The Monday Photo

(Also, a Tale From the Edge)

This is what I saw when I sat on Ickford bridge yesterday, eating my packed lunch with one foot in North Bucks, and the other in Oxfordshire.

The county border here runs along the river Thame. I’m looking East, so the fields in this photo are in Buckinghamshire, as is the left hand side of the river. The right hand side is of course in Oxfordshire.

The border runs straight through the apex of this triangular pedestrian refuge and there are two stones marking it, both engraved and both meeting at the apex. The one on the left is easy to see here, but the other stone is in shadow and hardly visible.

The lichen doesn’t help to make the stones easy to read either, but the left hand one says:

Here Begineth
The County
of  Bucks
1685

The right hand one says:

1685
HERE ENDS
THE COUNTY OF
OXON

It seems they were done by two different people, with the year at the top on one and at the bottom on the other, and only one of them is all in capitals. It’s strange that they are worded so differently from each other; perhaps whoever made them were both Buckinghamshire men.

This is the second time I’ve shown you a county boundary marker recently, but these are probably the oldest ones in Buckinghamshire and it’s thought 1685 was also the date the bridge was built. It’s certainly not the first bridge on this spot.

I’ve been to Ickford before; in the fields behind me there’s usually an annual tug of war match between the villages of Ickford in Bucks and Tiddington in Oxon and I’ve covered it on the NBW. Naturally the pull is across the county border, the river. Yep, people get wet.