After Hadrian’s Wall, the Lake District, Chester, and North Wales, our Tauck tour turned east toward Oxford. This was one of the most history-packed stretches of the whole trip.
Included was the farmhouse where Anne Hathaway grew up and the house where Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon.
Next we headed to Oxford and Blenheim Palace, along with a university city with over nine hundred years of teaching.
⌂ Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in Shottery
Our first stop was Shottery, a hamlet a mile west of Stratford-upon-Avon. It is now part of the town. Additionally, the word cottage undersells the place considerably. This is a twelve-room, timber-framed, thatched farmhouse. It has been added onto by one generation after another. The oldest part dates to around 1463. The rooms seem to wander. The family kept adding to it. Nearby, Oxford and Blenheim Palace are well known.
Anne was born here around 1556, the eldest daughter of a yeoman farmer. She grew up working a farm that once ran to more than 90 acres. She married William Shakespeare in 1582, when she was 26 and he was 18. Our guide made a point that surprised a few of us: Anne’s age was not unusual for an Elizabethan bride. It was William who was especially young for a groom.
Thirteen generations of Hathaways lived here across nearly four centuries. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust bought the house in 1892. They kept Mary Baker, one of the last Hathaway descendants to care for the place while telling family stories to visitors.
The guides still do exactly that. They recount conversations the family had and the small rituals that accompanied each visit. Visitors hear how Mary Baker kept notes and passed down stories of the house.
The garden is worth lingering in and was replanted in the 1920s with flowers Shakespeare named in his plays. That restoration aimed to reflect his stage world and invites quiet admiration today. Visitors often pause to compare the hedges with lines from the plays and imagine the old rooms.
▣ Shakespeare’s Birthplace on Henley Street
A short ride brought us back into Stratford to the half-timbered house where Shakespeare was born in 1564. The street is pedestrianized now, so you can stand back and take in the whole crooked facade.
The house was his fathers and so was the the story here. John Shakespeare lived and worked here for fifty years as a glover, making his own leather and selling gloves straight off the window ledge to people passing in the street. He and Mary Arden had eight children, five of whom survived to adulthood. William was the third. John was a successful tradesman and civic figure who became Mayor of Stratford in 1568. The earliest record of him at this address is wonderfully human: in 1552 he was fined for leaving a pile of muck outside his own front door.
William lived here until he left for London, and the first five years of his marriage to Anne were spent under this roof. The rooms are furnished to the period and the walled garden is planted only with herbs and flowers known in his lifetime.
From Grammar School to the Globe
Standing in the room where he was born, it is worth remembering how ordinary his start was. He was baptized at Holy Trinity on 26 April 1564, which is why tradition sets his birthday on 23 April. No school records survive, but he almost certainly attended the King’s New School, the free grammar school a few minutes’ walk from the house, where boys probably began around age seven and spent long days studying Latin, rhetoric, and the classical authors. That was the whole of his formal education. He never went to university, and his better-connected rivals never let him forget it. He married Anne at 18, had three children by 21, and then vanishes from the record entirely between 1585 and 1592, the stretch scholars call the lost years. Strangely, nobody knows what he was doing during this tme.
When he surfaces again in 1592 he is in London and already successful enough to be resented. A rival playwright sneered at him in print as an “upstart crow,” the first written notice of his career and a fairly clear sign that he had already made an impression. In 1594 he joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men as a shareholder rather than a hired hand, which is how he actually got rich, and in 1599 he helped build the Globe theater on the south bank of the Thames. When James I took the throne in 1603, the company became the King’s Men. In a working career of roughly twenty-three years he produced about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and two long narrative poems. He bought New Place, the largest house in Stratford, in 1597, retired there around 1613, and died on 23 April 1616, apparently on his fifty-second birthday.
Eighteen of his plays appeared in print for the first time after his death, because two fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, gathered his plays into a single volume in 1623, the book we call the First Folio. Without those two men there would be no Macbeth, no Tempest, no Twelfth Night. Anne died the same year the folio appeared.
