Castles · Tour

Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Oxford: Guided Walk of the Colleges

This is a three-stop day with two doors you can choose to open. Admission to Windsor Castle and to Stonehenge are both booking options: take them and you go inside, leave them and you get free time in Windsor town instead. Windsor first. The streets are cobbled, the town has been tied to the royal family for centuries, and the castle stands over the rest of it. This is the ancestral home of the English and later British monarchy and the largest occupied castle in the world; it has housed kings and queens for almost 1,000 years and is one of the official residences of His Majesty The King. Its 10.5 hectares hold the State Apartments, furnished with some of the finest works in the Royal Collection and arranged to the changing taste of Charles II and George IV, and St George's Chapel, a Royal Peculiar seating about 800 in the Lower Ward. Stonehenge is next, 4,500 years of history and an interactive audio map to work out what people have made of it since. Oxford takes the rest of the day, and this is the part with a guide on foot. The city has surviving architecture from every period back to Saxon times, a claim no other English city makes, which is where the name City of Dreaming Spires comes from. The walk goes past the Bodleian Library, one of the oldest libraries in Europe and, with more than 12 million items, the second largest in Britain after the British Library, and the Sheldonian Theatre, built to Christopher Wren's design between 1664 and 1669 and named for Gilbert Sheldon, the chancellor who paid for it. The colleges of the university are seen from the outside. The coach leaves Victoria Coach Station at 8am, boarding from 7:30, and the day ends by Victoria Station.