Burford, Oxfordshire

Coming home

Landmark noun An object or feature of a landscape or town that can easily be seen from a distance, especially one that enables someone to establish their location.

As we travel around, we acquire a personal inventory of landmarks that punctuate our journeys and help us to recognise places. They can be hills, lone trees, or other natural features, but often they’re buildings. Church towers and spires in distant valleys, factory chimneys, windmills. And also more modest buildings – toll houses at junctions, roadside cafés or pubs, isolated farms. They help us give people directions: ‘Turn left at the White Hart, and first right after the telephone box.’ ‘Park near the church.’ ‘Drive up the hill until you come to the filling station.’ They tell us where we’ve got to on a journey. And sometimes they become personal symbols of a particular place.

When I drive home to the Cotswolds from London, part of my journey is along the A40, which takes me across Oxfordshire and into the hills of Gloucestershire to my destination. Just before the Oxfordshire town of Burford I begin to notice the drystone walls of the Cotswold fields and the limestone architecture of my home patch, and for me, on this journey, all this is symbolized by this stone barn, which sits in a field near trees a couple of hundred yards from the road.

On the Cotswolds, field barns like this were mostly built in the 18th century and later, to service the kind of farming that came in when the open fields and commons were enclosed. They often have just one large porch – unlike farmyard barns, which usually have two, providing a big interior space for threshing. These field barns weren’t used for threshing – they were for keeping fodder for animals and for sheltering the beasts in winter. After a long life, this one has been re-roofed with what looks like corrugated asbestos, a popular cheap roofing material 50 years ago, and I think is unused now.

When I pass this barn I know that I’m in the limestone country at last and in a couple of minutes’ time I’ll be in Gloucestershire and on the last leg of my journey. I always look out for this building, and it has acquired a personal meaning for me beyond any architectural or historical interest it may have. As the sun of a winter’s evening lights up the surrounding trees and suffuses the barn’s limestone walls, catching my eye for a split second as I whiz by, it stands for nothing less than the warmth and welcome of home.