Blenheim Palace
On Sunday I joined a number of my classmates on a trip out to Woodstock, a town about 20 minutes by bus from Oxford. The town is nice enough, and we enjoyed a drink there later in the day, but the main draw is the fabulous Blenheim Palace, the home of the Dukes of Marlborough and the birthplace of Winston Churchill (1874-1965), the famed prime minister and orator who led Britain to victory in World War II. The land around Woodstock, and the title of Duke of Marlborough, were granted to John Churchill (1650-1722), the 1st Duke, by Queen Anne (the last of the Stuart monarchs) (1702-14) after his victory at the Battle of Blenheim (1704) during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). The construction of Blenheim Palace began soon after at the direction of John Vanbrugh. Built in the short lived English Baroque style (often defined as existing between 1666 and 1713), it is quite an impressive specimen and was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. It also boasts impressive gardens and a so-called “Pleasure Garden”, which as you can imagine ignites a good deal of snickering (in reality they’ve got nothing to do with the source of the snickering, but nonetheless it led to some fun jokes on at the garden’s expense).
Queen Pool, Blenheim Palace
Our View at Lunch
In any case, we took a bus from the main station in Oxford out to Blenheim. It was a hot day, with the highs reaching well into the high 80’s Fahrenheit (30 Celsius or so). The bus was somewhat crowded, but not impossibly so, and we arrived without incident. As you walk down the main road into the grounds, you see the palace in the distance, majestic, with the vast, green fields splayed before you. We’d planned a picnic, and the group went off to do that immediately. A few of us wanted to grab some more food, so we headed up to one of the cafes, bought some extra food, and tried to find the rest of our group again. We didn’t, and so ate on our own–sandwiches, fruit, almonds, lemonade, cider, and cookies. It was quite a good assortment, and it was nice to sit under a tree by the Queen Pool, a lake, and see the view.
A View 