A Three-Hour Tour

Yesterday Dr. Ross told Brandon and me about a little town near Oxford called Iffley that has a 12th-century church. He said that he and some of the other professors (Drs. Norwood and McCrillis, I think) had seen it before and really enjoyed it. He said that it was a little bit of a walk to get there but that it would be fun. So I asked if we could go today. We all agreed to leave around 10:00 a.m., but Brandon woke up with a bit of a head cold and didn't feel much like walking, so Dr. Ross and I decided to go ahead and brave it alone. We set out on a journey that we expected to take only a couple of hours and were enjoying our walk through the English countryside. After walking about half an hour (and having a too-close-for-comfort encounter with a loudly mooing cow), we came upon a little town, but Dr. Ross didn't think we had walked far enough for us to have reached Iffley, so we kept walking for about another hour, when we reached another small town and decided to stop for tea in a local pub to warm up. After taking our tea, we ventured toward Iffley again, but when we stopped one of the locals to ask for directions (because three roads diverged in a yellow wood) he told us that we needed to go back the way we had come -- that we had already passed Iffley. Well, Dr. Ross and I started walking back in the direction of Oxford. We turned off a path that we had walked past earlier and thought that we had finally found Iffley. So I asked a man sitting outside of a pub where we could find the church. He said he didn't know but that his friends inside would. Dr. Ross and I went inside with him, and they told us that we needed to keep going toward Oxford more. So we started to head out of the pub, and the men said to us that we should stay for a pint, and Dr. Ross declined and started walking out the door. So then the men looked at me and said, "Well, you should stay for a pint then." Obviously, I declined, wiping the pub scum off my skin as we exited. So getting back on the trail, I joked that I felt like Keira Knightley walking into a room full of skeezy pirates (some of those guys really did look like characters straight from the Pirates movies), and Dr. Ross joked about my new "British friends" who would be meeting us in Iffley. We kept walking until we reached the first town that we had reached (thirty minutes after leaving Oxford), only to find out that it was, indeed, the Iffley that we sought. Needless to say, I got quite a few burns in on the directionally challenged Dr. Ross and his faulty Magellan sense. I finally designated myself leader for the remainder of our time in Iffley -- an action I think that may have resulted in our making it back to Oxford today.

Once in Iffley, we stopped for lunch at a nice little restaurant and then proceeded to find the church, which turned out to be well worth the extra three hours of walking, even if we did only stay in the church for about twenty minutes. (It was so small that it didn't take much longer to see it anyway.) Inside the church, you could see how the church was built in sections, the first built in the Romanesque style and the second two sections built later in the Gothic style. It also had lovely stained-glass windows. The exterior of the church looked a bit like a fortress or a castle, which I remember learning is typical of churches of the 12th century, so it was fun to see that in person.

Inside the Church

Exterior of the Church

Well, I guess I must say that even if our slight detour (how's that for some classic British understatement?!) did become a little Gilligan's Island-esque, we made it home safely, and we had a lovely walk along the River Thames and had tea in a cozy little pub that we would not have found if we hadn't walked too far. So it all paid off in the end. Dr. Ross kept thanking me for being such a "good sport." "No problem," I kept saying. But man, I really do have about a month's supply of burns stored up now for Dr. Ross! Haha!

Rowers on the Thames

More photos here.