Thames Path, England

The Thames Path is a 185-mile meander along the banks of the River Thames. From its source in the rolling Cotswold hills, the path winds through lush green meadows, past quaint villages and ancient sites and on through the heart of London to the futuristic Thames Barrier in Greenwich. If you’re resolute, it’s possible to walk another 30 miles, navigating a way around housing estates, docks and marshlands to where the Thames flows into the sea.  

Our plan is to walk the first 55 miles of the Path, from the source to Oxford, to celebrate our friend Geoff ’s birthday and to introduce his 11-year-old son Finn to the art of wandering. An airshow and subsequent scarcity of accommodation determine that we will walk upriver from Newbridge to the source for three days and then return to Newbridge and walk downriver for a day, to Oxford.

Newbridge to Lechlade (26 km)

Quintessentially English countryside. Flowering meadows. The meandering river, not just pleasing to the senses but an important historical trade route; the golden thread of our nation’s history as described by Winston Churchill. Villages of thatched-roofed cottages and charming riverside pubs: the Rose Revived, Ye Olde Swan, The Trout Inn. Dragonflies, butterflies and molehills. Mute white swans gliding by. Canadian geese standing stately on the river bank guarding their young. Hawks circling.

New Bridge with its medieval pointed arches. Built by monks in 1250, it’s `newer’ than the oldest bridge on the river, Radcot Bridge (958 AD). Quaint canal boats saunter upstream and downstream. Flatboat sailors navigate locks, islands and the lines of men fishing from the river banks.

Pollarded willows, coppiced hedgerows and hay meadows. Kissing gates and stiles. Farms and church steeples and 17th-century manors. Tales of holy men, medieval kings and fabian gatherings.

The house where William Morris lived for 25 years until his death in 1896. The riverbank where he foraged for reeds, grasses and flowers for his dyes and found inspiration for his textile patterns. A designer, artist, writer and social activist, Morris is buried in the nearby Norman churchyard.

The bends in the river concealing and then revealing the riverscape, the sky and, every so often, squat concrete pillboxes with narrow rifle slits in their bleak grey walls, just some of the 18,000 guard posts built across the British Isles in 1940 to thwart an anticipated German invasion.

Coaxing Finn on through the warm afternoon. There’s no screen at hand but in his imagination, the video game Fortnite plays out nevertheless. He is obsessed with shooting down invisible players, fighting to the death in the water meadows of the Thames. Taunting his opponents with dance moves, then annihilating them.

Passing the highest point on the Thames. Once barges bound for London were loaded here with wool and cheese from the Cotswolds, honey-coloured Taynton stone from nearby Burford and salt carried by packhorses down the Old Salt Way from Cheshire.

On to Lechlade with its church dedicated to St Lawrence at the wish of Catherine of Aragon, her pomegranate symbol still on the vestry door. And Shelley Walk, commemorating the poet’s visit in 1815 when he wrote ‘Evening Churchyard, Lechlade’: Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men, Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen…

A beer for us at day’s end. Fish and chips for Finn for seeing out the distance. Carrying a pack for 26 kilometres quite an achievement on a first-ever hike. The very non-English sultry weather, a challenge during the long afternoon but delightful in the evening as we sit by the lustrous river with a cold drink in hand.

Lechlade to Cricklade (17 km)

Rooks in the fields. Ducks nesting by the river. Yesterday’s heat cooling and the cloud building. Wild swimming in the Thames. The water too cold for the adults but Finn delighting in it. A pale, slender body and long, thin reeds floating on the glassy green surface of the river.

The lost village of Inglesham. On a gentle rise of land above the water meadows is the ancient church of St John the Baptist, given by King John to the monks of Beaulieu in 1205. It’s a beautiful and serene place. Fragments of wall paintings from the 14th century, 15th-century angels, a Saxon stone carving of the Madonna and child, well-worn timber box pews; an interior saved from over-restoration by William Morris. He regarded the church as ‘seldom equalled and never surpassed among buildings of its size for refinement and beauty.’  

Small sweet songbirds sheltering in the tall reeds growing along the river bank. Yellow water lilies resplendent in the sunshine. Wheatfields ripening from green to pale golden. Old stone farm buildings, distant church towers and spires. Shire horses, cows and flocks of sheep. Trees arching towards each other provide shade and a walkway of golden-green light. The day sublime.

An incursion. The thunderous roar of a trio of fighter jets tearing apart the sky and shattering our rural idyll. We momentarily take fright, until we remember this coming weekend’s Royal International Air Tattoo.

Finn ceaselessly throwing a carved wooden boomerang and willing it to come back. It’s a tourist souvenir and so it never does. Mustard growing wild. A narrow winding path through waist-high grasses. Inky blue and black butterflies. The 9th-century Saxon town of Cricklade lies on the kink of a Roman-built road. A warm and bucolic summer’s day; villages bathed in honey light and England’s grey winter grimness beyond recall.

