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In These Signs Conquer
Revealing the secret signs an Age has obscured
by Ellis Taylor
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTICLES Please read before proceeding
In the Marian Fields
of South Oxfordshire
Part 3
A five part, true and intriguing tale of beauty and her continuing triumph over evil.
A few miles from Temple Cowley, in a place called Littlemore, is a public house. It used to be a Templar Priory dedicated to St Mary, sometimes with St Nicholas or St Edmund (the original patron saint of England). Intriguingly, the Order are recorded as patrons for 300 years until 1545. (14)When I was a kid it was derelict and infested with feral cats. It’s a very smelly place due to the fact that Oxford’s main sewerage treatment festers virtually next door. Apart from the sewerage works the site was surrounded by farm land till just a few years ago and was a haven for migrating birds. This land at the time of the Templars was known as Cherley. A Roman Road (ancient straight track) sidles up close and many, many people have witnessed ghosts and white ladies around here. Some have actually seen whole troops of Roman soldiers marching along the road. All sorts of interesting artefacts have been dug up. One freezing cold night while walking alone along the lane I saw a glowing white figure near here, it bolted towards me like lightning (I went equally as quick the other way).
Today, on the doorstep of the priory is the new Oxford United Football Stadium. Previously their home ground was 'the Manor' in Headington, another Knights Templar domain. When I first heard the plans for the stadium I told everyone that the team were calling up the wrath of the Ancients and that they would experience ill fortune if it went ahead, which it did, and they did. From a team that in the 1980s won the Milk (League) Cup and played in the top division they surged out of the major divisions and now play in the 'non-league'tournament. Something else I’m sure contributed to the ‘curse’ was that this ancient Christian sacred place is now in the hands of a Saracen, a Muslim. To rub their grizzled faces in it the egotistical and acquisitive new Pakistani owner named the stadium after himself, the Kassam Stadium. It would not help that Mr Kassam made his money, they say, through providing expensive accommodation to desperate people while charging huge amounts of dosh to their responsible councils.
Reportedly there have been several attempts to lift the curse, one by the Archbishop of Oxford, so others must realise that there is something very wrong. At the back end of last season Kassam flogged the club, debts and all, to former Oxford player Nick Merry and the messianic figure Jim Smith, hero of Oxford United’s glory days before the arch fiend Robert Maxwell, who was chairman and owner at the time, poisoned the waters. Perhaps Smith can forge the good times (Merry) again. Kassam still owns the lease on the ground though as well as a cinema, hotel and bowling alley complex. United’s fans have scrubbed the name ‘Kassam’ from every road sign pointing to the club. If the club has any sense, and if it is possible to do so, they will choose a new name that has sympathetic correspondence to its origins; then the glory days may well come again - if they are quick. Oxford United’s logo, as well as Oxford’s coat-of-arms displays the signs of Taurus and Aquarius (the bull and the waves). (15) Both Taurus and tower derive from the same root word; Oxford is universally (ahem!) known as the ‘City of Dreaming Spires’ and these of course are all set 
on towers. We’ve got a stepped pyramid now as well. It hits you smack in the face when you leave the railway station in the west of the city brooding on top of the newest college in Oxford, 'The Said Business School', allegedly financed by the Bin Ladens and not, I am informed, unconnected to the massive new mosque in
Several ley lines converge on the priory/stadium site. Some continue through the Littlemore Mental Hospital, the Sewerage Works and latterly the newly built Science Park - none of them particularly attractive to the Goddess, I would imagine? The stadium to date has only three sides, claimed to be due to lack of finances, but I don’t believe it. This three-sided arrangement is similar to the ancient stadia of Greece and elsewhere. The purposes for this design are more likely to be for the energy generated within the complex to whip around and exit via the natural (and constructed) energetic routes. Also energy entering through the open end is amplified and catapulted back, influenced by what is going on within. The three sides of the stadium are largely built in corrugated metal forming a barrier to electromagnetic energy entering or escaping from these. Energy flowing from the Goddess hill at Garsington to her priory at Littlemore is blocked. The open end on the North West points towards Oxford and this city has a major part to play in what is going to unfold over the next few years as we enter the Age of Aquarius. That is what the Oxford emblem is telling us.
Return to St Mary's
Back at St Mary’s in Garsington I wandered past the exhuberant voices, as they sallied from the interior, to the edge of the hill at the far side. Hand on my brow I pitched my gaze to Wittenham and surveyed the fields for any signs of cereal artistry. There was none. A few hundred yards to my right a kestrel hovered over the long grass near Pettiwell Road, a black and white cat leapt onto a garden wall nearby and began grooming itself, and a crow began to caw. I looked up and saw the black bird sitting on the top of the scaffolding that gripped tight to the church tower. I had been hoping it would be possible to at least touch the tower but none of it is accessible. Putting everything else down on a wooden bench I took my rose petals and apple juice over to the old stone walls as close to the tower as I could and dipping the roses in the juice I placed them in some cracks and said a prayer for her. She appreciated it but I felt this immense grief emanating from her that not even the enthusiastic love coming so strongly from within her could lighten. I felt sad, and not a little helpless.
For some reason I felt drawn to a footpath that runs below the retaining wall so I followed the call and found myself on a pavement constructed of old stones. One in particular was a quite large. I walked slowly back to the church struck by the contradiction of the space I was in. A place of such subtle and magnificent beauty on a glorious day; yet an overwhelming sense of sorrow pervaded it all, tears unseen, sobbing unheard.
When I got back to St Mary's the rector was saying goodbye to the last of the parishioners and a young couple were taking in the view of the surrounding vale, obviously delighted by it. We began to chat and I told them a little of what I knew of the locale. They thanked me and made back towards their car, on the way chatting to a man that had come out of the church. He began to tell them about the church and I could hear what he was saying. I didn’t mean to earwig but voices carry on the hill especially on days such as this. He began to tell them that before this church was built a tower stood here. He said it was built by some people who came across the river from Dorchester-on-Thames. At this point I went over. I knew there had been a tower here previously because I had been told this psychically but I didn’t know who had built it. Thinking the man might know I asked him. He didn’t. ‘Just some people’, he said. I asked him if he knew when this happened, but he didn’t know that either. Then the rector came along and I mentioned the scaffolding.
“How much longer is the scaffolding going to be up for?” I enquired.
“It seems like it has been here for a lifetime, doesn’t it,” he replied.
He told me they had a grant from English Heritage, and that the scaffolding had been erected at the end of March. I remember seeing the church lit up in all its glory whilst driving home one night in mid-March. The next time I passed it was dark.
Workers attended to the urgent leaks on the roof about the same time the scaffolding went up but shortly afterwards ‘vandals’ climbed up one night and damaged the masonry and ripped off some lead from the roof. The rector was troubled by the delay in fixing the 12th century tower. The costs of hiring the scaffolding are rising and they only have a certain amount of money to pay for it all. Corrugated iron, about 8 feet tall completely surrounds the bottom of the scaffold and the tower. The only access is from the inside, which is locked at night and very often during the day now.
I determined to send healing to the church and the hill whenever I thought of it and every day.
© Ellis Taylor 18th August 2006
Ellis Taylor is the author of
and
Footnotes and References
14. http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu/monasticon/?function=detail&id=1038&PHPSESSID=32f74c91c25dd8dba4df9
15. www.headington.org.uk/oxon/streets/inscriptions/stclements/coat-of_arms.htm
Marston Road to the East of the city. What is all this Saracen-Crusader (Templar) thing all about?
