January 17th, 2010 Posted in Crafts, Family, Travels, birding | No Comments »
Just a week before we made our trip to Canada for Christmas we made a short visit to Oxford. We visited a RSPB site local to Oxford called Otmoor, and spent some time in the great outdoors looking for British birds. There were some really interesting viewing holes in the bird blind that made great frames for pictures.
Between the RSPB reserve and our friends’ home in Oxford we drove through this little village where the road would narrow to just a car width framed by the walls of buildings. The several dozen buildings in this village were all built using the same stone and every 5 or so had a thatched roof. Very cool! I could only snap a few shots as Pete tried to carefully navigate between the buildings.
We continued on to visit with Tim and Anna and their 6 children. While Tim gave Pete and I a 2 hour sprint tour of Oxford, Anna kept the kids out of trouble with bread baking and shaping, and drawing. Here are some of the results.
A kingfisher and Tucker (the rabbit) crafted into bread dough.
Images nabbed on our tour.
One of the Oxford College courtyards. There are 39 colleges in the Oxford University. Each college has a courtyard such as this one. The building houses the college library, study halls, and other related rooms. And if you continue through the back gates there is often a beautiful garden for the enjoyment of the students (weather permitting).
The crafting that went into these old buildings is stunning and it is overwhelming as there is so much to look at. It makes me want to study more architecture. They even decorated the water spouts.
A piece of Christ Church College out buildings, supposedly the end that Henry VIII stayed in.
In our short tour we saw so many aspects of Oxford, but only really saw a glimpse. Most of Oxford is behind walls, our camera battery running low, and the lighting poor contributed to fewer pictures than I had wished for. A few of the highlights included a cross in the road marking the place where Bloody Mary had three bishops burned at the stake for failing to recant the Protestant faith, the 1000 year-old towers that they were kept in till their deaths, and the Eagle and Child, the pub where Tolkien and Lewis chatted.
The thing that comes back to me every time are the layers of history overlapping one another. It’s so hard to put into words. We were surrounded by insignificance and significance. Insignificance in that there were people walking past getting groceries and doing their Christmas shopping without a second thought. And significance in that so many people that lived in Oxford in days gone by have changed the world.
Diana
