Old Father Thames: Walking from Source to City...Chapter Two
Trip One: Day Two - Cricklade to Lechlade
(Catch up on Chapter One: The Source to Cricklade )
The Thames is no ordinary waterway, it is the golden thread of our nation's history.
-WINSTON CHURCHILL
After the persistent rain of a peaceful night at the Old Bear Inn, Cricklade, we woke to brilliant sunshine and quickly moving, soft white clouds and strolled out onto the high street in search of breakfast. Cricklade likes to claim the title of ‘first town on the river Thames’ - those words are proudly emblazoned on the ornamental roundabout at the dual-carriage-way junction - and certainly it has the historic pedigree to match such as sobriquet. Founded in the Ninth Century and heavily fortified by Alfred the Great, it sits at the junction of the river and a Roman road on a small rise at the centre of a large floodplain. You might think this makes it an inauspicious place for an important borough, but these were the northern fringes of Wessex, Viking occupied Mercia lay just on the other bank of the Thames, so fortifying a town that for much of the year became an island in the floodwaters was of great defensive benefit to Alfred.
Until the year 1100, Cricklade was home to the Royal Mint, one of the first such centralised monetary systems in early medieval Europe, and a key aspect of the prosperity that made the British Isles such an attractive prospect for gold-hungry Vikings. A town trail leaflet informs us that a number of ‘Cricklade coins’ are to be found in the town museum…which turns out to be closed. The most distinguishing feature of the town today is its incongruously large and decorative church tower, which had been like a lighthouse to a floundering ship to us in the rain-soaked meadows the previous evening. We decided to call in and give thanks for our deliverance… after we’ve sourced some breakfast.
The high street offers a number of cafes (as well as a noteworthy number of unique ‘family-run’ butcher shops), but for sheer novelty and entertainment value, one cannot do better than attending ‘C & R Family Grocers’. This quite extraordinary cafe, as the name suggests, is not really a cafe at all but an old-fashioned village grocers that sells everything from turnips to fridge magnets, fresh bread to footballs, and between this Aladin’s cave of items have been haphazardly arranged a selection of mismatched tables and chairs. Some of these have been hastily repaired with a combination of expanding foam and gaffer tape. Two older ladies in aprons patrol the counter and we find that in sole occupation of the tables on that bright morning was a chubby old fellow with thinning hair and a full white beard.
Taking our seats and ordering basic breakfast fare of scrambled eggs on toast and a sausage sandwich, we are shortly presented with what I have no doubt to be the largest cafetiere of coffee on which I have ever laid my eyes. It would be no exaggeration to compare its volume to the fuel tank on a small motorcycle. It is exactly what we need. Making small talk with the whiskered man, we describe our route and he too warns us about the flooding we’d been informed of the previous night in The White Hart.
“Those meadows flood much more than ever they used'' he complains, turning to the aproned lady for corroboration, she nods sympathetically but not without a hint of kind condescension.
“It's them down at Lechlade with their lock, whenever it rains they shut those gates and send all the water back up to us!” he continues, with surprising venom.
Whiskers is clearly a regular at the grocers/cafe, in fact, it later transpired that he is there every morning as he and the cook list between them his unshifting weekly rota, “Monday is pie, Tuesday eggs and ham, Wednesday fry up etc.” He cackled with the laugh of a thousand cigarettes after every comment he made.
Shortly this cast of characters is joined by an older couple who have come in for their shopping. As they push through the door, Whiskers pipes up “oh no, here he comes!” and bursts into another wretched cackle. A small grey lady leads her tall husband through the assorted tables to collect various root vegetables and breads. She is sheepish but he is elated, making a repeated loud and high “BING!” sound as he wildly looks around. With some effort she draws his attention to the job in hand, the bagging up of carrots, and he counts each gnarled orange growth into the paper bag with childlike glee.
She quietly turns to my Dad and apologetically explains that her husband has dementia. Her is quite clearly entirely in his own world but, as opposed to the usual character of the condition, it is a joyful one. His one concern seems to be the cars and delivery vans lining the high street, “But how will they get through, how will they take the salute?” he inquires to no one in particular, for a moment a cloud covers his sunny countenance.
“Who, dear?” asks his wife
“The parade!” he replied with indignation that anyone might forget this most important of events.
“I don’t think there is a parade today, dear”, she says with resignation, and the aproned lady kindly supports this hypothesis.