Afterward our tour through the house and walk around the town, we had time for lunch at “The One Elm” restaurant.
◆ Arriving in Oxford
After lunch, we headed on to Oxford for two nights at The Store, a hotel on Broad Street inside the old Boswells building. Boswells was one of England’s oldest family-owned department stores, trading from 1738 until it closed in 2020, and the conversion keeps the bones of it. Original skylights were incorporated into the restaurant floor. There is also a rooftop bar with views straight across to the Radcliffe Camera and the Sheldonian, which is a hard location to beat.
We arrived late afternoon and felt the difference in this city immediately. It was busy, with students and visitors filling the streets. There was also a large mental health convention that also contributed to the crowded streets. Our bus had to stop several blocks short of the hotel, because central Oxford runs a Zero Emission Zone plus camera-enforced traffic filters, and our large coach was not welcome. We walked, checked in, and met back in the lobby for a walking tour.
✦ Oxford University: A City of Colleges Under One Umbrella
Most of us knew Oxford only as old and prestigious University. Our guide, Susan, was excellent, and by the end of the walk we realized how little we had actually understood about Oxford Univerrsity.
Start with the age. There is no founding charter and no founding date, but teaching is documented here as early as 1096, which makes Oxford the oldest university in the English-speaking world. It grew fast after 1167, when Henry II banned English students from studying in Paris and the scholars came home. In 1209 a violent dispute between students and townspeople sent some scholars fleeing northeast, helping establish Cambridge. That rivalry is more than eight hundred years old.
How the Collegiate System Actually Works
The structure was the real surprise and complicated. Oxford is not one campus but a federation of 39 self-governing colleges and four permanent private halls, each with its own buildings and character. University Colleges, Balliol, and Merton are the oldest, all founded in the mid-1200s.
Students may name a preferred college when they apply, although they can be offered a place by another one. Once admitted, they belong to their college for the whole degree. The college houses them, feeds them in hall, and looks after their welfare, which is the part that sounds a little like an American fraternity house. Where the comparison breaks down is teaching. Oxford colleges do teach. The tutorial, a small group of students meeting with a tutor to work through what they have written and learned that week, still happens at the college and Oxford still calls it the cornerstone of an undergraduate education. What colleges do not run is the lectures, the laboratories, or the exams. Those belong to the university’s departments and faculties, which organize lectures and laboratories, set the syllabus, and award the degree. Plenty of academics hold two posts at once, one at a college and one in a department, and that is what stitches the whole thing together.
We walked past many of the main academic buildings with Susan filling in some of the famous alumni as we went. Lewis Carol, Tolkien, and many other literary legends, as well as many world leaders attended Oxford. Even Bill Clinton spent time here, but never graduated from Oxford. More than thirty British prime ministers studied here.
The Bodleian and the Radcliffe Camera
The library that stopped everyone was the Bodleian, first opened to scholars in 1602.
Today, the Bodleian Libraries hold more than 14 million printed items. Thus, this makes it one of the largest library collections in Britain. The Bodleian has had legal deposit status for four centuries. This status allows it to claim copies of eligible works published in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Space has always been the problem. Consequently, they dug a book store under Radcliffe Square in 1909, the largest in the world at the time.
The building everyone photographs is the Radcliffe Camera, the round domed one standing alone in the square. Camera just means room in Latin. It was built between 1737 and 1749 with money left by a royal physician, and it became a Bodleian reading room in 1860.
♪ Evensong at Christ Church Cathedral
Bob had caught my cold and spent the afternoon resting. When we heard there was a choral service at the cathedral that evening, he rallied, and a group of us met in the lobby and walked around the corner to the chruch.
Christ Church Cathedral is a wonderful oddity. It serves as both the cathedral for the Diocese of Oxford and the chapel of Christ Church College, a double role that is unique in the Church of England, and it is one of the smallest cathedrals in the country. There has been a church on this spot for roughly nine hundred years, built around the shrine of St Frideswide, patron saint of the city.
