Oxford Landmarks

The footpath around a Cherwell island in Magdalen's grounds — named for Joseph Addison, walked by Joseph Addison, made famous a century later by C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.

Hertford College's 1914 covered skyway over New College Lane — Oxford's most photographed bridge, despite resembling neither of the actual Bridges of Sighs.

The 23-metre Saxon-medieval tower at the centre of Oxford — climb 99 steps for a four-way panorama.

The 1825 stone bridge at the south end of St Aldate's, Grade I listed and standing on the site of an oxen-ford that gave Oxford its name. The boat that became *Alice in Wonderland* set off from here on 4 July 1862.

A medieval tower at the north end of Folly Bridge, demolished 1779. The 13th-century Franciscan friar Roger Bacon — one of the earliest European advocates of the scientific method — is said to have lived and worked here.

A Benedictine nunnery founded in 1133 on an island in the Thames; the burial place of Henry II's mistress Rosamund Clifford until a bishop ordered her tomb thrown out of the church in 1191. Suppressed in 1539, ruined in the Civil War, painted by the Pre-Raphaelites, picnicked over by Lewis Carroll.

Victorian cemetery established in 1847 on Merton College land. The resting place of Kenneth Grahame, Walter Pater, Charles Williams and the Mad Hatter's reputed model — now a wildlife refuge with muntjac deer and pheasants.

The bench at the back of the Botanic Garden where, in the closing chapter of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Lyra and Will promise to sit at noon on Midsummer's day every year.

The 144-foot perpendicular Gothic tower of Magdalen College (1509) — the centrepiece of the High Street and the gathering point for May Morning.

Sir Gilbert Scott's 1843 Gothic-Revival monument to Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley — the three Oxford Martyrs burned for heresy in 1555–1556.

A long, narrow island in the Cherwell — Greek 'between rivers' — laid out as a public walk in 1865, threaded between two branches of the river that flow at different heights.

Norman castle (1071) and former Victorian prison — the medieval mound, St George's Tower, and 1,000 years of overlapping use.

The 13th-century defensive ring around medieval Oxford — best-preserved in the gardens of New College.

James Gibbs's English Palladian rotunda (1749) — the first circular library in the country and the most photographed building in Oxford.

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.

Sir Christopher Wren's first major building (1668) — the University's ceremonial assembly hall, with a painted ceiling and a viewing cupola.

The Anglo-Saxon tower at the head of Cornmarket — c.1040, the oldest standing building in Oxford. The Bocardo Prison cell door behind which Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were held in 1555-56 is preserved in the tower.

On 10 February 1355 two students complained about the wine at the Swindlestock Tavern at Carfax. Three days later, ninety-three people were dead — and the university had supremacy over the town for the next 470 years.

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.

An ancient yew at the entrance to one of England's finest Norman churches — paired inside by John Piper's Tree of Life and Roger Wagner's Flowering Tree windows.

C.S. Lewis's Oxford home from 1930, built 1922 on the site of a former brickworks. Now the C.S. Lewis Foundation Study Centre.

A brass-plaqued bench in University Parks, dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) by the Tolkien Centenary Conference in 1992 — accompanied by two trees said to represent Telperion and Laurelin, the Two Trees of Valinor.

The site, in the Oxford Botanic Garden, of the Pinus nigra under which J.R.R. Tolkien 'often spent his time reposing'.

Sir Christopher Wren's Gothic-revival gatehouse tower at Christ Church (1682) — home of Great Tom, the bell that still rings 101 times every night.

The Jacobean entrance tower of the Bodleian — a single building demonstrating all five classical orders, stacked vertically.

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.

The University's church on the High Street, with one of the best tower views in Oxford and a 13th-century spire.

Four hundred years of gardens behind a Jacobean front quad — Wilkins's mound and mechanical curiosities under Cromwell, a Picturesque tree collection under Wills, and a Sheldonian Emperor's Head retired in the corner.

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.

City cemetery opened in 1889. The Roman Catholic section contains the grave of J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith, headstone inscribed Beren and Lúthien.

Twenty-six acres of gardens, playing fields and a lake inside the city — the largest college grounds in central Oxford, kept that way by the college's 18th-century edge-of-town location.

The North Oxford house where James Murray edited the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary from a corrugated-iron shed in the back garden — the original Scriptorium, with 1,029 pigeon-holes and a Post Office postbox of its own.

The North Oxford house bearing the plaque to Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin — Somerville chemist, X-ray crystallographer, and the only British woman scientist to have been awarded a Nobel Prize.

From a 1912 conversion of a military training school into Britain's largest car factory — and on through Morris Motors, the British Motor Corporation, British Leyland, Rover, and BMW. The single most important site in twentieth-century Oxford.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's most famous fiasco — Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones painted Arthurian scenes onto the bare brickwork of the Union's debating hall in 1857. The paint started peeling before the work was finished.