Throughout, every comment from the tall man had sent Whiskers apoplectic with laughter. The weird scene becomes even stranger when a uniformed district nurse rushes in, and before she has time to finish her good mornings she dashes upstairs with her bag and is out the door again a couple of minutes later. The whole breakfast had the feeling of joining a Radio 4 drama, The Archers, for instance, halfway through and never quite catching up with the plot before you tune out.
On our way to collect our bags from the inn and head off on the next leg of the walk, we poke our heads into the church. Architectural historians have been rather unkind about the tower of Crickalde church, Nikolaus Pevsner described its “proud and self-certain, (if) somewhat heavy and certainly not elegant, crossing tower", whilst more recently Simon Jenkins called it “massive rather than graceful.” It is certainly inappropriate for the parish church to which it is attached, a pretty standard and simple affair with the layers of Saxon, Norman, and Gothic that are to be expected around these parts. The striking perpendicular tower was the pet project of the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Protector to the boy-king Edward VI and driving force behind the ill-fated plot to crown his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, as queen. It was completed in 1550 and as such is one of the final expressions of original medieval gothic architecture in Britain. Ungainly it might be, but its sheer forcefulness, firing up into the sky more like something out of Thunderbirds than Tudor England, is to be praised. And inside, although abruptly dividing the nave and chancel, it does create the most exciting high-vaulted choir, with light circulating from lantern windows above the roofline of the nave.
Our attempt to discover the remains of the Saxon walls was less successful. Nothing to be seen but a public information board showing a diagram illustration of what was on the site which is now a park with just the slightest hint of a ditch in the shape of the turf.
Taking our bags from The Bear, we make our way East, not on the Thames Path thanks to the flooding, but instead along a road that runs parallel. This comes to an abrupt stop at a busy dual-carriageway which we must follow in order to join a country lane that will link with the Thames at the village of Castle Eaton, some five miles away. Searching Google Maps the night before, I had seen a pavement running along the verge of this major road, but we were not expecting to need to pass through the garden of a derelict house and vault a fence to reach this pavement - clearly disconnected from any footpath some time ago. After about half a mile this pavement abruptly stopped, leaving us another half-mile to walk on the litter-strewn grass verge of a 70mph road. We picked our way through the slip roads and petrol pumps of a service station and finally found our country lane.
We made good progress down that lane, which despite its inauspicious start, became very picturesque, passing cottages, farms, and an impressive rookery suspended in the knobbled branches of the bare trees. The dark bundles of twigs that made up the crows’ nests looked like some alien fruit grown from the coral-like structure of the pale limbs. Before very long we had arrived at the clearly rather exclusive village of Castle Eaton and took a break at The Red Lion. This large red-brick pub announces itself as the ‘first pub on the Thames’ and it is true that we have not previously encountered a pub directly on the riverbank. The reason for this becomes clear as we take our half-pints out to the rear garden to discover, at the bottom of its steep grassy bank, a very swollen Thames - the first time we’d laid eyes on it that day. Looking into its murky-grey swirling waters, we raise our glasses to those who had forewarned us of the flooding and so far had helped us keep our feet dry.
The path runs along lanes beyond Castle Eaton and, just as we leave the final homes on the edge of the village, the dark clouds that have been slowly pursuing us all morning break over our heads in the most violent of hail storms. For a couple of minutes the countryside becomes dark and the small hard balls hammer on our hoods, but just as quickly as it arrived, the clouds pass over and we are left in the sun again. Our trouser legs have the appearance of tree trunks where moss only grows on one side, as the hail left its soggy mark only on the side of our legs which took the westerly brunt of the shower. Before the rain stops completely there appears, across the fields, the very shallow arc of a rainbow which gradually grows in intensity. Perfectly underneath its apex, as if holding up its multicoloured vault, is the medieval tower of Kempsford church on the far bank of the river.
Leaving the lanes we pick through a network of meadows and agricultural fields and encounter our first unavoidable floods, mostly standing pools of rainwater or river overspill. Thankfully our boots prove to be sufficiently waterproof and walking on tiptoes from time to time prevents the worst of the water from dampening our socks. More lanes, more fields, more showers, and more shallow flooding. We have not really seen the Thames since the Red Lion, there is just the vague awareness that it is winding its silvery way through the fields to our left.
