Disco beat...

Tue 29 Apr 2008, 13:54

The source of the music throughout Saturday night seems to have been a rave at High Lodge, on Cornbury. The fireworks came from Ranger’s.

One of the difficulties in bringing a situation like this under control is that two agencies are involved, and they don’t seem to work together. The noise nuisance is the concern of West Oxfordshire Environmental Health; the Public Order offences are police matters. Some joined up thinking (and action) between the two would be helpful here.

It would be interesting to know how many police and police cars are deployed overnight in our area. I suspect that there will be surprisingly few of either.

Igor. I don’t go out of my way to trivialise your very real concerns about traffic: please don’t trivialise other people’s real concerns. Sleep deprivation and playing loud music are techniques used, and recognised as effective, by enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a bit more than a ‘nuisance’ and, because of the very peculiar acoustics of the river valley, makes some of us very much more vulnerable to it than others.

William. ‘If Our Old Friends were still alive they would only say that this thing didn't go on in Charlbury back in 1782’. Probably not, but something very similar was in full swing by 1830.

“The Forest Fair …. apparently began about 1790, as a simple picnic arranged by the local Wesleyans to enable their Witney members to escape the unseemly frivolity of carnival day in Witney wake week. Unfortunately for them, their quiet picnic on Newhill Plain above the upper lakes in the forest, was invaded by the very merry-makers they were trying to avoid. Through the second quarter of the nineteenth century the fair was the neighbourhood's great annual event, with an average attendance of 20,000 persons.
From two days before the Fair every available nook and cranny in Charlbury was filled. An army of entertainers, as well as those to be entertained, had to be housed; for there were ‘Wild West Shows’, ‘travelling theatres’, ‘Atkins and Womwell Menageries’, ‘Monsieur Columbier and his French Company with Fireworks’, and last, but not least, ‘the Vauxhall dancing saloon, with harps and violins, lit up at night with hundreds of lamps’…. Music of kinds must have been plentiful; for almost all the shows and booths had their gangs: many local fiddlers and one or two clarionet players were present; and the Charlbury Yeomanry Band performed from Lord Churchill's boat on the lake.
Although year by year Lord Churchill, as forest ranger, drove his carriage with coachmen and footmen in full glory, down the broad streets of booths, he was not really in favour of the occasion. The fair had developed something of a name for petty crime and debauchery.” ( www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-ArnFart-c6.html )
It seems we have been here before.