Down Saffron Road to the sound of a cooing pigeon. This area is curiously referred to as Saffron Platt and I can only guess that saffron was grown here once, a popular medieval crop for hiding the taste of putrid meat. I can’t resist the alley beside Crendon Hall. Low brick’n’flint wall. Was once called The Rope Walk. Trinity Reformed Church first stone laid 1850. Along the rows of cottages and yards of Easton Terrace and into Stuart Road where two big old houses stand guard. I’m following the route taken when ‘Beating the Bounds’ as described in ‘Strange Wycombe’ by Alan Cleaver. They partially re-enacted this curious old custom in 1985. It involved visiting the marker stones of the borough boundary and bumping a boy’s head upon them. Cleaver goes into the likely pagan origins of the ritual and the possibility that it was linked to archaic practices of child sacrifice. At the end, on the corner of London Road, The Willows still shows crumbling engravings on the pillars at the gothic side entrance. Opposite is the Friends House facing the Rye and Quakers are still in residence. Quakers and other religious dissenters have had a strong foothold in the area for some time and Wycombe returned the first member of The Society of Friends to sit in the House of Commons when Thomas Archdale was elected in 1698. “World Peace will come through the will of ordinary people like yourself” on a faded sign in the grounds. Next door is a fine colonial veranda that reminds me of the posher parts of Sydney. There’s a path leading up to a partially concealed old house sat well back from the road. Can I allow my curiosity to take me up somebody’s garden path? Crown House Independent School and a prosperous looking row of Georgian cottages complete the picture that this was once the wealthy part of town before the London Road barged through choking it up with commuter fumes.
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