Southampton to LHR/London via Cotswolds and Oxford with Lunch

What your day looks like

After meeting your friendly driver and expert guide in Southampton, please take your seats on our luxury coach as we depart northwards into the delightful and much-loved Cotswold region of England, famous for its honey coloured stone villages and leafy valleys. Your local guide has a wealth of information about this beautiful part of the world. Learn of the wool trade and how it played an important role in the shaping of the history of the area, and hear how the regions decline as a cloth producer saw the Cotswolds become a sleepy backwater, frozen in time. Our first stop is in the delightful village of Bibury with its famous collection of houses known as Arilngton Row. We then drive along meandering lanes and rolling hills to the beautiful village of Burford, where the ancient stone cottages seem to cascade down to the River Windrush. After a guided walk through the town, and a chance to see the ancient church of St John the Baptis,t we will enter an old tavern built in 1402. Here, we will enjoy a delicious lunch amongst the old stone floors and wood fires. We then continue to Oxford where our time begins with an hour's walking tour of this world-famous University city with your professional guide. Founded in 1167, Oxford is England's oldest university. On the walking tour, we'll walk past some of the most famous university buildings, cloisters and quadrangles, explore the back streets and wander across cobblestone squares, all the while standing in the shadows of the famous 'dreaming spires'. Our guided walking tour will take you into the heart of this land of hallowed academia, where you'll have a chance to see the Bodleian Library, the Radcliffe Camera, Sheldonian Theatre and selected colleges. Some of the university colleges our tour will take us past include Christ Church, Merton, Oriel, Corpus Christi, Magdalen, University, Queens, All Souls, Hertford, Trinity, Balliol and St John's. The University has 38 independent, autonomous colleges and we will also pass alongside many others on your tour. Entry is included to the Divinity School, Oxford - the oldest original purpose-built structure of the University. Please note that The Divinity School may close on short notice, in these circumstances, we will include a visit to an alternative college if available. We end our visit to Oxford with some free time, a chance for you to explore at your own leisure, before heading eastwards to take us to Heathrow airport and London to be dropped at your designated hotel or airport terminal.