As far as headstone pilgrimages go, my favorite account was written by the author and critic Gerald Early. Recalling his family's visit to Jimi Hendrix's final resting place in Renton, Washington, Mr. Early concludes that paying a call on a slumbering guitar god is an anti-climactic undertaking offering only one lesson of real value: life is for the living.

I tend to agree with Mr. Early. So my remembrance of visiting George Orwell's grave is no paean to a dead hero-it is more an attempt to freshen the recollection of my Oxford University days. I spent my junior year abroad there, and in the words of Mr. Orwell, "Such, such were the joys." Certainly, life is for the living, but then so is memory.

That said, an extended stay in Oxford can be a very fine thing, provided you have a bicycle.

If you ever visit the ancient university town for a greater length of time than the standard weekend trip from London, be sure to procure a reliable two-wheeler. Don't make the same mistake I did. I suffered through an entire college term (eight weeks that feel like several years) without a chained stallion to call my own.

A bicycle increases enjoyment of Oxford at least four fold: Even the humblest antique clunker will shave fifteen minutes off a twenty minute walk from, say, lodgings at St. Catherine's to lectures at Christ Church. A swifter, sturdier bike places the outlying splendors of Oxfordshire well within pedaling distance. Mounted on your Cannondale or Mongoose at the Oxford town centre, every direction presents a seemingly infinite number of villages and curiosities ripe for two-wheeled exploration.

North, up the Woodstock road, lies Churchill's ancestral Blenheim Palace. East, down the Iffley, sits a ridiculously quaint village of the same name. A ride West, over the Botley, deposits you at the foothills of the Berkshires after an hour's ride. Then there is the matter of the Thames path, which-if you are in the mood for some serious cycling and possessed of a lung capacity far greater than mine-will escort you to the London Embankment.

One of my favorite Oxford bicycling destinations was the village of Horton Cum Studley. To reach it you ride out past the Oxford Crematorium (Yes, they burn human flesh there and dispose of it in a weirdly post-modern memorial park.) and through about five miles of farmland. When you finally reach Horton Cum Studley, you must ride up a lung-crushingly steep hill, at the top of which you'll find a gentlemanly country inn and restaurant with a sizeable park surrounding it. The hill is the highest point in the area, and affords a perfect spot to uncork the bottle of wine in your backpack and reflect on how you've just ridden to a village that's probably the namesake of some long-forgotten Elizabethan porn star.

My single greatest Oxford bike adventure, though, was the visit to George Orwell's grave. On a damp afternoon in February, my flat-mate Mr. Nelson and I pedaled forth to pay homage to the great man, who, according to our Oxford student handbook, lay resting in the village of Sutton Courtenay.

Now, Sutton Courtenay consists of not much more than a church, a pub, and a pond of sorts behind the houses on the main thoroughfare through town. There are dozens of tiny hamlets just like Sutton Courtenay in the surrounding area, and there is really nothing to distinguish the place save for its view of the ominous looking Didcot nuclear power plant. Riding into town Mr. Nelson and I took note of the slightly undersized town youth battling it out on the football pitch in the shadow of a giant reactor apparatus. In fact, Sutton Courtenay's town pond, as we learned upon further investigation, is actually a cooling mechanism for the power plant. The pond is fenced off, with signs posted at regular intervals warning, "Keep Out! By Order of the English Atomic Energy Commission."

Mr. Nelson and I, both of us twenty years old and fresh off respective re-readings of 1984, took these postings as a challenge rather than the deterrent they were obviously meant to be. In the spirit of Winston venturing away from the Ministry of Information, we scaled the fence and set out to explore the pond, half expecting the secret police to ruin our fun with a sudden raid. And while we weren't threatened or detained by any thugs working at the behest of inner-party types, we were, however, menaced by three giant swans. The pond itself was pleasant enough, but we couldn't completely enjoy walking by the water. We were followed, at a constant distance of about a hundred yards, by this band of very angry looking former ugly ducklings.

For anyone considering a trip to Sutton Courtenay, beware. It may be that these frightening creatures are actually sophisticated robotic surveillance tools trained to maul any snooping trespassers who happen to stumble onto a secret passageway -- perhaps for the Trilateral Commission's international headquarters and rehabilitation clinic.

Deciding not to risk a mauling any further, Mr. Nelson and I retreated from the pond and slipped into the local pub to refresh ourselves. The locals there behaved much like locals in any other small town. They were skeptical and reserved at first, but softened up once they saw we were just a couple of young yanks come to pay respects to one of their own.

Buoyed by three pints of cheap Tetley ale and the good will of the natives, we set out from the pub and walked across to the churchyard and cemetery. It was time to find the hero of Down and Out in Paris and London. We quickly discovered that half the pleasure in visiting the grave was stumbling around through the cemetery trying to locate the thing. It took us fifteen minutes to realize that our search for George Orwell was useless. We had forgotten that Orwell was merely a pseudonym for the writer's real name: Eric Blair.

And even then we had a hard time finding the grave, because every headstone in that cemetery is devoid of ostentation. It is a humble resting place, with uniformly humble memorials to the dead that reside there. There is no vault or plaque dedicated to the author prince, no sketchy looking old men standing by the front gate selling maps to mark the spot. A picture of the graveyard at Sutton Courtenay ought to be used for contrast in any essay about visiting Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris: that old swath of necro-real estate that the dead lizard king Mr. Morrison and many other artistic pop stars call home. With several square miles of dramatic, looming crypts and a waiting list to get underground there, Pére Lachaise is the very definition of an overdone final resting place and also the subject of many essays like this one. The graveyard at Sutton Courtenay is perhaps the anti Lachaise, and realizing this, one begins to understand why Orwell chose it as his final resting place.

Later I found out that Orwell had no real connection with Sutton Courtenay, only a desire to "be buried in a country churchyard" despite a lifelong antipathy to religion and an unassailable reputation as one of his generations' most clear-eyed skeptics. The "Englishness" of such a burial, Orwell said, appealed to him.

Here is a man whom on the strength of his literary accomplishments deserves a place in poets corner at Westminster Abbey. But poets corner is an exclusive and private club-open to the public for their worship and veneration only at certain hours dictated by the National Trust. The graveyard at Sutton Courtenay, on the other hand, is home to the barkeep and the enlisted man-hardly glorious company. But the place has afforded Orwell a certain private dignity in death-the yard was deserted save for a few old men and women come to place a flower or two. You'll find no tour groups and flashing cameras at the Sutton Courtenay cemetery. What you're looking for is a small headstone, partially obscured by a rose bush, bearing the inscription: