Stepping inside Oxford's famous Christ Church College, I feel an immediate hush fall over the world as I imagine all of the amazing minds which have studied here.

These are the halls Albert Einstein walked down with his head full of ideas. And these are the lecture theatres where Lewis Carroll dreamed up his magical Alice in Wonderland. It feels as if hundreds of years of intelligence are carved into the incredible stonework and it feels impossible to interrupt the power by speaking.

A man is standing guard in one of the halls. He is wearing a plain grey suit and a black bowler hat and he is short - so short in fact that he looks like he belongs in the 19th Century. I smile at him and wish I could take a photo of this quintessentially Oxford sight - the man makes me feel I've travelled back in time.

In Tom's Quadrangle everything feels incredibly Harry Potterish, as the films were made in Christ Church College. The quad has the most immaculate grounds I have ever seen, the grass so vibrantly green and trimmed to perfection. It's hard to believe that during England's Civil War, this very quad was used as a cattle pen by Royalist forces. Those days are long gone and now it looks as though a gardener has laboured to make each blade of grass perfect.

Tom's Tower, the seven tonne bell tower at the end of the quad, is grand and dramatic, just like a lot of towers and spires throughout Oxford. My boyfriend and I find the college's well known sundial and according to our guidebook, we're standing in front of the library where mathematics tutor Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) used to watch a big ginger tomcat play in a chestnut tree. The puss was the inspiration behind Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat, and I'm amazed to discover Alice was the daughter of a dean at this very college.

Nearby there's the most charming little place called Alice's Shop where Oxford's most famous little girl is celebrated with beautiful gifts and treasures. We buy a hand painted wooden magnet of Tweedledum (or is it Tweedledee?) and some gorgeous Alice bookmarks.

Of course Lewis Carroll is not the only imaginative resident to grace the colleges in Oxford. We walk past Magdalen College and the artistic stonework outside of the college is said to have inspired CS Lewis' stone statues in the Chronicles of Narnia. Later we pass Merton College, home to the world's oldest medieval library, the spot where JRR Tolkien sat and wrote The Lord of the Rings. My precious!

Of course Oxford isn't all about its history. There's a crushing crowd making its way down the high street every weekend - tourists, students, locals. The tourists are all stopping in very inconvenient places to take photographs. The students have started a new fashion movement I've not seen anywhere else - raggedy trackpants. The older the better, it seems.

The locals are surely trying to get their errands done without running into the tourists, who are frantically buying anything with 'Oxford' blazoned across it. I consider buying the obligatory grey sweatshirt myself but I find just enough willpower to put the pounds away. I do, however, commit a tourist crime by stopping in the middle of the busy street to photograph the exasperating Church of St Mary the Virgin and its 14th Century tower.

Down by the river we watch some people punting in the sun, the long wooden boats piled up waiting for visitors. We stop to watch a man being hypnotised before a video camera and then have a giggle when he runs towards the spectators babbling about how the nearby ducks are evil dinosaurs in disguise and we're all going to be attacked!

We visit the mind-boggling History of Science Museum where an exhibition is celebrating, of all things, the history of magnifying glasses and telescopes. It is manned by the kind of man you imagine to be in Oxford - stuffy, soft-spoken and freaked out by the possibility of our backpack creating chaos in the exhibition.

We round off our day by passing the most photographed sight in Oxford - the Palladian style Radcliffe Camera which was built between 1737 and 1749 and is a stunning landmark. I try to get an older gentleman to take a picture of us in front of the Camera, but ironically he doesn't know how to use our camera and there's no click when he presses the button. We thank him anyway.

After a day packed with history and wonder, we walk along the high street towards the Oxford train station and I'm browsing in the window of a Jamie Oliver restaurant when I hear a crash, bang, scream. Eek. A small girl has been knocked off her bicycle by a car and here comes her frantic mother, careening down the street with little sister in tow. Everyone is shocked when the little girl gets up about 30 seconds after the crash and walks towards the footpath fairly easily.

It's a strange end to a very surprising day and I can't imagine ever forgetting our day in Oxford and the way the beautifully carved buildings were covered in bright Autumn leaves. Oxford is everything it's cracked up to be. I'm off to re-read Alice in Wonderland.

Check out more photos from my trip in my Flickr album.

Read more of Kelly's blogs.