Here is a cure for headache from the lips of someone who claimed never to have had one. “You get a bit of assafetito and stick’n under your nose; it do smell bad, but you won’t ever have no more headaches.” By ‘assafetito’ the speaker, known only as Keeper Cook of Kingham, meant the fennel-like plant asafoetida, (Narthex Asafoetida) otherwise known as Devil’s Dung or Stinking Gum; and he was talking to the future sub-rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, William Warde Fowler, in about 1873.

I am indebted to Gordon Ottewell, the former headteacher of Kingham School, for this piece of medical advice — which I shall put to the test at the next opportunity. He has just produced a delightful booklet called Warde Fowler of Kingham: Oxford Don and Ornithologist (Barn Owl Books, £9.99) which introduced me to this likable academic who, Mr Ottewell suggests, may be seen as our Oxfordshire version of that best-selling naturalist Gilbert White of Selborne, and who certainly deserves to be far more famous than he is.

Armed with Mr Ottewell’s book on the one hand, and the online version of Fowler’s Kingham, Old and New, Studies in a Rural Parish (B.H. Blackwell, 1913) on the other, I spent last Sunday mentally wandering about the West Oxfordshire countryside as it was a century and more ago — and inevitably comparing then with now.

Of course, Mr Fowler (1847-1921) would be astonished to see two gastropubs in his village — a friend treated me to lunch at The Kingham Plough the other day and I can vouch for its excellent cuisine — but he would not be surprised that Country Life readers not long ago voted Kingham the best place to live in England. He loved the place and would doubtless have agreed with them.

All the same, it was with trepidation that I turned to Mr Ottewell’s final chapter, called Wildlife — A Century of Change, expecting to read another chilling saga of unmitigated environmental disaster — and was, therefore, encouraged to learn that not all is total doom and gloom. Mr Ottewell, himself a keen ornithologist, wrote: “Happily . . . although the status and distribution of certain animals, birds and plants have declined significantly since Fowler’s time, the vast majority are still present, albeit in reduced numbers, and the gaps left by the loss of certain species have been filled, not always satisfactorily from a human standpoint, by certain opportunist newcomers.” In other words, he gives the 20th century, in Kingham at least, a sort of C grade pass, rather than a downright fail.

Mr Fowler first went to Kingham in the 1860s when he was an undergraduate at Lincoln College. He went at the invitation of the eccentric Captain John Barrow, whom he met on a trip to Switzerland and who ran his house like a ship — in much the same way as the Admiral does in Mary Poppins: ie a flag was run up a 60ft mast at eight bells (8am) when guests were expected to be ready and correctly assembled at the breakfast table.

In 1873, the Rector of Kingham’s wife, known as the Queen since she ruled the place, along with her “prime minister”, the school master, asked Mr Fowler whether he knew anyone who would like to rent the cottage opposite the Rectory — such a lovely house, by the way, that I once knew a man, far from godly, who said he would “take up the cloth” to live there. He immediately volunteered himself — and remained a resident of Kingham for the next 48 years, finally being buried in the churchyard.

Weather, closely observed, is one of Fowler’s specialities: the great thunderstorm of June 7, 1910, which prompted Fowler to ask why some trees (beech for instance) conducted electricity better than others; or the great blizzard of January 18, 1881, during which Fowler made his way by train and foot back to Kingham from Oxford; or the freak snowstorm of April 25, 1908, when deep snow settled in Oxford.

But it is the stories of some of the people living in the village all those years ago, as much as the observations of birds, which are so charming. Keeper Cook, for instance, was the only man Fowler had ever seen wearing a night-cap with a tassel, “ like that of Mr Barkis in David Copperfield . . . Soon after Cook delivered the medical advice above he “was gathered to his fathers and is now quite forgotten except to the oldest among us”.