Old Father Thames: Walking from Source to City... Chapter Six
Trip Two, Day Three: Clifton Hampden to Goring & Streatley
(Catch up on the previous chapter: Here!)
Attend Dame Isis down to Dorchester,
Near which her lovely Tame doth meet with her,
There Tame his Isis doth embrace and kiss,
Both joined in one, called Tame or Tame Isis
-JOHN TAYLOR, 1632
Waking to our sixth morning on the path, we found that the pretty village of Clifton Hampden had overnight been shrouded in a silvery mist which slowly crept up the grassy river bank as we slept. On the way down to breakfast it became clear that my ankle, whilst still very sore from the previous day, would probably be able to get me to the twin towns of Goring & Streatley, our destination for this final day of the second trip. The meal itself was a standard Full English, neither particularly good or bad, served in the quaint half-timbered room which must have originally been the main bar of the old Plough Inn. Before long, rucksacks on backs, we were making our way out into the mist and back down to the riverside.
We paused briefly at the church which, as previously mentioned, is raised on a promontory above the road and accessed by a set of steep steps. It was locked, although a pretty comprehensive ‘restoration’ by George Gilbert Scott (he who was also responsible for the bridge here) meant that we were likely not missing out on much behind the locked porch doors. However, the climb was not wasted as the churchyard affords a charming view of the river, glinting and glimmering on its passage through the mist.
The walk from here to Dorchester, about three and a half miles, is through a series of riverside meadows that sit at the base of the Wittenham Clumps, hills we’d seen in the distance the previous day. This pair of rounded hills with their individual copses at the summit are an important natural landmark for me. My masters’ thesis was based on the final works of the modern English painter Paul Nash, who spent the last months of his life on a series of symbolic landscapes based around the clumps. He had known them since boyhood and sketched them around 1912, but, in the final years of the Second World War, he returned to the subject and characterised this place with a deeply romantic and mystic potency. Most of these works are set at the equinoxes, summer and autumn, or otherwise use the moon and sun to mirror the twin hills. They feature seasonal flora which hold medicinal or folkloric power and blur a sense of natural and human time to create an image of place that stands outside of simple chronology.
On the morning in question, they were entirely invisible, lost in the mist, despite being less than a mile away. Those hills are also an important waypoint on our journey along the river as they constitute the westerly extreme of the Chiltern Hills, the great band of chalk ridges around which the Thames must weave before reaching London.
Despite obscuring the view, the mist was wonderfully atmospheric and a welcome change to the previous days. It cast a tranquillity over those first few miles that we had not known since the source and seemed to bring all the nature of the river out to play. As we threaded our way through peacefully munching riverside cows, we spotted crested grebes diving on the river, herons standing sentinel along the banks, swans bathing in the shallow pools in the surrounding fields and, wheeling silently, high above, some of our first Red Kites of the trip. They are the most beautiful birds, setting an unmistakable silhouette against the brightening grey sky with their broad wings and sharply forked tail. Riding the rising warm air, they hardly seem to ever flap their russet wings, gliding with deadly stealth above the habitats of their prey.
On reaching Day’s Lock, with the sun beginning to burn off the mist, we decided to take a slight detour from the riverside to the town of Dorchester-on-Thames. In the shadow of the Sinodun Hills (the geological name for the Wittenham Clumps), this town may claim the title of most ancient on the river. There are signs of habitation through nearly every era of British history, from the Neolithic onwards, including notable remains from the Bronze, Iron, Roman, and Anglo-Saxon ages. In 634 the Pope sent St Brinius to convert Wessex to Christianity and, thanks to a grant from the King, he established his bishopric at Dorchester. The strength and stability of the foundation at Dorchester, whose influence covered all of Wessex as well as Murcia to the north, resulted in it becoming the de facto capital of the kingdom, only later to be eclipsed by Winchester where the bishopric was ultimately transferred. In the 9th Century Dorchester once again became home to a powerful bishop but by 1085 the seat had once again moved, this time to Lincoln, meaning two of the most prestigious episcopal sees in England can trace their origins back to this sleepy town. All this ecclesiastical coming and going meant that Dorchester ended up with a large and beautiful church which, even after the dissolution of the monasteries, holds the title ‘Abbey’.
Dorchester Abbey is a beautiful hodgepodge of styles and periods, with masonry and frescoes dating from all parts of its long history. Two particularly interesting features are the Jesse Window, dating from the 14th Century and displaying the ancestors of Christ carved into the stone branches of the tracery, and the restored shrine of St Brinius. The relics of the saint were moved to Winchester along with the Bishop’s throne, but the remains of the early medieval shrine have been restored and still act as a site of pilgrimage. He is often, unofficially, considered the patron saint of the Thames and since his feast day, in the Catholic Church at least, happens to be my birthday, it feels only right to stop off here on our journey.
Crossing the road, we call at The George Hotel for a midmorning coffee. Parts of even this building date back to 1495, although the classy refurbishment makes that hard to believe. More a restaurant than a pub, The George is full of interesting Thames relics on the walls, from black and white photographs to fishing flies and straw boaters. There are two small snugs dedicated to Ian Flemming and Agatha Christie respectively, both sometime resident in this part of the Thames valley. There is a framed selection of classic ‘Bond girl’ postcards in the gents’ toilets and we are served our coffees in branded cups with a shot glass full of Maltesers each.
