Addison's Walk
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.
Quietest in the early morning before the college opens to general visitors. The water meadow the path encloses is enclosed grazing — admire it from the path.
Addison's Walk is a footpath around a small island in the River Cherwell, inside the grounds of Magdalen College. From the path Magdalen Tower and Magdalen Bridge come in and out of view across the water meadow that the path encloses. It was originally called Water Walk, and the path itself most likely dates from the sixteenth century — the name "Addison's Walk" has only been in use since the nineteenth, and the loop was completed as a circular walk at around the same time. Until then it ended at Dover Pier, a Civil War gun position on the Cherwell.
Joseph Addison
The walk is named for Joseph Addison (1672-1719), a Fellow of the college from 1698 to 1711. Addison wrote about landscape gardening in The Spectator, and the walk was — by the time it was named for him — a working illustration of the kind of landscape his essays praised: a path designed to look as though it had no design.
C.S. Lewis and the long talk of 1931
The walk is more famous now for a single late-night conversation. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a Fellow of Magdalen for much of his working life and walked Addison's Walk regularly with the friends who would become the core of the Inklings — including J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. A long late-night discussion on the path between Lewis, Tolkien and Dyson is what Lewis credited with his shift from theism to Christianity in 1931, two years after his earlier conversion from atheism to theism in 1929. Tolkien had hoped Lewis would join the Catholic Church rather than the Church of England.
Lewis later wrote a poem about the walk that names it directly. The path is also referenced repeatedly in Justin Cartwright's 2007 novel The Song Before it is Sung.
Visiting
Access is through Magdalen College's porters' lodge on High Street during the college's normal opening hours; the standard college admission ticket covers the grounds. The walk pairs naturally with the college cloisters and the deer park inside Magdalen, and with the water meadow it encloses on its inner side. The Inklings circuit through Oxford takes in Tolkien's tree and the Tolkien bench in the parks; Addison's Walk is the third site most associated with the group on the ground in Oxford.
Nearby
Within a few minutes' walk
