Christ Church

I do the walk around Christ Church meadow almost every day, but I'd never actually been inside the college itself. You need a ticket, and they're only released once a week, so I've thought of it as something I'd maybe do sometime. But you can attend services at the cathedral, which is on the main quad of the college, and last Saturday I went to Evensong there.

This is the cathedral entrance from Tom Quad, and the altar inside. Tom Quad is named for Great Tom, the bell in the tower over the entrance to the college. It's the loudest bell in Oxford (I can attest to this) and rings every night at 9:05 pm. Everything at Christ Church is five minutes behind the rest of Oxford, because they still stick to the original Oxford time, which was five minutes behind Greenwich Time. So Evensong began at 6:05.

Back to Christ Church Meadow

I visited Christ Church Meadow my first day in Oxford, but I didn't include a picture of the actual meadow. I've now done the meadow walk—a 1.5 mile path circling the meadow—several times. Christ Church College is our next-door neighbor in Oxford, and if you go out the back gate of Merton it's a five minute walk to the meadow.

What still astonishes me is that it is an actual meadow—acres and acres of grass, in the middle of a city where land is almost as expensive as Manhattan. Which tells you how ridiculously wealthy Oxford colleges in general, and Christ Church College in particular, are.

Of course, it wouldn't be a meadow without cows.