Pete Hughes finds himself strangely at home in a town which could lay claim to being the county’s quirkiest.

With its guerilla gardening, wife carrying race and slightly-barmy lord of the manor, Faringdon ranks as one of Oxfordshire’s quirkiest places.

The little market town, whose name is thought to mean “ferny hill”, nestles underneath perhaps its barmiest trademark, the Faringdon Folly – built by Gerald Tyrwhitt Wilson, 14th Baron Berners in the 1930s.

The story goes that Lord Berners wanted the tower built in Gothic style, which the architect, his friend Lord Gerald Wellesley, hated. Lord Berners went on holiday and on his return found that Wellesley had built all but the last 10 feet in a classical style. The infuriated Lord Berners insisted that the remainder be built in Gothic style. Lord Berners’ spirit lives on through Faringdon’s proudly singular style.

In 2013, a group calling themselves Faringdon Free Food announced plans to plant thousands of fruit trees, herbs and flowers in whatever public land they could find to create a pick-your-own free-for-all.

It came after a group of residents got Faringdon named the first Fairtrade town in the South East in 2003 for shop owners’ efforts to sell Fairtrade products.

The annual FollyFest music and arts festival pulls thousands into the market place where bands from across the country perform across three days in August each year.

It was as part of FollyFest 2013 that organisers hoped to hold a traditional Finnish wife-carrying competition, only to be told at the last minute they did not have the right health and safety permission. Not to be defeated, they held the contest at the town's cricket club the following May and seven competing couples were squirted with water as they sprinted 253-metres through the mud to try to make it first across the finish line.

The town prides itself on having a range of classy independent shops, including three delicatessens and a butcher's shop.

Traders fought plans for a Tesco before it opened in 2013 but it has seemingly attracted enough business to stay open.

Life is peaceful in Faringdon, and the thing that gets up residents’ noses the most is plans to build new houses between the town and village of Great Coxwell, blurring the two settlements’ identities.

Lying on the A420 between Swindon and Oxford, residents enjoy easy access to the region’s two major shopping centres, but they are also a stone’s throw from the Ridgeway and Uffington’s ancient White Horse Hill.