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The Chronicles of Narnia Walking Tour
Oxford

Follow C.S. Lewis from a lion-carved doorway on St Mary's Passage to the riverside walk that sparked Narnia's spiritual foundation, and the quiet grave where his story ends.

8 stops

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Every Stop Has a Story

Gateway to Narnia

This 16th-century door's Victorian-era carvings, a brass lion's head and two goat-legged fauns worked into the timber above, bear an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Tumnus, the faun Lucy Pevensie meets just after entering Narnia.

The Guardian of the Lamp

This genuine Victorian lamppost, which would have flickered with gas flame during C.S. Lewis's nightly walks here, stands right beside the carved Narnia Door and is widely considered the true inspiration for the lamppost the White Witch grows from a scrap of London iron.

The Wardrobe's Scholarly Home

The statues on this church's Baroque porch still bear damage from Parliamentary soldiers who used them for target practice during the English Civil War, scars that a Great War veteran like C.S. Lewis likely read as a reminder of the 'Deep Magic' that persists even through conflict.

Inkling's Inner Sanctum

In the back-room 'Rabbit Room' of this pub, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien read their early drafts aloud to the Inklings every Tuesday morning for more than thirty years, a rigorous writers' group so blunt about dull chapters that Narnia was quite literally 'peer-reviewed' here.

Across the Road for a Pint

When curious tourists turned their usual booth at the Eagle and Child into too public a spot, Lewis and his fellow Inklings crossed the street to this tavern, continuing their draft readings under the gaze of the pub's namesake heraldic lamb.

The Professor's Cloisters

During World War II, C.S. Lewis hosted evacuee children from London at Magdalen College, just as Professor Kirke does in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while the weathered animal carvings on the medieval cloister pillars here look eerily like the stone statues frozen in the White Witch's courtyard.

The Stone Table Inspiration

On a September night in 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien walked this riverside path with Lewis, arguing that myths were 'broken notes' of a deeper truth rather than mere lies, a conversation that shattered Lewis's resistance to Christianity and laid the spiritual foundation the entire world of Narnia would be built on.

Final Resting Place

C.S. Lewis, who sat in the same marked pew here every Sunday for over thirty years, is buried beneath a simple slate headstone in the churchyard, while inside, an etched-glass Narnia Window depicts Aslan and the castle of Cair Paravel.

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