The Perch

The reward at the end of the Port Meadow walk: a thatched seventeenth-century inn in a hamlet, with a garden that makes the mile back into town feel optional.

The Perch sits in the hamlet of Binsey, across Port Meadow from Jericho and reachable on foot or by bicycle rather than easily by car — which is much of the point. The thatched building dates to at least the seventeenth century and is Grade II listed; the inn itself claims eight hundred years. Lewis Carroll walked out here from Christ Church with the Liddell children, and the Perch is named as one of the first places he read Alice aloud in public. Binsey’s treacle well, in the churchyard a short walk further on, turns up in the Dormouse’s story. It has twice burnt and twice come back — badly damaged by fire in 1977 and again in 2007, reopening in September 2008. Between 1928 and 1948 it was where Oxford students went to hear the latest jazz.