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Dawn Treader Voyages
C. S. Lewis Study Tour and Cruise
August 16 - 26 or 29, 2004

Oxford & Cotswolds Extension:

Wednesday, August 25th through Sunday, August 29th
No proper C.S. Lewis study tour in the United Kingdom and Ireland could possibly bypass Oxford! We hope your schedule permits a few extra days to join us in this glorious university city where Lewis spent most of his adult life.

Our extension begins Wednesday evening in Bath, England’s showpiece of harmonious Georgian architecture…epitomized by the classic sweep of the Royal Crescent. The perfectly proportioned frontages were built between 1760 and 1780, with a variety of builders finishing the structures behind the facades however they pleased. It was the busy Roman architects of the first century, though, who were responsible for putting Bath on the map—at least for those seeking the therapeutic benefits of the green waters bubbling from a local hot spring (constant temperature, 115.7ºF). Not only did the Romans build the great public baths whose excavated remains we see today, but also a temple to Sulis Minerva, the Romano- Celtic goddess of healing whose surviving bronze head is now in the Baths Museum.

Leaving Bath by coach on Thursday, our drive takes us up into the Cotswolds…archetypal English countryside in all its gentle beauty… dotted in little valleys with villages of creamy limestone…places with charming names like Stow-on-the-Wold, Chipping Norton, or Moreton-in-Marsh.

After a pub lunch, we’ll visit the 200-room Blenheim Palace,Winston Churchill’s ancestral home and the only non-royal palace in the country.This summer is the tercentenary of the 1st Duke of Malborough’s triumph leading Queen Anne’s troops to victory over the French at the Battle of Blenheim.To express the nation’s gratitude for the victory, Parliament voted the Duke an enormous sum of money to build himself this mansion on a 2,100 acre estate. (Capability Brown finished the ambitious landscaping just as we colonists were getting our revolution underway.) In the nearby village of Bladon, we can pay our respects at Winston Churchill’s simple grave. On then to Oxford for three nights in the Old Bank Hotel, a stately “old bank” building midway down High Street which was gutted on the inside and re-opened four years ago as Oxford’s premier in-town hotel. Many of the guestrooms look directly down onto the manicured Fellow’s Garden of University College, which we will use one evening for a Pimm’s Party.

Founded by King Alfred the Great, and thus having good claim to being the oldest of the Oxford colleges, University has been at its present site on Oxford’s High Street since 1332. C.S. Lewis was an undergraduate here. Also, a certain Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas is a well-known University College alumnus… but with a claim to a different sort of fame: for once smoking something (but “not INHALING!”) when he was a graduate student thirty-five years ago.

Friday and Saturday we immerse ourselves in the Oxfordshire Lewis so loved. It was here that Lewis’ life was bisected, almost in half, by his conversion.

“I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”
From a letter C.S. Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, 1 October 1931

Thanks to the efforts of the C.S. Lewis Foundation, joined by the labor of hundreds of volunteers and the financial support of a growing number of Foundation friends, the beloved home of the Lewis brothers, The
Kilns, has been faithfully restored to its original state. Stan, together with fellow Trustee Kim Gilnett, will lead us on a personal tour of the home and Lewis’ nearby parish church, Holy Trinity of Headington Quarry, with its lovely Narnian Window. In the churchyard the two brothers are buried in a single grave. Friday, Stan and Kim will lead a “walking tour” of several Oxford colleges, with special emphasis on Magdalen College (pronounced maud-lin) where for twenty-nine years Lewis served as both fellow and tutor teaching English and philosophy. His rooms were in the New Buildings (“new” meaning 1650-1840!). A fine way to spend a sunny August afternoon is punting on the River Cherwell. We will organize a flotilla for American amateurs from Magdalen Bridge.

Lewis enthusiasts certainly would not want to miss his oft-frequented pub, The Eagle and Child, or “Bird and Baby” as it was called by the Inklings group who choose this as their meeting place.A collection of Lewis’ friends began gathering there around 1930. For the next three decades, they met most Tuesdays to discuss and read aloud their respective compositions. At various times it included his brother Warnie, J.R.R.Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and many others. Here Lewis delighted in, as he described it, “friendship (which) rapidly grew inward to the bone.” On another occasion Lewis wrote, “There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.” No doubt the pints they consumed added to the conviviality!

Saturday night we will bid farewell to one another at a festive Farewell Dinner in the hall at University College, enriched by the good company and insights ofWalter Hooper, personal secretary to Lewis at the very end of his life and editor extraordinaire of many of Lewis’ writings.The extension concludes with breakfast on Sunday. Non-stop coaches for the London airports leave directly from across High Street (departing hourly for Heathrow and every 90 minutes for Gatwick). Cheerio!

Oxford Extension Pricing

$970 to $1,140*

Includes one hotel night in Bath, three in Oxford, four full breakfasts, two lunches, two dinners, transportation by private motorcoaches, guided tours, all admission and entrance fees, tips, service charges, and VAT

*Per person sharing double rooms, with final pricing dependent on number of participants and category of hotel rooms individually chosen.