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Wheatley's lock-up, built in 1834 as a place of detention for drunks

Wheatley has curious connections with the past, from John Milton to making bobbins for fishermen's nets, writes CHRIS KOENIG

Here is a poignant little fact about Wheatley, that village on the outskirts of Oxford. For centuries it had a curious connection to the North Sea. It had a cottage industry making the trawl bobbins for the nets of fishermen in such ports as Grimsby. The wooden bobbins were made from elms cut in the former Royal forest of Shotover, which were said to be the best for the job.

Villagers had the task of threading the bobbins, which had to be made of knot-free wood, and which varied in diameter from nine to 26in, on to a metal spindle.

The bobbins subsequently received extraordinary wear and tear - they acted as tiny rollers on nets as they were dragged along the bottom of the sea. Elm was used because it was exactly buoyant enough, when weighted by the spindle, to keep the nets in place.

Now, of course, the elms, victims of disease, have all but gone from the countryside as, indeed, have many of the fish (victims of over-exploitation) from the sea, but until the Second World War the bobbins were turned out by the thousand by Wheatley men, many of whom had never seen the sea.

Was bobbin-making, or quarrying come to that - Wheatley's other traditional activity - particularly thirsty-making work? The village has what must be the most eye-catching lock-up in the country, built in 1834 in the shape of a pyramid, as a place of detention for drunks. Though these days, I am told, May Day revellers actually pay a small fee to sample its accommodation.

Then there is the Merry Bells building, now a village social centre, which was in 1888 given to the village as a temperance hotel by the lady of the manor of Shotover House, who was concerned about the amount of alcohol consumed in the village.

I was in Wheatley, in this 400th anniversary year of John Milton's birth, as part of a tour of what some call Oxfordshire's Milton Country.

The poet's grandfather, Richard, was under-ranger of Shotover and lived at nearby Stanton St John, if historian John Aubrey (1626-97) is to be believed.

Aubrey, who was a student at Trinity College, Oxford, gave fellow historian Anthony a Wood, his Lives of Eminent Men, not published until 1813, as material for Wood's history of Oxford.

In it he recounts how Richard Milton clung to the Roman Catholic faith even in the reign of Elizabeth, and was in 1601 twice fined £60 for non-attendance at church.

His faith led to a bitter row with his low-church, Anglican son John (musician and father of the poet) who had been educated at Christ Church.

The row led to the father disinheriting the son who was then forced to go to London and seek his fortune as a scrivener, a sort of notary, accountant, and moneylender (all according to Aubrey).

Whether the poet John Milton ever visited his grandparents in Stanton St John (a village which, incidentally became familiar to TV viewers as the setting for Midsomer Murders) is unknown. What is known is that he visited the neighbouring village of Forest Hill.

He went there first, prosaically enough, in 1642 to collect a £300 debt on behalf of his father, but fell in love with Mary, 17-year-old daughter of the debtor Richard Powell, whom he married, according to tradition, at Forest Hill church.

Famously, he took her back to London where she pined for her family - to whom she returned after only a month of married life.

That was not the end of the story, though. When Royalist Oxford fell in 1646, during the Civil War, and the Royalist Powell family found themselves in trouble, the republican John offered shelter not only to Mary but also to many other members of her family.

Somehow Milton, with his ideas expressed in his pamphlets on divorce, freedom of the press, fights against tyranny, seems far closer to the modern world than those bobbin-makers in Wheatley.

11:37am Thursday 15th May 2008

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