Mount Weazel
One of many things I like about Oxford is the cluster of obscure villages each side of the A34: Binsey, Wytham, Godstow, the Hinkseys, all a comfortable walk away. Late one August evening, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
j4 and I wandered through the fields behind Botley, up the hill towards Cumnor. The A-Z showed a wooded hill crowned with "Cumnor Folly", which was an obvious destination. But we couldn't find the folly. We found the trig point and a spooky shack made of branches, but no folly.
Another lovely walk this weekend took us into Wytham Woods (owned by the University, which issues permits). We noticed that the map names one of the fields "Follies", but without trespassing all we could see were two low pieces of stone.
By this time I had a hunch about our folly. The OED confirms a rare sense of 'a clump of fir-trees on the crest of a hill', and a dialect dictionary localised this to Berkshire (where Cumnor and Wytham belonged before 1974). So we'd been looking round for an architectural folly when all along we were standing inside it. The open Web knows nothing of this, so I may as well record it here.
In the meantime, I'd also consulted Headley & Meulenkamp's directory of follies. It drew my attention to a little-known proposal in central Oxford:
In 1975 John Madden, an undergraduate, submitted plans for a 450ft (137m) pyramid to be built in Christ Church Meadow. The submission was properly drawn up and presented: it would have been necessary to freeze the Thames over for seven and a half years in order to excavate the 100ft (30m) deep foundations; then a further 16½ years and 18 million tons of stone from Headington Quarry would be needed to build the thing. Labour was no problem—there was to be compulsory secondment of second-year undergraduates—but the question of finance was delicately avoided. The intention was that the pyramid should serve as Mr Madden's mausoleum, and his application got as far as the City Planning Committee, where it was defeated by the narrowest of margins—five votes to four—after the city engineer pointed out that street lights would have to be kept on all day because the sheer bulk of the monument would keep the city in perpetual darkness.
What do you think, gentle reader? I won't be fooled again.
