England’s Beautiful Villages – Abingdon and Farringdon

Abingdon

Last weekend, on our way to mall crawl Westgate Oxford, we had a quick stopover in Abingdon. Abingdon-on-Thames has a strong claim to be England’s oldest town–object evidence includes tools such as hand axes from almost 400,000 years ago. Wow!!

This market town is probably best known for the MG car factory, which opened in 1929. Although the factory no longer exists, the clubhouse donated to the MG Car Club is still in use. They say that rallies of brightly coloured MGs are a frequent sight in the town center.

Below are a few snaps of the town.

Farringdon

When I first read about Farringdon and the Folly, it wasn’t really the folly that I wanted to see, but the expanse of red poppies around it that I had come across on an internet post at some stage. When we got there, there were no red flowers in sight, much to my disappointment. But what a find! The woodlands feature a nice little wander with beautiful views of the surrounding countryside. Within the woods there are all kinds of quirky things to discover. We also read quite a few interesting tidbits about the area.

Lord Berners and his dry, surreal sense of humor is to thank for the folly on Folly Hill. He had the tower built to tease the neighbors! You can see five counties when you get to the top of the 150 steps – Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire. 

So, what is a folly? In architecture, a folly is a costly ornamental building constructed primarily for decoration, and generally has no practical purpose. Many grand houses in England have got mock Gothic ruins scattered about their landscapes, seemingly randomly. The most common form of folly however was the tower. There are a lot of tower follies around, and the Farringdon Folly that we visited, is one of them.

Here follow a couple snaps.