Photos by Betsa Marsh, Travel Arts Syndicate Young scholars head out for a field trip on the sidewalks of Oxford.

By Betsa Marsh Travel Arts Syndicate

OXFORD, England -- For nearly 1,000 years, Oxford has perfected the dual realities of town and gown -- busy commercial crossroads intermingled with the secluded quads and cloisters of its famous colleges. The joy of exploring this great English city is discovering both her civic surprises and her collegiate secrets.

		If you go ... Oxford: www.visitoxford.org. Great Britain: 1-800-462-2748; www.visitbritain.com. Oxford University The University of Oxford, composed of 39 colleges, holds three terms each year: mid-January to mid-March; late April to mid-June; and early October to early December. Getting there BritRail has frequent trains to Oxford from London Paddington. The trip takes one hour. BritRail London Plus Passes start at $74 and are not available in Britain. They are good for unlimited travel for a specified period of time (two days, four days or seven days) to areas around London, with discounts for seniors, families, children and off-peak travel. 1-866- 274-8724 ; www.britrail.com. (Other kinds of BritRail passes also available.) A rental car is handy for exploring Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds. 1car1 offers BritRail pass holders a 10 percent discount: www.1car1.co.uk. Coming events The county is planning an explosion of millennial events, such as: Feb. 12-March 11: Dancin' Oxford. May 7: Go With the Flow, a celebration of all things aquatic. May 12: Street Olympix, inspired by Sir Roger Bannister, the first runner to break the four-minute mile-in Oxford. Several events are in the planning stages: A Festival of Cycling; Alice's Day, with a Mad Hatter's Tea Party; and Regia Anglorum, living history re-enactments at Oxford Castle that dip back a thousand years to the time of Alfred the Great and Richard the Lionhearted. For details: www.oxfordinspires.org. Summer study at Oxford Always wanted to stay and study at Oxford? Now you can follow in Lewis Carroll's footsteps at the college of Christ Church for a one-week residential study program. The Oxford Experience offers classes on 50 subjects, including "The Public and Private Lives of British Prime Ministers," "Enjoying the Cotswolds," "Five Centuries of British Poetry," "The Crusades," "William the Conqueror and the Normans," "Cathedrals of Britain," "English Choral Music," "William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement," and "Shakespeare's Romances." The one-week classes will be July 1 to Aug. 4. Students have access to the college gardens, chapel, picture gallery and riverside walks in Christ Church Meadow while staying in student lodgings, some with private baths. Meals are in the magnificent Hall, made famous in the Harry Potter movies: a full English breakfast, a buffet lunch and a served three-course dinner are included. Prices start at $1,850. Registration deadline is April 1, but early application is recommended because classes fill quickly. For more information: www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/, or write The Oxford Experience, OUDCE, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JA, U.K.

Occasionally, tensions still spring up between Oxfordians and today's 17,000 University of Oxford students. But it's nothing like the St. Scholastica Day riots of 1355, when the townspeople killed 63 students -- some by ritual disembowelment.

Today, things are decidedly friendlier, with students, faculty and locals all zooming by on their bikes. Travelers can join right in, even stepping into most of the storied college quads during public hours.

Oxford, already in the global spotlight for its "Harry Potter" film locations, will shine even brighter in 2007 as the surrounding community, Oxfordshire, celebrates its 1,000th anniversary.

The town, of course, is much older -- going back to Stone Age people who left arrowheads, Romans who left pottery and Saxons who left wide market streets and North Gate tower. The tower is just 97 steps up for a great view above Cornmarket Street. To take in all this heritage, it helps to have a sort of Oxford Cliff's Notes for the "sweet City with her dreaming spires," as Matthew Arnold famously said.

The Really Old Days: Long before Romans or Saxons, giant lizards ruled in Oxfordshire -- and their skeletons prompted a new name: dinosauria, "terrible lizards." Check out skeletal bits of the first excavated dinosaur at the University Museum of Natural History.

The Roman Wave: Togas took over in A.D. 43, with Romans taking the gravel plain above the River Thames and its Cherwell tributary. They set up a pottery factory, shards of which are in the Museum of Oxford. The Latin "Tamesis," for a dweller along the Thames, became the foundation for the poetical "Isis" renaming of this stretch of river centuries later.

Saxons Settle in: These Northern Europeans pulled up to the riverbanks where the oxen ford the stream -- Orsna Forda -- by A.D. 800. They laid out the main crossroads that still define Oxford and built the North Gate, the city's oldest structure, about 1040.

