In the 1920s, Oxford was full of poets, and most of them seemed to know each other. Among the most battle-scarred was Robert Graves, whose precarious mental condition meant that he was allowed to ‘live out’.

First he stayed with John Masefield in Boars Hill, where the neighbours included war poet Edmund Blunden, as well as Robert Bridges. Then he moved to a rundown cottage in Islip.

He had returned from the trenches of the First World War “very thin, very nervous, and with about four years’ loss of sleep to make up”, and knowing that it would be years before he “could face anything but a quiet country life”.

Like many war poets, his work is full of references to nature, and I decided to explore the footpaths around the village of Islip, where he lived at World’s End cottage from 1921-6. Graves cycled the seven miles from there to Oxford on what were then quiet country roads — in his memoir Goodbye To All That he remembers finding that someone had washed his bike after he left it for unlocked a week at Islip station. He was astonished that pump and lights were still there, but not surprised that no-one had stolen the bike.

He chose the village partly because it had a railway station. After years at risk of closure, the line from Oxford is now being upgraded and will soon offer a fast route to London. The work means that Islip station is closed until next year, so we caught a replacement rail bus from Oxford station forecourt.

It dropped us on the Kidlington road west of the station, the driver explaining that the stop had been chosen so that the buses could avoid the A34 traffic jams.

We walked through the playing fields to the village hall, where a cake and plant sale was just starting. One stall was selling local lavender products from Jacob’s Field, south of the village. Judging by the photo on the bottles, it looked a fine sight and would be on the route of our walk.

We pressed on to the church, which was just opposite. Islip’s other famous inhabitant was Edward the Confessor, whose portrait is opposite the church door, with heraldic beasts from Westminster Abbey, which he founded.

The church was badly damaged in the English Civil War, when Cromwell’s troops won the battle of Islip Bridge, where we were heading next. But first we paused to try out the stocks on Cross Tree Green, where a Calvary to the dead of the First World War must have been a familiar sight for Graves, whose poem November 11th, published for the first time earlier this year, expresses horror at “thoughtless and ignorant” crowds celebrating the armistice.

The poem asks: “Why are they cheering and shouting?”, calling them “the froth of the city” and “the thoughtless and ignorant scum / Who hang out the bunting when war is let loose / And for victory bang on a drum.”

Meanwhile “the boys who were killed in the battle” are “peacefully sleeping on pallets of mud”. He was persuaded not to publish the poem at the time and released a toned-down version in 1969, saying it had been unprintable until then.

We headed downhill to cross the river Ray (a tributary of the Cherwell) by a road bridge that is now perilous for pedestrians, since the village streets became rat-runs for traffic hoping to avoid the grid-locked A34. If a modern-day war veteran came here looking for peace and quiet, he would be sadly disappointed.

World’s End is down a quiet cul de sac by the river. Beautifully converted, it is unrecognisable from the 1925 photo with Graves in front. He ended up in Islip because his wife Nancy wanted somewhere five or six miles from Oxford in the opposite direction from Boar’s Hill, where they had been living in John Masefield’s garden.

Graves wrote: “I laid a ruler across the Oxford ordnance map, and found five riverside villages which corresponded in general direction and distance with Nancy’s stipulation.”

She wanted somewhere with shops, and a church with a tower. Islip fitted the bill.

Graves threw himself into village life, serving on the parish council, but found he had more in common with the village’s old soldiers than with the local gentry who ran the council.

From World’s End, we took a narrow footpath leading left up to Bridge Street, passing the lavender field, which was firmly padlocked, and followed the Confessor’s Way past some beautifully-kept allotments.

Islip celebrated Edward’s centenary by creating a one-mile circular walk, with a useful footbridge which provides a quieter route to the village from Oxford. The path heads across the middle of a large field, offering fine views of Kidlington Parish Church spire across the Cherwell.

We parted company with the Confessor’s Way at the river, heading south, instead of north back to the village. We ‘watched the seasons pass’, revelling in the sounds of high summer, with nature conspiring to provide easy listening lessons in identification. A chiffchaff sang ‘chiff chaff’; a bluetit ‘teacher, teacher’ and finally a yellowhammer, sitting on a naked branch, with its yellow head glowing in the sunshine, sang: “A little bit of bread and no cheese.” Then a comma butterfly fluttered its wings, showing the small white comma — a first for me.

The wildlife is attracted by the lush vegetation, which would once have been kept at bay by grazing cattle. These watermeadows were valued for centuries for the tender grass which has a head start in spring, having been protected from frost by the floodwater. I am all for nature, but we were delighted that someone had cleared the footpath with a strimmer, making it easier for walkers.

This path had undoubtedly been flooded for most of the winter, and it’s a walk best avoided after heavy rain. The meadows ended at Sparsey bridge, where we crossed the Cherwell, walking through a huge field of peas to take a closer look at Water Eaton Manor. This was the inspiration for Meg Rossof’s young adult novel How I Live Now, though a farmhouse in Carmarthenshire was used when it was made into a film.

Perhaps the filmmakers felt this Jacobean house in Oxfordshire was not remote enough — the area is surrounded by pylons and the lights and CCTV cameras of Water Eaton park-and-ride. It will be even busier when the new Oxford Parkway station opens, but on a summer’s day it is easy to ignore the distant hum of traffic and forget you are on the edge of the city.

Having crossed the river, we decided to continue on the west bank to Cutteslowe Park — a walk which should be easy but often leads me astray. The path leading to a footbridge over the park’s boundary stream is clear enough, but somehow we missed the right turn off the farm track and ended retracing our footsteps. We stopped for a cup of tea at the park pavilion, watching families enjoying the playground and clock golf.

In Robert Graves’s day, walkers would have had no way of crossing the Cherwell until Magdalen Bridge, unless they took a ferry. But we crossed the ring road at the pedestrian and cycle bridge and followed the cycle track across the river to take a footpath through water meadows newly acquired by the Oxford Preservation Trust, leading to the Victoria Arms at Marston.

The trust, which also owns the pub, has named the area Marston Hamm, from the Old English word for ‘land in the bend of a river’. Before the Marston Ferry Road was built, the pub had a ferry crossing and is now a favourite destination for punts.

We wandered along the Cherwell to the University Parks, with novice punters encountering mishaps, and young people shrieking as they plunged into the freezing water to cool off.

We crossed again at Rainbow Bridge (properly called High Bridge), built as a job creation project in 1923-24, during Graves’s time in Islip. He loved walking and when he wasn’t cycling, must surely have used this footpath along the Cherwell to Summertown, handy for St Giles, where he was studying at John’s College. Goodbye To All That was written at a time when his life was in turmoil. He turned his bitterness about the war into farcical descriptions of the horrific events he had witnessed. As poet Andrew Motion says in his introduction to the latest edition: “It is like reading a version of the final episode of Blackadder, some 80 years before that show was written.”

Graves’s time in Islip is marked in the preface to his famous memoir — a poem written by his lover Laura Riding called World’s End.

See my website www.groundhogwalking.co.uk