We rejoin the path just south of the town centre where an important confluence takes place, of all the tributaries that join the river along its course, Coln, Lech, Windrush, Cherwell, Kennet etc, this is possibly the most significant, not in size but in name. The stretch of river from the source down through Oxford to Dorchester is often referred to as the Isis. The origins of the affectation are not exactly clear, and we certainly have evidence that a version of the name Thames has been used to refer to the whole river back to Saxon times, but at some point, between the Middle Ages and the dawn of an early antiquarianism in the 17th Century, the identity of the river began to shift. Poets, mapmakers, and proto-historians noticed the Latin name for the Thames, Tamesis, and its similarity with the name of the Thame tributary. They jumped to the conclusion that the name must be a portmanteau of Thame and Isis. They imagined that in Roman times the Isis was the bit of the river before the Thame joins the flow and the Tamesis or Thames is formed. Savvy?
None of this is true but the name stuck and became popularised in the 18th Century, particularly in the colleges of Oxford where its allusions to classical myth appealed. The personified character of the female Isis and the male Thame appear in the poetry of Edmund Spencer and the water poet John Taylor, the geographical distinction is also noted in William Camden’s Britannia, first published in 1586, one of the earliest and most popular historical travel guides to Britain. Even today the keystones of either side of the bridge at Henley show the heads of Old Father Thames and the young Goddess Isis.
Continuing along what is indisputably now the Thames, we pass through Benson, the first major pleasure craft maria on the river, with row after row of identical white plastic yachts for hire moored against the towpath. We have to leave the riverside once again here as the footpath across the top of the weir is closed for repairs, so our journey to Wallingford is made through winding streets of cottages and then a modern business park before popping out just before Wallingford bridge. A blue plaque on a little cottage announces it as the home of Jethro Tull, not the folk-rock band but rather the father of the agricultural revolution, who invented the horse-drawn seed drill in the early 18th Century.
Crossing the river we enter yet another ancient Thames town. Wallingford first appears in a Saxon charter dated 821 but there is plenty of evidence of Roman activity before this. Much like Cricklade, our first Thames town, Alfred the Great built massive earth fortifications to protect the coin mint at Wallingford. These were later adapted into a Castle where, in 1153, the Treaty of Wallingford brought to an end the bloody civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda known as ‘The Anarchy’. Despite masonry being pilfered for the extension of Windsor Castle, Wallingford was again refortified during the civil wars of the 17th Century, being the last Royalist stronghold in Berkshire to hold out against Cromwell. The 16-week siege became such a focal point of resistance that, after his ultimate victory, Cromwell ordered the castle’s total demolition to prevent another uprising in the strongly royalist town.
Little has changed in the subsequent centuries as, when we visited, almost every shop window around the marketplace was decorated for the coronation of another King Charles just a few days away. We stop off at St Peter’s Church but the interior does not live up to its spire’s decorative exuberance, and then call into the supermarket for two slices of pork pie which we enjoy on a bench whilst watching three double-decker buses bring the marketplace to a honking standstill.
What follows is four miles of undistinguished path which, at the beginning of a day’s walk, would pass swiftly and easily but at this point, on the third day of a trip, it's a long slog. Just before the village of Molesford, we pass under the vast red brick arches of a railway viaduct carrying the Great Western Main Line over the river, the first time on our journey these two transport highways have met. Our bootsteps ricochet back to us off the smooth vault. Beyond this, we must cut up to the road through the football pitches of Molesford School. Suddenly I found myself in a familiar landscape, these immaculately kept riverside pitches are one of the waypoints I have made mental note of for years travelling back and forth between Cardiff and London on the train, and now I'm standing in the middle of them.
A couple of miles of A-road pavement, to avoid the school's main site, ends at the Beetle & Wedge pub, which sits right on the riverside and has its own dock. Just as we take a seat at a table at the waterside a riverboat moors up and brings with it a handful of extremely tame and inquisitive mallards. The cyan fash of a Kingfisher is visible for just a second on the opposite bank and all is peaceful. The pub’s unusual name refers to tools used in splitting wood for boat building and the site was home to the Molesford Ferry until the 1960s. HG Wells stayed here in his time and it's now rated as one of the best restaurants on the river. Two halves of beer cost nearly £6.
Onwards, our final stretch of the trip is to find the twin towns of Goring & Streatley. We have been gradually getting closer to some of the most significant hills we’ve yet seen on the journey, this is the Goring Gap, the point where the North Downs meet the Thames and the Chiltern Hills pick up on the other side. Half a million years ago these chalk ridges formed one unified barrier and the course of the Thames was forced north, eventually joining the Ouse and draining into The Wash. Over time the water level rose, overtopped the ridge and spilt into the lower Thames valley, which had already been carved out by the Kennet, which today is just a tributary that joins at Reading.
Goring sits on the Oxfordshire side of the river and is the larger, whilst Streatley is in Berkshire and is the more picturesque. The path enters the conurbation on the Streatley side, passing the handsome village church where C.S. Lewis preached. We make our way up the hill past flint and brick houses and whitewashed cottages, each with a twee and unimaginative name (the cottage with the Mulberry Tree is called ‘Mulberry Tree Cottage’, the house in the middle is called ‘Middle House’ and you can imagine the name of the house with the wisteria). At the top crossroads stands The Bull, a traditional-looking coaching inn which has been given the same identical interior as all the other pubs now owned by this chain. We decide on this particular place for dinner as Jerome K Jerome recommends it and it happens to be the only remotely affordable pub in Streatley.
It is also noted in ‘Three Men in a Boat’ that “Goring is not nearly so pretty a little spot to stop as Streatley” but “is nearer the railway in case you want to slip off without paying your hotel bill.” Being on the opposite bank we decide it's probably best to pay our dinner bill before slowly trudging down the hill, across the bridge to Goring and up the other side to the rail station to complete another enjoyable if exhausting three days on the river.
Next time: unexpected heights, a pie in Pangbourne, and the river people of Reading…
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