Many of us have come across the Wild in Art trails in recent years, as we walk around a city trying to find large, decorative animal sculptures of one kind or another. A few years back we visited the Owl Trail in Birmingham and spent a day tracking down as many as we could find, but this year, conveniently, the Oxen have arrived in Oxford. OxTrail 2024 has been set up in aid of Sobell House Hospice, so what better excuse to take part?!
The trail consists of around 30 large oxen, placed all around the city, and over 100 smaller ones all around the county, from Banbury to Henley, and from Carterton to Thame. I don't hold out any expectation that I'll be able to collect all the smaller oxen, but should be able to find all the full-size ones fairly easily.
I had a training day in the city centre a couple of days after the trail launched, so decided to make a quick start by finding my first couple of oxen as I headed over to the trail shop in the Westgate Centre in the hope of finding a campblanket badge there! Sadly there was no fabric badge, but I got a pin badge for my collection, and found my first few oxen so it wasn't a wasted effort at all. With time in Oxford last weekend to take park in a Pokemon event, that was another good opportunity to find a few more, so I'm currently at a rather respectable 9 large and 15 small finds.
Finding a few more of these will add a bit of a lighter note to my next visit to the Churchill Hospital too, since there is one large one there, as well as a small herd at Sobell House itself. And then there's time over the summer to see if we can manage to explore slightly beyond our usual places and see if we can find any extras.
Comentários