They may also have built St. George's Tower, now part of "Unlocked," the new Oxford Castle experience. After William the Conqueror stormed Britain, his supporter, Robert D'Oilly, incorporated the stone tower into his new Norman fortification. The castle has had a rich life, from citadel to political prison to Victorian workhouse. As part of "Unlocked," you can pull the hangman's lever, snap your own mug shot or try the treadmill -- a workhouse prisoner walked 57,000 steps a day, equivalent to climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

For extra thrills, book lodgings next door in the new Malmaison Hotel, a clever reworking of the prison's "A" wing.

Enter the Scholars: Not long after the Norman invasion of 1066, Blackfriar and Greyfriar monks arrived. They taught informally in rented halls, setting a course of theology, logic and rhetoric over seven years; then a student could become a lecturer himself.

There's no firm date for the founding of the University of Oxford, then as now a confederation of colleges. But everyone points to 1167, when the King of France expelled English students from the University of Paris. Many headed to Oxford, Europe's third-oldest university after Bologna and Paris.

Bricks and Mortarboards: University, Balliol and Merton Colleges were all established in the late 1200s, but Merton's 1264 buildings now stand as the oldest in Oxford or Cambridge. Merton Street is Oxford's last medieval cobblestone.

A New Approach: In 1379, William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester and later chancellor of England, envisioned the first college created as a unified whole -- New College. His inner quadrangle with a grassy courtyard became the rage, copied by nearly every college since. The cloisters are the spot where Harry Potter, in the "Goblet of Fire," turns Malfoy into a ferret.

A Kingly Prerogative: Cardinal Wolsey had a great gig going until he failed to arrange Henry VIII's first divorce. Henry took Wolsey's grand home, now Hampton Court Palace, and his Oxford college, Cardinal's. Henry reopened it as Christ Church in 1546.

Harry Potter fans flock to see the staircase used in the films. But the famous Hogwarts Hall? It's modeled on Christ Church's, but a larger version had to be built in a studio.

"I've stopped telling children that this isn't the real hall," said guide Elizabeth Hudson-Evans, "because their little faces just crumple and they start to cry."

Christ Church is one of the best places to hear Oxford -- at evensong in the cathedral, with the boy and male choirs soaring up to the medieval rafters. Then, just along St. Aldate's, Great Tom, the bell in the tower designed by Christopher Wren, rings 101 times each night at 9:05 p.m. That's one curfew stroke for each student enrolled in 1648, the year the nine-ton bell was hung.

A century before J.K. Rowling created Harry Potter, an Oxford fellow, the Rev. Charles Dodgson, dabbled in fantastical stories himself. He amused Alice Liddell, daughter of the Christ Church dean, with tales as they floated along the Isis. The world now knows him as Lewis Carroll and the tales as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass."

	Author Colin Dexter, creator of the Inspector Morse series, raises a toast in the Morse Bar of the Randolph Hotel. Click photo for larger image.

Restocking the Shelves: The university's library was thrilled to receive the volumes collected by Duke Humfrey, brother of Henry V, in 1426. The precious books were chained to their shelves until the Reformation blew through the stacks, with zealots burning or dispersing any texts considered Papist. They sold the leather covers to glovers and tailors.

The library lay in ruins until Thomas Bodley, a Magdalen College graduate and career diplomat, offered to fund its restoration. The Bodleian Library reopened in 1602, and today has more than 7 million volumes. Within the complex, the 15th-century Divinity School and the remnant of Duke Humfrey's books, weighing down sagging wooden shelves, have starred in Harry Potter films.

"Murder Capital of the UK": Author Dorothy L. Sayers, a graduate of Somerville College, brought murder to Oxford in her novel "Gaudy Night," but no one has decimated the population like Colin Dexter.

"It seems I've single-handedly made Oxford the murder capital of the U.K.," Dexter joked about his Inspector Morse series. "Someone added them up, and there are 89 murders in the books."

The devilishly plotted books, written by a crossword champion and collegiate test writer, became popular TV shows around the world.

Like many of the sanctioned tours, the Morse version weaves in and out of the college quads, ending, as the Morse character himself did, in the courtyard of Exeter College. There, Morse, played by John Thaw, collapses in a fatal heart attack to the strains of Faure's "Requiem."

How fitting, then, to buy a ticket that night and list to the Exeter College Chapel Choir sing the work in its neo-Gothic Chapel. It's sublime -- just one of dozens of performances scattered around Oxford each night.

A performance is a great way to see the Sheldonian, designed by the teenage Christopher Wren, and the Oxford Playhouse, where Richard Burton made his stage debut -- and another way to pop into more college chapels and quads for the richest possible town-and-gown experience.