A walk round the farm, for the people the car park keeps out.
Three and a half miles and twelve stops, built for the several million people who will never get here. The visitor cap is a planning condition rather than a preference, the car park holds about seventy cars, and the sums do not work at any scale. This does.
Twelve stops, in the order you meet them.
Scroll to walk it. The frames are the twelve stops from the gate to the pub, and under reduced motion this becomes a single plate and a caption, which is a storyboard, which is honest.
Scroll to run it. 1 / 12
The route, in order.
It starts at the gate because that is where everything about this place starts: a boundary between a road anybody can use and a farm almost nobody can.
It ends at a pub five miles away that is not on this farm at all. We have stitched the last two stops on because that is where the barley goes, and we say so on both of them rather than quietly hoping nobody has a map.
- The Gate
0.0 miles — Where the walk begins and the queue ends
- The Farm Shop
0.2 miles — A shed that got out of hand
- The Yard
0.3 miles — Concrete, mud and reversing
- The Big Field
0.8 miles — A hundred and eighty acres, and the whole problem
- The Dry Stone Wall
1.2 miles — Gerald’s life’s work, in limestone
- The Woods
1.6 miles — Where the mushrooms and the ash dieback are
- The Spring
1.9 miles — The reason the farm is where it is
- The Unfarmed
2.2 miles — Chapter 17, and the best idea on the farm
- The Bees
2.5 miles — Six hives, and a product called Bee Juice
- The Lambing Shed
2.8 miles — Empty for forty-six weeks a year
- The Brewery
3.1 miles — Where barley becomes twenty to forty times itself
- The Pub
3.4 miles — Everything British, including the tonic
This exists because the real thing does not scale.
Several million people watch the programme. The car park holds roughly seventy cars. Those two numbers have never been reconcilable and no amount of goodwill, signage or one-way systems will reconcile them.
The number of people permitted on this site at once is a planning condition. The goods the shop may sell are limited to those produced within sixteen miles. Neither is a marketing position; both are enforceable, and both have been argued about at length in front of West Oxfordshire District Council.
So this is the honest alternative rather than a consolation. It is free, it takes nobody’s parking space, it works at three in the morning in another time zone, and it is the only version of a farm walk that four million people can do at once without ruining the thing they came to see.
The arithmetic that made this.
The twelve stops.
Each one says what is there, what happened there, what it costs to keep and what to look at.
The Gate
A five-bar gate, a cattle grid and a sign that has been photographed more times than most listed buildings. This…
The Farm Shop
It started because forty tonnes of potatoes had no buyer. There is now a queue outside it most weekends, and…
The Yard
The turning circle between the grain store, the workshop and the back of the shop. It is where the farm…
The Big Field
From the top of the rise you can see the entire field at once, which means you can see the…
The Dry Stone Wall
No mortar, no foundation to speak of, and it will outlive everybody involved in building it. Around a hundred and…
The Woods
A few acres of mixed woodland at the edge of the holding. It produces mushrooms, wild garlic, firewood and, at…
The Spring
A spring line where the limestone meets the clay, a stone trough, and the only reliable water on the holding…
The Unfarmed
Margins, hedges, woodland edge and the corners a combine cannot reach. Under conventional management this is waste ground. On the…
The Bees
Six hives on the south edge of the wildflower ground. They produce honey which is sold as Bee Juice at…
The Lambing Shed
Four pens, a creep, a heat lamp and a camera. For six weeks in spring it is the most watched…
The Brewery
The walk cheats here. The brewery is not on this farm and never has been. We have stitched it on…
The Pub
The Farmer’s Dog, which is five miles down the road and not on this walk in any honest geographical sense.…
Everything else in Wandering.
The route, the practicalities, and the answer to the question everybody asks.
The route
The whole walk end to end, with distances and what each leg is like.
Why you cannot just turn up
Sixteen miles, seventy cars, and a council that has appeared in more episodes than the goats.
Accessibility
Keyboard, captions, audio description and genuine reduced-motion parity.
On a phone
What we cut, what we kept, and why it works on 3G in a field.
The footpaths
Two real ones cross this land. They are yours, and they are not the same as this walk.
Tickets
The guided walk that does exist, when it exists, and how few places there are.
In a group
A guided version of this walk for a room full of people, free to state schools.
The same walk, four times
The identical route in spring, summer, autumn and winter, and how little of it looks the same.
The guide
Who is talking, what they say, and how to turn them off.
How it was made
Screen-printed illustration rather than photography, and the reason for that.
What the walk looks like right now.
Watching the wheat
Harvest is coming
- Season Read from the date at OX7 system clock—
- Weather Met Office DataHub, OX7 metoffice.datahub30 min
- Crop stage From the farm office record farm-office24 h
- Plates in use The seasonal illustration set theme—
- Cameras live Ten, across the same ground cam-health60 s
20°C at the farm shop, and dry for now
Winter barley running at 4.1 tonnes the hectare
Chapter 41 is open. Forty came before it
The walk changes with the real season at OX7 rather than with a marketing calendar. In this demonstration build each feed renders a seeded placeholder and names the source that would replace it.
This is not a substitute for coming and it is not pretending to be. It is what we can offer the several million people who cannot, and it is better than a photo gallery and a paragraph about how special the light is here.
Told when the real walk opens.
There are a small number of guided walks a year and they are gone within a day. This is the only warning anybody gets, and it is the only thing we will use the address for.
- The guided walk dates, before they are public
- Nothing else from this section, ever
- One click to stop, with no retention screen
