Can any county be as full of the shades of dead writers as Oxfordshire? A few weeks ago I took a literary gallop in these pages through the city of Oxford, armed with my copy of The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles. The outlying countryside deserves similar treatment. Indeed, the map of southern England contained in the guide shows the shire to be knee-deep in such ghosts.

Where to start is the problem. Woodstock is as good a place as any. Here Alexander Pope, who translated much of his Iliad in Pope’s Tower at Stanton Harcourt, visited Fair Rosamund’s Well in 1717 and “toasted her shade in the cold water”.

Fair Rosamund — Rose of the World, said to be the most beautiful woman in Christendom — was the mistress of Henry II (1133-1189) and, according to The Garland of Good Will by Thomas Deloney (1543-1600) was hidden in a maze here — but was discovered by Queen Eleanor, who followed a silken thread unravelling from her dress. All the “labyrinthine brickwork maze in maze”, as Tennyson described it in his play Becket, was unable to save her.

Blenheim, designed by playwright Sir John Vanbrugh, was still being built when Pope visited, but he noted that only one wall remained of Henry II’s manor. Walter Scott surmised how this destruction came about in his novel Woodstock (1826), set in the Civil War. The manor was occupied then by Henry Lee, ranger of the Royal Woodstock Forest, whose daughter, according to Scott, fell in love with a Parliamentarian soldier.

Chaucer’s House in Park Street, Woodstock, is probably on the site of the house where Oxford academic John Aubrey said Chaucer stayed with his son.

Now where shall I go? Across Blenheim Park to Combe, I think. The bawdy poet John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, lived near Combe gate in High Lodge (he spent one entire year drunk), having been appointed ranger of the forest by his friend Charles II. American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne visited the Lodge and described in Our Old Home (1863) seeing the canopied bed in which Rochester died, repenting of his wicked ways. (I think the bed was still there in 1960; anyway I remember being shown about then something called Rochester’s cot, hung about with rotting damask, like something out of a Hammer House of Horror film.) Also in Combe lived Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) writer and early champion of women’s education. Jumping fast forward 400 years we also come across short story writer A.E. Coppard, who moved here in about 1914 from Islip (where the saint and king Edward the Confessor was born in 1003).

Now let’s flit like a high-flying bird to the Vale of the White Horse — a flight that some might regard as cheating since it only ceased to be part of Berkshire in 1974. Here we alight in Uffington where Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) author Thomas Hughes was born in 1822. He was baptised in the church where his grandfather was vicar. His grandmother later moved to nearby Kingston Lisle. She was a friend of Scott and Dickens and furnished them with much folklore, which they used in their works.

Travelling north again, who could resist coming down to roost at Ewelme, once the home of Wiliam de la Pole (1396-1450), Duke of Suffolk, who built the almshouses here? Chaucer is thought to have visited the Duchess, Alice, who was his granddaughter. And Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927), following the rip-roaring success of Three Men in a Boat, moved into a farmhouse here and is buried in the churchyard. In nearby Nuneham Courtenay the first Earl Harcourt removed a whole village to create a romantic landscape beside the Thames — something deplored by Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) in his poem The Deserted Village, in which Barbara Wyatt, who refused to leave her cottage, is commemorated.

In that little gallop I only scratched the surface of where I could have gone. Indeed, I think that there are few writers of note in the English language who are unable to claim a connection with Oxfordshire.