We attended Choral Evensong, sung at 6 p.m. most evenings and open to anyone who walks in. The church was nearly full. The service felt unexpectedly relaxed, and the singing was beautiful, carried by acoustics that seem built for exactly that sound. Listening to a choir whose tradition stretches back five hundred years was one of the quiet wow moments of the trip.
On the way back we stopped at One Ship Street for a quick dinner. Bob was feeling rough, so we kept it to soup and salad and headed back to the room. Neither of us thought much of the meal, though in fairness our taste buds were not to be trusted that night.
♛ Blenheim Palace, Birthplace of Winston Churchill
The next morning, we drove out to the town of Woodstock, eight miles northwest of Oxford. Nothing quite prepares you for the scale of Blenheim Palace. It is newer and grander than any of the older palaces we had seen to date including the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinbrough. You come through the gate, the ground opens out, and there is the Great Court, the Grand Bridge, the Column of Victory, and two thousand acres of parkland behind it all.
A Nation’s Thank-You Gift
Blenheim exists because of one battle. On 13 August 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, led allied forces to a decisive victory over the French and Bavarians in Bavaria. A grateful Queen Anne gave him the royal manor of Woodstock, and Parliament granted funds to build a house worthy of the victory, named for the battle. Construction ran from 1705 to 1722 and did not go smoothly. Sir John Vanbrugh’s English Baroque design caused years of arguments over its cost and extravagance. The Crown stopped paying in 1712 and the Duke covered the rest himself. Alexander Pope mocked the Grand Bridge for spanning a marshy brook.
The bridge got its water sixty years later, when Capability Brown dammed the River Glyme to create the Great Lake and softened Vanbrugh’s hard geometry into rolling parkland. Blenheim became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and it holds a title no one else can claim: the only country house in England that is neither royal nor a bishop’s residence yet is still called a palace.
Churchill, Spencer, Spencer-Churchill
Here is the part worth getting right, and it is the thread our guide pulled hardest. The family who owns Blenheim today is not, strictly speaking, simply the Churchill family. It descends through the Spencers as in Princess Diana’s Spencer family.
The 1st Duke and his formidable wife Sarah lost their only surviving son in 1703, so a special Act of Parliament allowed the title to pass down the female line. Their daughter Henrietta became Duchess in her own right. When she died in 1733, the title went to her nephew Charles Spencer, son of her sister Anne. From that moment the family name at Blenheim was Spencer. It stayed that way until 1817, when the 5th Duke took royal license to add Churchill back in, honoring his great-great-grandfather. Spencer-Churchill is the name they have used ever since.
And yes, those are the same Spencers. Charles Spencer’s younger brother John was the ancestor of the Earls Spencer of Althorp, which makes Diana, Princess of Wales, a cousin of this house. Twelve dukes have held Blenheim across three centuries, and the 12th, Charles James Spencer-Churchill, keeps private apartments there today with his young family.
The American Heiress Who Saved It
The money ran out more than once. The 5th Duke spent through most of the fortune, and by the 1870s the 7th Duke was selling off the contents to keep the lights on. What rescued Blenheim was a Gilded Age marriage. In 1895 the 9th Duke, known as Sunny, married the American railroad heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt. Her dowry paid for the restoration, the tapestries, and the formal water gardens. He told her shortly after the wedding that he had married her to save Blenheim, which is not the line you hope for on your honeymoon. She went on to become a genuinely popular duchess, they separated in 1906 and divorced in 1921, and she is buried in the same churchyard as Winston Churchill.
Churchill’s Room
On 30 November 1874, Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife Jennie Jerome were visiting Randolph’s father, the 7th Duke. Jennie went into labor early, and Winston was born in a small ground-floor bedroom. That room is preserved, and the Churchill Exhibition around it covers his life, his writing, his paintings, and the war years.
He never inherited Blenheim, being a grandson of one duke and cousin to another, but he came back all his life. He painted in the grounds and proposed to Clementine Hozier at the Temple of Diana beside the water terraces in 1908. A trail now links the spots that mattered to him.
