Thames Path, England

Mid Summer, 2019

The Thames Path follows the river from its source in the rolling Cotswold hills, past historic sites and cities, in and out of quaint villages, wildflower meadows and beech woodlands and on through the heart of London to the futuristic Thames Barrier in Greenwich.

We walked the first 55 miles of the 185-mile Thames Path in 2018, following the river from its source to Oxford with our friend Geoff and his 11-year-old son Finn. This year, the four of us are walking from Oxford, the ‘City of Dreaming Spires’, to Henley-on-Thames, a journey of some 50 miles. 

Over the centuries the Thames has been a vital trade and transport route, a source of food, water and power, a place for recreation and relaxation and an inspiration to writers, composers and artists, including Claude Monet who painted the Thames on several occasions. Although no longer a golden highway of trade, the Thames still supports a diversity of habitats, provides drinking water to London,  and continues to be a place of revelation and repose.

Oxford to Abingdon (20 km)

Keen to be on the Thames Path again, a year after we left it here at Folly Bridge (aptly named as it turns out), we put on our packs and blithely saunter off, charmed at once by the gaily painted canal boats drifting by and the meadows bright with orange poppies, white daisies and blue cornflowers.

Two kilometres on we realise that we are walking upstream when we should be following the river downstream and, worse, that we are on the Oxford Canal Path, not the Thames Path. An inauspicious beginning perhaps, but it’s an enchanting summer’s day and, lightheartedly, we retrace our steps and set off again, as if for the first time. 

Dreamy riverside houses swathed in greenery. Iconic university college boathouses. Caudwell’s Castle with its plaster-white statues and mismatched windows. Osney Weir, the remains of Osney Abbey and Iffley Lock. The gardens of the picturesque lock keeper’s cottage are exuberant with flowering hollyhocks, roses, fuchsia, lavender and geranium. The door of the Norman church at Iffley is carved with stone flowers found nowhere else except in the cathedral porch at Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The church also features carvings of dragons, centaurs and fabulist birds and beasts, more inspired by Saxon and Celtic symbols than Christian ones.

For a few kilometres, we are joined by Grace and the family pet, Cooper, a miniature dachshund. They leave us after lunch at the bohemian Isis Farmhouse, 200 years old and accessible only by boat or on foot. The surrounding farmland is wet meadowland that floods each winter. The meadows are cherished for their rare wildflowers, including purple and white chequered snakeshead fritillaries that flower in their thousands in late spring.

As we leave Oxford behind, the canal boat traffic quietens and the track alongside the river becomes more treed and secluded. Women languidly dive off the side of longboats and swim in the green river near Sandford Lock, one of the deepest and oldest on the river. Michael Llewelyn-Davies, JM Barrie’s inspiration for Peter Pan, drowned upstream of this lock in 1921, just before his 21st birthday.

On through the warm afternoon towards Abingdon, a defended settlement in the Iron Age and one of the oldest continuously inhabited towns in Britain. Monday has been market day here since 1086. In the 11th century, the Abingdon Abbey ordered the construction of a new channel on the Thames to improve navigation to and from Oxford. Journey times were reduced but, controversially, the Abbey charged a toll of 100 herrings a year for boats using the shorter route. 

Hawks circling. A stately heron standing guard at the confluence of two rivers. The water splashed yellow and white with floating lilies. Millhouses, 14th-century chapels and riverside inns lively with people this bright summer’s evening.

Abingdon to Wallingford (24 km)

A sunshiny morning. Ducks wander in from the garden to search for pickings in the breakfast room of our hotel. Out into the day by way of a bridge across the Thames. Shard-like church spires pierce the crystal clear sky. River captains ready their canal boats. Saturday morning rowers take to the water. 

Past the Abingdon school boathouse, the largest oak building in Europe, and on to Culham Lock where there was once a medieval village. Now there is little more than the outline of streets, hut platforms and trackways leading to the river’s edge. The reasons for its demise are not agreed. The Black Death of 1348 which killed thousands of people? A series of poor harvests after wet summers in the 14th century? Or the coming of sheep farming which forced crofters from their homes to provide the lord of the manor with suitable grazing land?

At Days Lock rowers wait in their fragile craft for the water in the lock to rise and speed them on their way. A diversion through Sutton Courtenay, following the Old Thames. George Orwell is buried in the church here, as is Lord Asquith, the last Liberal Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. 

Meadows cut bare of their hay. Off in the distance is an impressive mound, its chalk flanks cleared, its top encircled by beech trees. It is Castle Hill, a Bronze/Iron Age hillfort and one of the Wittenham Clumps, a beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten in the words of the British poet Paul Nash. A few hundred years after being abandoned, the Romans invaded and inhabited the Clumps. A Roman road still leads up to them. 

Past Clifton Manor high up on a hill with its village of thatched-roof houses and an arched bridge built of local red bricks and then a pause for coffee, the first of the day, at Barley Mow, ‘the quaintest, most old-world inn on the river.’

Canadian geese grace the shoreline. These birds were introduced to Britain as a potential game bird before it was realised that they fly too low and are too tame to provide good sport. A mute swan and her cygnets travel in a stately procession down the river. All the mute swans on the Thames are owned by the Queen or one of two guilds; the Worshipful Company of Vintners and the Worshipful Company of Dyers. An ancient ceremony known as Swan Upping takes place in July each year. Scarlet-uniformed Swan Uppers travel the river in traditional rowing skiffs. ‘All up’ they cry as they spot a family of swans and cygnets. They position their boats around the birds, lift them out of the water to check their health and mark them according to whether they are owned by the Queen or a guild.

Raggle-taggle groups of men fishing along the riverbank. More of the squat, concrete pillboxes we saw on last year’s walk, built and manned during WWII to help guard against a German invasion. Gracious two-storey boathouses built over the water. Hidden Roman towns, 12th-century abbeys and 17th-century dovecotes. 

