As part of St Matthew’s celebration of its 125^th year as Oxhey’s Parish Church, we performed the ancient rite of beating the parish bounds on Sunday 21^st May. This is the date of Rogation Sunday when the Church traditionally prays for the Lord to prosper the year’s harvest: in past times walking and “beating” a parish’s boundary (and boys!) was associated with prayers for the fertility of the land. The parish bounds were last beaten 25 years ago to mark St Matthew’s centenary. Last time the incumbent was given the bumps, and we have followed 'tradition' again - see picture.

We are fortunate that our boundary is mostly in open land, and that public footpaths are now available close to it. Very little of the walk to beat the bounds was in residential streets and hardly any on a main road. The whole walk was a little under 9 miles (14km), divided into two sections. Sally Best did a great job, driving some of our parishoners to meet us for a welcome and convivial lunch at the halfway stage. Starting just after 11am, we finished at about 5pm.

Some people chose to do part of the walk, while around a dozen steadfast walkers, including some of the children, completed the whole circuit. There was driving rain for most of the day, making the going slippery in places. Unfortunately Janet Gear lost her footing in the woodland just off Sandy Lane and suffered a dislocated ankle and a broken leg. An ambulance crew was quickly on the scene, which was quite close to the road, but the inaccessibility of the woodland meant a call to the fire brigade and she was eventually carried out by six strong firemen. After an overnight stay in hospital, she is now recovering at home.

At the end of the walk, hot baths were the order of the day for most of us, though some limbs were still aching well into the following week. Our thanks go to Roger Tabor for organising the walk, planning the route and for establishing exactly where our parish boundary now lies.

Here is a map of the route (size 217k) in 'pdf' format.

To view it you will need the Acrobat Reader from Adobe. If you do not have it already, you can download it free from:
  The Adobe website (note: this link will open a new window in your browser.)

Here is a larger picture (120k) of the end of the walk