- I was lucky enough to be able to stay with Suzy and Geoff for a couple of days.
- Finally after the hectic festival I had time to think and make plans. If the weather had been good I would have planned to go to another festival the next weekend, but heavy rain was forecast again and there is no sense in being in a waterlogged field. So in the end the first thing was spend a day being a tourist in Wallingford as I had not had time during the festival to go to the museum etc., then I could go and check out Oxford the next day.
- First I decided to do a long distance walk along the Thames to the historic island town of Dorchester. Much as I dislike the arrogance of south of England I could see that the ancient villages and the hills around the Thames made a beautiful setting. After about 6Km I was in the museum at Dorchester Abbey which had been the headquarters of the church from there all the way upto the Humber until after 100 years the HQ was moved up to Lincoln. So now 700 years later it's an enormously big parish church.
- Despite being only one room in the ancient schoolhouse the Dorchester Museum was excellent with a nice non-commercial teahouse next door.
- I walked further north to check out the 5000 year old burial mounds and earth circles, but I found huge lakes which are all that is left of gravel mining. Yes, incredibly 60 years ago there had been little respect for such things so they'd had no hesitation in bulldozing such ruins.

-There was no bloody bridge so I had to walk back to the footbridge at Day's Inn, which incidentally has a free camping site on an island. I walked from there up what's called the "Wittenham Clumps", up to a Bronze Age fort (Castle Hill) which dominates the area. some photos, more

It was amazing to see how much earth they had moved 2500 years ago so that the ditches are still so deep I had to walk around to get to a nearby dolmen. The dolmen was small and nothing to see I walked down through some more villages.

- By 6pm I was passing the festival field ... it was good to see it looking pristine so that should help with the council granting a licence next year.

- Only Waitrose Supermarket - northern towns are pretty cheap cos half the shops are pound shops and charity shops, but here in the nicer richer south of England there were no pound shops .. the only supermarket was Waitrose.. you could organise shopping trips for southerners to come up to Scunthorpe .. I swear on average things are 50% cheaper.. like there one just couldn't find a new toothbrush for less than a pound whereas up north I can get one for 20p.

- The first place I passed was the The Ashmolean Museum. It is mostly Art and Egyptian, but there was a bloke playing the harpsicord, really amazing. It's a miniture grand piano with a double decker keyboard and cos there are 3 sets of strings which are not hammered like inside a piano, but plucked it's got 3 times the variety of sounds. Indeed it often sounds like a modern synthesiser. some audio : harpsichord1, harpsichord2, harpsichord3, harpsichord6

- Geoff had recommended the Pitt Rivers Museum, but a familiar story it's closed for a year for redevelopment. Surely museums can come up with a better system rather than just closing .. seems like a bit of a scam to me. They receive taxpayers money, but since they redevelop at least every 20 years that means 5% of the time they are not available to the taxpayer. Anyway I got to go around the History of Science Museum and the Main University Museum with it's dinosaur skeletons etc.

- I spent an hour checking out if there were any interesting events/lectures etc ...but nothing happening.. so what to do next ? Oxford is very expensive to sleep in so I looked at the map an realised that since I never visited the Rollright Stone circle I could go and check it out.

- I took a bus out of Oxford and then got a lucky hitch from Woodstock right to the Rollright Stone circle. A bit disappointing it was not exactly like stonehenge - just a circle of 25 dwarf size rough stones on a really really flat hill, with the "King stone" across the road and a medium sized dolmen across the field. A little bit of rain and windy as hell.

- I walked into Long Compton to join the Macmillan Way and set up camp.. There was a banjo band playing in the pub, sample 1, sample 2, but when I came out the heavier rain had started.

- The weather was bad and there were no festivals happening so I decided to cut my losses and go home. So since I was near the old Roman road The Fosse Way which joins up with Ermine Street in Lincoln I hitched all the way along it. I got one good long lift past Nottingham then 1 to Lincoln then 1 home.