This year, unlike last, Finn is digitally equipped. However, what seems to continue to give him the greatest pleasure is wild swimming in the cold waters of the Thames. 

The river arcs westwards around meadows where docile cattle graze. On through Shillingsford, by way of a high stone-walled tunnel and an avenue of trees. Then onto the towpath, past the Queen’s Arbour and the King’s Meadow to Wallingford, where in 1066 William the Conqueror crossed the Thames on his way from Hastings to London. He built Wallingford Castle which became one of the most powerful royal castles in the Kingdom until Oliver Cromwell destroyed it in 1652.

Wallingford to Tilehurst (22 km)

A warm, misty morning. We wander down to the water via the back alleyways of Wallingford, small songbirds on edge as a hawk circles. The river is wide and bright with reflected canal boats, trees and an old lock house. Green woods and water meadows. Dog walkers out this fine Sunday morning. Travellers camped along the river bank. There is a lone child, a pretty girl, with a group of men. Our hearts miss a beat. 

Kayakers putting in. Private estates with manicured green lawns next to meadows wild with grasses and flowers. Marsh marigolds, meadow buttercups, oxeye daisies. White, umbrella-like lace flowers, perfect except for the insects feeding on their delicate petals; a Dutch Masters still life, a memento mori. 

Solitary men fishing the section of the river they have rights over. Most with small transistor radios tuned to the cricket (England went on to win their first Cricket World Cup in the tightest of finishes). Red brick railway bridges. Trains whizzing by, bound for Oxford or London. 

Goring is said to be one of the most beautiful villages in southern England. Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, preached here, at St Mary’s Church, in 1864. At the end of Ferry Lane is perhaps the oldest crossing of the Thames. And the Ridgeway, part of the fabled Icknield Way, passes through here. It’s a pre-historic trade route extending from Wiltshire, along the chalk ridge of the Berkshire Downs to the Thames at Goring Gap.

A hot chocolate, because it is the speciality of the one open cafe in Goring. There’s a bustle of activity as villagers go about beautifying the town for next week’s Regatta; the scene reminiscent of an era of church fetes, cream teas and genteel village life. Through Little Meadow, a wildflower reserve set amongst the green fields and woodlands of the Thames floodplain, past charming boathouses and, at Gatehamption, a site where Stone Age relics and the earliest evidence of post-glacial humans in Britain have been found. 

Steeply up through a woodland of beech trees and old yews, the only such climb on the Thames Path. Along the edge of a chalk cliff, back down to the river and on to Pangbourne where Kenneth Graham lived for several years until his death in 1932. Hardwick House, an estate downstream of Pangbourne, is reputed to have been the inspiration for Toad Hall and its owner, Sir Charles Rose, the model for Toad. Whitchurch Bridge links Pangbourne with Whitchurch-on-Thames and is one of the two remaining privately owned toll bridges across the Thames. It charges cars 60p to cross its 300-foot length, making it one of the most expensive tollways in Britain.

Grand estates give way to ramshackle, riverside encampments as we near Reading. At first glance, the town appears modern but in actual fact, it dates back to the 8th century. An abbey was founded here in 1121 and the city received its royal charter in 1253. Jane Austen started school in1785 at  Abbey Gateway (still a girls school) and Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in Reading Gaol in 1895.

Tilehurst to Henley-on-Thames (19.5 km) 

An early breakfast at Workhouse Coffee, its excellent coffee brewed by an Australian barista serious about beans, roasting and extraction.

 All-day to walk and less than 20 kilometres work in it. Cloudy skies, a cool breeze, the sun occasionally flooding the morning with warmth and light. Herons and neon blue damselflies hover above the water. The church at Sonning, founded in Saxon times, is open so we wander it to look at its ornate organ and engraved brass sepulchral memorials. James Sadler, beekeeper, poet and lock keeper thought of Sonning as a ‘spot more lovely than the rest’. It still retains an ancient water mill, historic houses and an air of prettiness. 

‘Lush’ says the waiter when we stop for tea at a smart riverside cafe and explain away our shabbiness by telling her that we are walking the Thames Path. 

Wide expanses of river with islands and water lilies opening to the sun. Through a series of kissing gates, across just-cut meadows and on to Shiplake, childhood home to George Orwell. We chat to a couple who intended to walk all the way to the Thames Barrier together, until yesterday, when one of them exacerbated an old ankle injury and now has to quit the path. 

Marsh Lock, busy with boats. A canal boat captain, dapper in cream flannels, a blue and white striped T-shirt and a baggy cream cap. A landscaped mansion with a narrow-gauge railway winding through its vast green acreage. 

Edwardian riverside houses, red kites spreading their wings wide in the sky above us, horse chestnut trees dangling with conkers. On the other side of the river are steep wooded hills, a cliff wall of exposed chalk and Happy Valley estate with its bridges made with stone from Druid temple graves. It is rumoured that the Romans cultivated a vineyard on the north-west facing slope of the valley. 

A last wild swim in the river. A glade of trees; Rowans, Hawthorns, Elders and Silver Birch, all once regarded as sacred trees with healing powers. Finn suggests that next year we walk as many days as it takes us to complete the Thames Path. He’s come a long way since last year in his enthusiasm for the adventure.

At Henley-on-Thames, we leave the gentle, green, secluded realm of the Thames Path and walk into a more complex, troubled country.

Lunch and a celebratory ale at a quintessentially English pub, the 14th-century Angel on the Bridge, our place marker for when we return to walk the final 80 miles of the entrancing Thames Path.

Additional photography by Geoffrey Blyth

Click here if you missed part one of our journey from the source of the Thames, and here to read part three where we finally reach the Thames Barrier.