GRUESOME tales of murder, ghostly hauntings and bizarre traditions are unveiled in a new book about Oxfordshire.

The Little Book of Oxfordshire, by local author Paul Sullivan, brings together facts, myths and stories from the county.

Mr Sullivan, 50, from Forest Hill, had just a month to write the book, which is part of a series from publisher, the History Press.

He said: “You could write 50 books 50 times this size just about Oxford itself, so it was important to get a balance of Oxford and Oxfordshire.

“My original manuscript was about four times the size of the eventual book.

“When you do this sort of thing, you start out with your favourite areas, so for me that was natural history and history of warfare within the county, but then you get to do all the other sections which are invariably the most interesting ones.

“I now feel we live in the most interesting county probably in the whole world.”

He said his favourite story related to a giraffe skeleton now on display in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History which has a lead tail.

When the specimen was brought to the university in the 19th century, it smelt so bad that students threw it into the street – whereupon a dog ran off with its tail before it could be retrieved.

Oxford’s Carfax makes it into the book several times, as the site where bull baiting used to take place, and as the Carfax Conduit, a public water fountain now in the grounds of Nuneham House at Nuneham Courtenay, south of the city.

Mr Sullivan said: “One of my favourite characters in all of Oxfordshire was William Buckland, a lecturer at the university in the 19th century who used to eat any animal he possibly could.

“He was going around a cathedral in France and he was shown a stain on the floor which was said to be from the blood of a saint.

“Buckland immediately got down on his knees, licked the stone and announced it wasn’t the blood of a saint, it was bat urine.”

Mr Sullivan, who has lived in the county since 2005, said: “My wife studied here so I did know the county a long time ago but it was only really since moving here I became an expert.”

Oxon trivia: Chinnor man George Fuller took the open market to the extreme in 1696, when he sold his wife to Thomas Heath of Thame – with the price set according to weight. The sale went through at 2 1/4d per lb, making a grand total of 29s 1/4d Oxford University students used to have a penchant for deer poaching but went away from the famous Magdalen deer park, instead targeting the Royal Deer Park at Beckley in the 15th century. Horspath Manor is said to be haunted by a Grey Lady, the ghost of a woman killed by her husband during in an argument. She has been seen a number of times, including in 1878 when a man fired his gun at her three times but found only two of his bullets afterwards. In the Middle Ages, the Lord of the Manor at Aynho, between Bicester and Banbury, used to demand part of his tenants’ rent in apricots, which flourished in limestone soil and warm stone walls. A man was crushed beneath his own cart wheels in 1872 – after his horse reared on meeting an elephant on the road from Oxford to Eynsham.