For anybody who has read the novel Nausea by John Paul Sartre, or ever feels as confused as the hero, this post is dedicated to you.

In the novel, the hero can no longer separate himself from what he sees in quite the normal way and becomes overwhelmed by just looking at a tree – all the bark and branches etc… They appear quite monstuous as he goes into a state of what most of us call mental breakdown.

These picture were all taken along the bushy , and swampy area, inbetween the Thames Walk and the Abingdon Vale Cricket pitch. Here you’ll find old tree stumps left to rot, and a clearing where a bonfire has been lit, and a ditch.

Looking back at my Abingdon 1910 reproduction map, bought for £2.20 at the library, I see that the ditch looked then more like a stream, possibly even bigger. The County Boundary between Berkshire and Oxfordshire ran down it before rejoining the Thames. So this little bit of land on the opposite bank was not Oxfordshire but Berkshire like Abingdon. The area contained mostly trees and was called the Rookery and had:

Some old stone steps leading to the bottom of a circle of stones… Anyone know what this was?

And a low bridge crossing the ditch…

And big trees that would have scared the living daylights out of the hero of Nausea, or anybody of a nervous disposition.