Oxford City Wall
RecommendedThe 13th-century defensive ring around medieval Oxford — best-preserved in the gardens of New College.
14 entries across places, people, and walks.
The 13th-century defensive ring around medieval Oxford — best-preserved in the gardens of New College.
A gentle river walk from the heart of North Oxford to a village pub — through parks, past punts, and into the countryside.
The Oxford that most visitors walk straight past — back alleys, medieval doorways, hidden gardens, and quiet corners.
A short central-Oxford loop through the locations of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, ending at the bench in the Botanic Garden where Lyra and Will keep their promise.
The Parks' northern boundary path leads past a Victorian cluster of giant sequoias and the tallest Caucasian elm in the country — structural, year-round, easy on the legs.
Ancient common land, wild horses, ruined abbeys, and two of Oxford's best riverside pubs.
Oxford's full river traverse — from the gentle weirs of Iffley to the wild expanse of Port Meadow.
The essential Oxford walk — 10 colleges, 2 libraries, and 800 years of architecture in 90 minutes.
A circuit of the Oxford addresses, colleges and pubs that frame J.R.R. Tolkien's working life — Exeter, Pembroke, Merton, the Botanic Garden tree, the University Parks memorial bench, the Eagle and Child, ending at his grave at Wolvercote.
The Parks' Victorian centrepiece: a Japanese Pagoda Tree planted in 1888, now a sprawling, broad-canopied specimen on the western boundary path.
A single tree as the whole point of a walk: a Weeping Beech, first cultivated in 1836, whose drooping limbs touch the ground, root, and grow again — making one tree feel like a small grove.
The Parks' autumn walk: the western bank of the Cherwell with a Scarlet Oak whose foliage turns deep red in October, with onward access onto Mesopotamia.
The Parks' summer walk: a Tulip Tree flowering in June and July, an Indian Bean Tree dropping cigar-shaped seed pods, and a scarce Bee-bee Tree from Korea and China that scents the air in late summer.
The Parks' May walk: over thirty varieties of hawthorn flowering together along a single boundary path — the kind of botanical density you only get inside a working University collection.