Oxford itself is a Saxon foundation, but the surrounding country has been ritualised land for millennia. Within an hour's drive sit some of southern England's most significant prehistoric monuments — a Neolithic chambered tomb, one of the country's largest stone circles, the oldest hill figure in Britain, and a Bronze Age henge.
A driving loop combining several of these makes a satisfying day out. See also Neolithic for sites specifically from the 4th-3rd millennia BCE, and folklore for the legends that grew up around them.
A 4,500-year-old stone circle on the Oxfordshire–Warwickshire border, with an older Neolithic burial dolmen and a probable Bronze Age standing stone — the most accessible major prehistoric site within reach of Oxford.
A Late Neolithic henge and stone circle at Stanton Harcourt, levelled by a wartime airfield, then chewed by gravel quarrying, then reconstructed almost from scratch between 2002 and 2008.
Britain's oldest chalk hill figure — a 110-metre stylised horse cut into the Berkshire Downs scarp at some point between 1380 and 550 BC, scoured and re-chalked by villagers for at least three thousand years.
An Early Neolithic chambered long barrow on the Ridgeway, completed around 3430 BCE — among Britain's best-preserved Severn-Cotswold tombs and a long day's walk from the Uffington White Horse.
Two wooded chalk hills above the Thames Valley, the most visited outdoor site in Oxfordshire — Iron Age hillfort, Roman villa, beech plantings from the 1740s, and the view that haunted Paul Nash for thirty years.