The Servants’ Story and the Stables
Downstairs, an exhibition called The Untold Story runs three hundred years of Blenheim history from below stairs, narrated by a chambermaid. It is not elaborate, just recorded voices carrying you through a sequence of timed rooms, and it works because it focuses on the household rather than the titled family—the people who actually kept a building this size running.
The Stables Exhibition nearby covers the family’s long relationship with horses, including a life-size model of Churchill’s childhood pony, Rob Roy. The Stables Cafe does a good cup of coffee, which after a few hours on your feet counts for a lot.
✿ St Martin’s Church, Bladon
Leaving Blenheim, we stopped a few minutes down the road at St Martin’s in Bladon, on the edge of the estate. Churchill asked to be buried here rather than at St Paul’s, where his state funeral was held in January 1965. After that service his body came by train to Hanborough and then to Bladon for a private burial with only family present. Clementine was buried alongside him in 1977, and his parents lie in the same churchyard.
The grave is remarkably plain, and that is clearly the point. The Dukes and Duchesses of Marlborough are interred in the Blenheim chapel. Winston chose the parish churchyard in Bladon, where other members of his family were also buried.
Note: He did not want to be buried at Westminster Abbey. He said he would not get along with too many people already buried there. However, a memorial to him stands there.
▥ A Free Afternoon: The Covered Market and the Ashmolean
We returned to Oxford for a free afternoon. Bob stayed in and was no better when I got back, so I went out to wander on my own.
I started at the Covered Market, between the High Street and Market Street. It opened in November 1774, built to clear the untidy and unsavory stalls off the main streets and gather the food traders under one roof. It turned 250 in 2024 and still runs about half food traders, including butchers making the local Oxford sausage, alongside bakeries, cafes, and gift shops.
From there I walked to the Ashmolean Museum on Beaumont Street, the University of Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology. It opened in 1683 and is widely regarded as the world’s first university museum. Admission is free, which feels almost absurd once you are inside.
I could have stayed for hours. There was a beautiful color map charting the growth of the Roman Empire across three centuries before its decline. The Egyptian and Nubian galleries are among the finest outside Cairo, with mummies, painted coffins, and objects going back five thousand years. Elsewhere there are Anglo-Saxon treasures, the Stradivari violin known as the Messiah, and works by Michelangelo, Turner, and Van Gogh. Five floors, arranged chronologically from the bottom up. You could go three times and still miss things.
♬ Dinner with Oxford Graduate Students
Tauck had arranged something special for our last evening: dinner in one of the university rooms with three graduate students as our hosts. It was the best hour of the Oxford stay.
They were sharp, funny, and completely unguarded. One thing they told us corrected an idea most of us had carried in from films and novels. The classic image of the Oxford tutorial, an undergraduate reading an essay aloud and defending it on the spot while the tutor picks it apart, is largely a thing of the past. Written work is submitted ahead of time now, and the session is a discussion built around it. The degree is still essay driven, just without the theater.
We also asked how college life feels from the inside and how they see the place changing. The student at our table was studying artificial intelligence, which turned the conversation somewhere none of us expected.
He felt that the companies building these systems should carry legal liability for the harm their systems may cause, the same way a manufacturer answers for pollution or for a defective product that injures someone. He did not believe the industry would get there on its own. Government, in his view, needs to step up and put real guardrails on the technology as a matter of public safety, and he felt strongly about it.
Hearing that laid out over dinner by someone actually doing the work, rather than by someone reporting on it from the outside, was the most interesting half hour of the evening. Arranged meals with locals can feel staged. This one did not.
➜ Next Stop: Bath
Wheels up the next morning was 8 a.m. sharp, with Bath ahead of us and then London for the final two and a half days. Bob was still nursing the cold, but we were both glad we had pushed through Oxford. Two nights sounded like plenty when we read the itinerary. It was not. I would go back for a week.
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