There is a great deal of interest wrapped up in that old road. It left Oxford on much the same line as now, but was neither drained nor embanked, and proceeded for some distance from the city along swampy ground, so that travellers upon it from Oxford to Eynsham were made to feed full of varied discomforts. Proceeding through Botley, often at the peril of their lives from floods, they then bore away to the right, for Wytham, passing through the village of Seacourt on the way. From Wytham, mounting and descending the hazardous track over Beacon Hill, at the imminent danger of their necks, they then came to the peril of the ford; and having haply passed over this in safety, felt that risks from natural causes were over. There remained only the bandits of an early period, and the highwaymen of a later to give them pause. As for Binsey, it is merely an insignificant hamlet situated at a very dead-end of traffic. You shall find it readily enough by proceeding from the “Perch” inn, beside the river, just above Medley Weir; but it is quite other guesswork seeking it from Wytham, for no way exists where formerly an ancient path ran, and a channel cut from the Thames winds a prohibitive course through the flat meadows. Binsey, indeed, stands on an island in olden times called Thorney, where St. Frideswide, that celebrated Oxford saint, first built her oratory, the name of the isle being then, we are told, changed to “Binsey”: absurdly said to signify the “isle of prayer.” Here she also founded the well of St. Margaret, miraculously springing forth in answer to her prayer, as springs were wont to do in the eighth century. They have long since refused to do the like. It is perhaps not remarkable that Binsey and this famous well in after-years became, and long remained, the objects of pilgrimage. The halt and the lame, the epileptic and the otherwise afflicted, flocked to Binsey and were cured, hanging up their crutches in the oratory and festooning it with their discarded bandages: and incidentally leaving solid gifts of money behind, greatly to the gain of the monastery of St. Frideswide, in Oxford, to which Binsey belonged from 1132 until the end of such things, four hundred years later. The crowds of pilgrims who came out of Oxford, making for the oratory and well of St. Frideswide, turned off at the vanished village of Seacourt.