The White Hart Hotel in Cricklade is crowded with boisterous football fans. It’s the World Cup semi-final and the mood is jubilant with England ahead at the end of the first half. Croatia fights back, the game seesaws, then Croatia gains the ascendancy and holds on to beat England 2 -1 in extra time. The final whistle sounds and the pub, the town and the whole country fall silent.

Cricklade to the Source and on to Kemble (23 km)

A mist-shrouded morning. White herons and egrets emerging from the pale fog. Low clouds moving like ghosts across the water. The trees and the grasses hazy until the sun burns through the fog and the world gleams brightly.

Ancient flowering meadows renowned for their rare spring snakeshead fritillaries and their summer grassland flowers; lady’s bedstraw, meadowsweet and knapweed. Once all the flowers were picked and sent to Covent Garden for sale. Now they’re protected, though some of the organic hay is still cut by hand. An ancient calendar determines that on 12 August each year the Hayward unlocks the gate to allow cattle in to graze. Later in the year, it will be horses and then sheep that stay through winter.

Beyond wooden gates, there are beech trees and black poplars. The light shimmers in the bright green woods and an ethereal blue haze rises from the trees and blurs the sky. We meet two walkers on the track and stop to chat. We sense their Australianness immediately. They’re from Penguin, in Tasmania, and are slowly walking the length of the Thames Path from the source to the sea.

Finn persuades his father to upgrade his boomerang to a fluorescent plastic sports model and much of the day is spent practising the art of the return. We Australians prove to be failures as coaches, Michael having to retrieve the boomerang more than once from a tree when his over-exuberant throws go wildly astray.

We walk through the picturesque stone village of Ashton Keynes with its four pillory crosses, all still bearing the damage done by the Roundheads in the English Civil War of 1641-1652. The Thames flows as a contained channel of water through the village. Thatched cottages, narrow mill races and moats. Forty square miles of lakes, the legacy of extensive sand and gravel quarrying throughout the 20th century. Hedgerows, barns, stone walls and more enchanting villages, including Somerford, ‘a place where the river can be crossed in summer’.

The river narrows and becomes shallow, then we lose the thread of it. A valley, the stone spire of a church resting on a 13th-century tower, a line of trees, a meadow and, under an Ash tree, a stone marking the source of the Thames. No water; no spring, or rill, or stream. Here at Trewsbury Mead, in summer, the river is a myth.

Newbridge to Oxford (22 km)

An early morning full of swallows. River nomads readying their boats for the day’s journey. Small stone villages with narrow winding streets, hazardous for cars and perilous for trucks and buses. Grand manors with their own hunting grounds held behind high stone walls. A doe crossing the path. Fields of geese and cows; Finn recklessly chasing them.

Red sedge grass. Wild white horses, lively riverside inns and, closer to Oxford, university students picnicking on the riverbank, just as Lewis Carroll’s rowing party did in 1862. Alice in a modern wonderland. Locks and ferries and a towpath. Arcane instructions to follow. “Go half left across a large field to meet the river again beyond another kissing gate. Follow an old channel. Keep by the river and bear half right.”

Wytham Great Wood. Badgers, moles and private fishing rights. High fences to contain a herd of deer. Swinford bridge, built in 1769 by the Earl of Abingdon and still privately owned. An Act of Parliament allowed the Earl and his successors to collect tolls tax-free.

On past the 19th-century Bossoms boatyard, home to generations of a family of lock keepers and ferrymen. Godstow Bridge then King’s Lock, the Thames most northerly point.

A view of Cassington Church and the ruined Godstow Abbey. The Abbey became a place of pilgrimage after Rosamund de Clifford, Henry II’s mistress, was buried here. The convent buildings became ruins during the English Civil War, although the abbey hospice still offers hospitality in its reincarnation as the Trout Inn, a haunt of TV’s Inspector Morse. Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited fame stopped at the Trout for a drink before walking along the river to Oxford, just as we do after an enjoyable lunch on its sunny terrace.

Grasslands gifted to Oxford by William the Conqueror. The 342 acres have never been ploughed and are a place where rare plants flourish. Creeping marshwort, fruited rush, birds-foot trefoil, silverweed. The southern end of the meadows flood in winter and occasionally become an ice skating rink. Allotments, islands in the river, a last wild swim at Tumbling Bay. Finn and his father swinging from a rope and plunging with delight into the deep, cold water.

On to Oxford and our walk’s end (for now). A celebratory drink in a 13th-century inn before catching a bus and hurtling fast-forward into the 21st century. Finn eager to return to his digital life but pleased with his first long walk and its unexpected adventures. The walkers among us wistful and wanting more of the golden summer and the arcadian pleasures of the Thames Path.

Click here to read part two of our journey on the Thames Path, and here for part three.
Additional photography by Geoff Blyth