Then a path, tight between tall hedgerows, proves so waterlogged that we have little choice but to wade up to our knees to pass onwards. The cold water that pours over the top of one’s boots soon becomes tolerably warm as it sloshes about around one’s sock and makes one’s feet feel twice as heavy. I am put in mind of those Victorian diving suits with their heavy footwear weighted down with lead. This continues for a short while before we reach a temporary sign proudly announcing that a new section of the Thames Path from here to Lechalde has opened up. Instead of the old route, which meant leaving the Thames again and walking along the verge of a busy A road, the path now hugs the bank of the river on its way into Lechlade. Up to our knees in water, we read the sign inviting us to take the new gate…beyond which more flooding stretches for as far as the eye can see. Wordlessly we decide to risk the old route and trudge our way up a gently rising cart track to the main road.
Our feet were soaked and so were our bodies as, along the exposed ridge on which that road runs, we were buffeted by frequent showers and winds. Conversation dried up entirely as we focused on enduring what had become our first real low point on the trip so far. Fast cars passed and threw spray in all directions, the lenses on my glasses now rendered opaque with water. Then, caught in the sun, elevated from the flood plain below us on a slight rise, we spotted our immediate destination - St John’s church, Inglesham.
I visited this most charming of churches for the first time in November, and when I wrote about it then (you can read that essay here: Meditations on the church of St John the Baptist, Inglesham, Wiltshire) I described it in terms of Noah's ark safe above the floodwater, with its exterior looking like a collection of soggy cardboard boxes. I did not know then how prescient these depictions were for that is exactly how it appeared to us weary travellers that afternoon. I will not bore the reader with a repeat account of that wondrous church, for, just as it has not changed since William Morris saved it in the 1850s, I found it had not changed a jot from my visit in November, so that account may stand as testament. Suffice it to say that it is one of the best rural parish churches in England, a place where the genius loci, the spirit of place, runs deepest under the surface of loam. As I sat on the steps of the preaching cross amongst the graves, wringing out my sodden socks and watching the rain showers scudding across the surrounding countryside, I knew that we had only a mile to go until we reached that night’s stop: Lechalde.
Rejoining the Thames Path proper, through a field of curious cows, we met the river again at the very point that it becomes navigable to boats. Where the waters mingle with the entrance to the old Thames and Severn Canal, which once allowed barges to travel uninterrupted from the Thames estuary in the east to the Bristol Channel in the west, we saw our first boat moored to the banks. Then another, and another, more and more regularly until the spire of Lechlade church appeared from behind the tall trees. Just as at Kempsford earlier in the day it was framed by a wonderful rainbow.
Lechalde is the first town that really interacts with the river. It is still a fast-moving stream at Cricklade and so the town cares little to show its face to the water but at Lechlade, there is a grand stone bridge with a little toll house, waterside pubs, and packed mooring basins full of pleasure craft. They can go no further upriver so many have been left moored there over the winter before their owners return to make their way downstream over the coming summer.
Still dripping wet we check into The New Inn Hotel, a grand coaching inn on the marketplace (now a car park) alongside the church, and are grateful when we find that our room, similar to Cricklade, in the old stables in the yard out back, has a wood-effect lino floor. We can shed our soaked boots and socks without the fear of a hefty bill for the carpet. After a much-needed shower and a change of clothes, we take the path through the churchyard to a pub on the banks of the Thames about half a mile from the town centre.
The Trout, which sits alongside the first lock on the river and occupies a building which is what remains of an eleventh-century priory, is one of the best pubs in the country. It is unashamedly old-fashioned, with no music playing, no slot machines, and a decor that would not look unusual to an Edwardian traveller. It has a low-slung, wood-beamed ceiling, bowed at the centre by centuries of upstairs use, and the walls are laden with stuffed river fish in glass cases. There is a table with an honesty box where one can buy homemade jams and chutneys, each with little patterned cloth caps tied to their lids. The beer is good and the food is cheap, hearty, and local. There is a slowness of old-time in the lounge bar, underscored by quiet chatter and the occasional crack from the fireplace. George Orwell once wrote an essay in which he invented his perfect pub, The Moon Underwater, an establishment of legend which he tailored minutely to his own liking. I don’t need to invent my perfect pub because it really exists, it's on the banks of the Thames, half a mile downstream from Lechlade.
We walked through the dark back to the hotel, slightly dryer and much fuller.
Day Three is coming soon…
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