Oxford, England  - People visit places for all sorts of reasons.

Not everyone in Washington is there to snap the White House and the Capitol. Some visitors to Beijing skip the Forbidden City and turn down trips to the Great Wall of China.

It's the same with Oxford, an English city renowned for its university and bookshops. Some visitors are drawn there not by the dreaming spires of its colleges, but by its connections with the 13 Inspector Morse detective novels written by Colin Dexter.

Along with the crime fiction fans are those who watched the 33 Inspector Morse episodes on television that starred the club-footed John Thaw and Kevin Whately.

Guided tours take enthusiasts around the places that featured in the wildly popular series. But real fans can easily construct their own trek of the Morse monuments.

Since Thaw's death the series has been reprised, with Whately playing a promoted Lewis and Laurence Fox playing sidekick James Hathaway.

Lewis, the title of the new series, is even fonder of flaunting Oxford's charms than the original Inspector Morse.

Sit in the bar of the King's Arms on the corner of Parks Road and Holywell Street and the likelihood is that a Morse pilgrim is at the next table drinking a glass of real ale like his hero did.

Not far away, in the Turf Tavern, look out for tell-tale copies of one of the books that celebrates Morse's Oxford and serves as a guide to places that feature in the series.

Morse liked the Turf, down an alleyway at Bath Place, and it appears in three episodes.

When Morse is in romantic mode and is dating attractive women, it was usually at the Macdonald Randolph Hotel that the trysts were filmed. The Randolph, an essential part of the itinerary, has a plaque on the wall outside, a Morse Bar and a wall-full of photos of the cast.

There are fans so devoted that you see them gliding around in old Jaguars, the cars the great detective owned and cherished. Their absolute favourite is a circa-1960 burgundy Mk II, the model that Morse drove in the 13 years the series ran from January 1987.

Fans as rich as Thaw - he was Britain 's best-paid television actor - stay at the Malmaison, once a grimy Victorian prison and now a flash hotel. The Malmaison has featured in both the old and the new series. (dpa)