Oxford mounting stones: Old Road, Headington
This early seventeenth-century mounting stone stands beside Old Road near the foot of Shotover Hill on the Headington side, on a section of grass just east of the bypass.
It originally stood on the part of the road where the bridge now crosses over the Eastern Bypass, and is understood to have been erected in c.1630 by Dr Bracegirdle “out of good intent to ease passengers there to mount their horses” (Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, with footnote E 134, 7 Chas. I, Mich. 31). Bracegirdle was a physician of Oxford, and Bracegirdle Road in Wood Farm is named after him.
Old Road was the main route from Oxford to London until the late eighteenth century, and passengers in carriages had to dismount and walk up Shotover Hill.
On 9 January 1779 Jackson's Oxford Journal reported how a stagecoach with six inside passengers and two outside was overturned when it reached the bottom of the hill down to Headington. “The Accident is said to have happened from the breaking of the Coupling-Reins, in descending the Hill, after which the Coach followed with such Velocity, that, striking a prodigious large Stone (used occasionally as an Upping-stock in the side of the Road, the Wheel was entirely shattered to Pieces, and the Coach overturned.” An “upping stock” is a mounting stone and was presumably this one.
When the bypass was created in 1959 the stone first spent some time in a garden in Kiln Lane before it was placed here.
Right: There is another mounting stone bank near the top of Shotover Hill (south side)..
A third stone is at the foot of Old Road in Wheatley
Henry Taunt's photograph of what appears to be a mounting stone at Shotover (wrongly labelled as a milestone) does not seem to match either of the two above, nor the one at the Wheatley end.