Palm Sunday sees villagers maintaining a long-held tradition in the Wychwood Forest, writes CHRIS KOENIG

The last silent and hauntingly beautiful remnant of the old Royal Forest of Wychwood, part of the Cornbury estate, still the county's largest piece of broad-leaf forest, will be open to the public on Palm Sunday, thereby fulfilling a longstanding tradition.

The 6,500-acre forest, with its lakes and tracks that resemble medieval roads, alive - as in hunting days of yore - with deer, can be easily missed altogether by anyone driving, say, along the B4437, near Charlbury, or the B4022.

Get out of the car, though, and walk, and you quickly see why West Oxfordshire has the status of the least populated district in the South East, though entry to this primeval world is restricted to a well-marked right of way on all days but one each year, thus preserving the meadow safron, herb paris, purple orchid, and adder's tongue for which it is known.

Sunday, March 16, will be that day. Since time immemorial inhabitants of such villages as Leafield, Finstock, Milton-, Shipton- and Ascot-under-Wychwood, all bordering the forest, have made their way to its heart on Palm Sunday to visit a well near the lakes called Wort's Well.

Right off the beaten track it may be approached from Hatchings Lane, Leafield, and then by walking for more than a mile through forest that for centuries supplied oak to build ships for the Royal Navy.

Usually on Palm Sunday the forest, owned now by a member of the City investment family Cayzer, which hit the headlines five years ago over a family tussle over the £629m Cayzer Trust, is carpeted with bluebells. This year of course, Easter being early, they will not be out yet.

The Palm Sunday tradition, I gather from the current edition of Wychwood Magazine (distributed free in Milton-under-Wychwood), is that visitors to the well take with them bottles. They gather wild liquorice growing around the well and mix it with the well-water to produce a cure-all medicine. Local historian John Kibble wrote in 1928 that prayers were said around the well.

Charles I gave Cornbury to Lord Danby, the man who founded the Oxford Botanic Garden. It passed to Lord Clarendon, whose History of the Revolution about the English Civil War raised money enough to finance the Clarendon Building in Oxford, and whose grandson, Viscount Cornbury, scandalised America as Governor of New York and New Jersey by cross-dressing.

In the 17th century Lord Clarendon planted more than 2,000 trees at Cornbury. But much of that work was undone during the Industrial Revolution when in 1856-8 1,970 acres of forest were enclosed and grubbed up.

Subsequent owners of the estate have included the du Cros family and the beer barons Watney.

The beer connection is interesting since the word wort means either the unfermented malt in beer, or any herb or vegetable. Might not the name wort, therefore, when appled to the well, not refer to the liquorice as the base ingredient of the medicine?

Whenever Charlemagne conquered a tribe in the name of Christianity, I am told, he would find out which tree the vanquished held sacred - and then chop it down in order to show that Man, not Nature, was centre stage. Some doubt about that when you visit this forest.

But back in the real world a pint of beer in the Navy Oak at Leafield slips down easily enough. And then there is the church at Finstock, where T.S.Eliot was baptised.