Ripon Falls Ripon Falls Ripon Falls at the northern end of Lake Victoria in Uganda was formerly considered the source of the river Nile. In 1862–3 John Hanning Speke was the first European to follow the course of the Nile downstream after discovering the falls that his intuition had marked as the source of the Nile. The water from Ripon Falls falls into a narrow opening and that is where some people believe the River Nile starts. He named the falls after George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon. The Falls functioned as a natural outlet for Lake Victoria, until in 1954 the
University of Oxford Mecca and journeyed with John Hanning Speke as the first European explorers to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile; mountaineer Tom Bourdillon, member of the expedition to make the first ascent of Mount Everest; and Peter Fleming, adventurer and travel writer and elder brother of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. The University of Oxford is the setting for numerous works of fiction. Oxford was mentioned in fiction as early as 1400 when Chaucer in his "Canterbury Tales" referred to a "Clerk [student] of Oxenford". By 1989, 533 novels based in Oxford