Not much romantic decay left in Oxfordshire these days. What with spiralling house prices during the past decade, and bankers with bonuses burning holes in their pockets still favouring the county even now, there is hardly a dcecent ruin to be found anywhere; they’ve nearly all become bijou residences for better or for worse (too often the latter, in my opinion).

But anyone who loves the romance of a good ruin could do worse than head for Thrupp, north of Kidlington, and take a walk along the canal to Shipton-on-Cherwell, before turning right along a footpath across a bridge over the Cherwell to Hampton Gay — where the ruined Elizabethan manor house stands forlorn among humps in the grass — denoting where the vanished village once stood — and across a field from the lonely church of St Giles.

Here is a ruin for the connoisseur, complete with thick-stemmed ivy trees growing through fine stone window frames that would look exaggerated in a Hammer horror film. Lovely.

I took the walk of, say, a couple of miles at most, on a suitably lowering November day last week — and find myself still lost in wonder at how such a short ramble could encapsulate so much historic tragedy, pathos even.

The manor, shaped in the classic E of the best Elizabethan houses and still complete with a battlemented central porch with carved lintels, was destroyed by fire and abandoned in 1887, when it was already some 300 years old and the property of Wadham College, Oxford.

Some imaginative souls said that the destruction came about because the place had been cursed on Christmas Eve 1874, when the 2pm Paddington to Birkenhead express crashed on the nearby Cherwell Line, which had opened in 1850. They remembered how on that occasion the inhabitants of the manor had refused to give shelter to the wounded and dying.

Among the 34 people who died, when the carriage in which they were travelling fell off the bridge, were two children now buried in the churchyard — their names unrecorded because no one ever came forward to identify them.

But Hampton Gay, so called because Hampton is derived from a Saxon word for Home Farm, and de Gay was the name of the lord of the manor following the Norman conquest, was the scene of desperate misery long before that tragedy. It was a victim of early enclosures, carried out by the then lord of the manor, the owner and occupier of the now-burned out house, Vincent Barry, whose monument in the church is pictured.

In 1596, faced with starvation, a miller’s man named Richard Bradshaw, of Hampton Gay, became a ringleader of an agrarian revolt in which a number of villagers planned to murder Barry and his daughter.

The plot was foiled when Roger Symonds, the village carpenter, spilled the beans to Barry. Ringleaders (probably including Bradshaw) were hanged, drawn and quartered in London, but their deaths were not altogether in vain, for the mighty Lord Norreys opined: “Some order should be taken about inclosure . . . . so that the poor may be able to live.”

As a result, the Tillage Act of 1597 was passed. It ensured that all Oxfordshire land that had been put over to pasture since the accession of Queen Elizabeth should be once again ploughed and cultivated.

How many people lived in the village before the enclosures is unknown, but now, beside the church and the ruined manor there is only a farm and a few cottages.

Walking back towards the Oxford Canal (opened in 1790) I saw a CrossCountry train whizz past Shipton-on-Cherwell Manor, once a recording studio belonging to Richard Branson. The last time I had seen the ruined manor was from the window of one of those trains when the tycoon, who owned CrossCountry, was showing off the tilting