Under an ancient ash tree in a pretty Cotswold meadow called Trewsbury Mead, I’m stooped over in search of liquid history. I can’t find a trickle, a dribble, even a damp spot.
A little stone monument announces that this spring–dry except in winter, I later learn–is the official source of the River Thames, the majestic waterway on whose storied banks kings were crowned and queens were beheaded, the Magna Carta was signed, Shakespeare’s plays debuted and the Mayflower set sail.
William the Conqueror built castles along the Thames. Henry VIII honeymooned next to the river–again and again. “Paradise Lost,” “Frankenstein” and “Alice and Wonderland” were written on its banks.
Twenty prime ministers and the future king were educated riverside at Eton, on whose fabled playing fields, the saying goes, the Battle of Waterloo was won.
“To run down the Thames is to run one’s hand over the pages in the book of England from end to end,” wrote H.G. Wells. British politician John Burns put it more succinctly. “The Thames,” he declared in 1944, “is liquid history.”
If I can’t find any actual liquid in this Gloucestershire meadow, I can at least locate the start of a hiking trail–the Thames Path, the newest of Britain’s national long-distance footpaths. Opened in 1996, it hugs the banks of the river as much as possible, from its birthplace to the Thames Barrier 180 miles downstream in east London, where the river officially ends and its estuary begins.
It’s a walk through the green heart of England, past fields of golden barley and thatched cottages as homey and precious as a Thomas Kinkade painting. It ambles alongside the dreaming spires of Oxford, brooding Windsor Castle, Hampton Court, Big Ben, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the Tower of London.
Like all of Britain’s long-distance trails, the Thames Path can easily be broken up into manageable chunks. In August, my wife Jeri and I set off to walk the first 50 or 60 miles–no two sources agree on the exact distance–from the source to Oxford. This is the most pastoral stretch of the river, through the timeless countryside of the Cotswolds.
The landscape here is old, gentle and, in the case of the Thames Path, nearly perfectly flat. For five days we carried light packs containing just our toothbrushes and a change of clothing for the evening. We took our meals in convivial country pubs and finished each day with a hot shower and a snuggly, duvet-covered bed in a B&B. Backpacking just doesn’t get any cushier than this.
Walking an unhurried 10 to 12 miles a day, we had time to linger in prettily steepled villages, to pause for conversations with country publicans and lockkeepers and retired constables, to share a bite with riverbank picnickers offering cucumber sandwiches from their wicker baskets and to consult with swans and magpies and bounding hares.
Shouldering our packs in Trewsbury Mead, we walked only a few steps before we were nearly run over with our first bit of history. The Thames Path crosses an old Roman road, the Foss Way, which connects Bath with Cirencester–at one time second only to Londinium as the largest town in Roman Britain. As we discovered, the road is still very much in use: Range Rovers and Vauxhalls whooshed past at unchariotable speeds.
As it turned out, this was the only busy road we’d see for days. We sauntered across a meadow full of lolling cows and wildflowers, passing an old stone farmhouse with glimpses over the trees to the 13th Century church tower of Kemble.
In the next village, Ewen, we found the first trickle of water in the infant Thames, and with it the first encounter with the river’s remarkable avian life: We heard a rustle in the reeds and saw a great blue heron beating its big wings. From here on, birds would be our constant companions. We shared the river with mallards, Canada geese, magpies, barn owls, and hundreds and hundreds of white swans.
The river–at this point just a babbling, willow-shaded brook–runs straight through the center of Aston Keynes, a handsome village named for a family that arrived with William the Conqueror. Like Kemble and Ewen, the homes here are made of honey-colored Cotswold stone, once described by J.B. Priestley as “faintly warm and luminous, as if [the builders] knew the trick of keeping the lost sunlight of centuries glimmering about them.” On the other side of the village, the Thames Path cuts directly across a neatly manicured playing field belonging to the Aston Keynes Cricket Club.
In Cricklade, we stopped for a cup of tea with Jos Joslin, the national trails officer in charge of the Thames Path. The trail, she told us, is still a work in progress, with occasional detours away from the Thames necessitated by riverside landowners. These battles have been going on since the towpath was built in the 18th Century, and some of the staunchest opponents have been the royal family. Queen Victoria blocked the towpath at Windsor with an Act of Parliament in 1860, and Queen Elizabeth II has kept up the fight.
But the walkers’ rights of way across private property are a cherished British tradition dating back to the Middle Ages, and the route of the Thames Path will continue to evolve as Joslin’s organization wins court battles against the reluctant landowners–at least those whose portraits don’t appear on postage stamps.
By next summer Joslin hopes to eliminate one of the worst detours, one I walked that afternoon–a mile along the shoulder of a busy highway between Upper Inglesham and Inglesham.
At Lechlade, where the path returned to the river, the young boys of the village were leaping into the Thames from the graceful, arched Ha’penny Bridge, named for the toll charged to walkers (except churchgoers and mourners) until the mid-1800s. Mentioned in the Domesday Book, Lechlade is a market town owing its prosperity to the fact that it was the highest point on the river loaded barges could reach. In the Middle Ages, many tons of lucrative Cotswold wool passed through here on its way to London and Europe.
Here we began to encounter brightly painted “narrowboats,” descendants of the live-aboard barges that once hauled coal throughout Britain. Built only 7 feet wide to fit through the narrowest locks, they now sport chimneys and satellite dishes and are often decorated with rooftop flower gardens and gnome statues.
At St. John’s Lock, Michael Faulkner, a retired civil engineer, noticed my interest in his narrowboat and gestured for us to hop aboard.
“C’mon,” he said, “we’ll give you a ride down to the next lock.”
As Faulkner steered from the back with the boat’s long tiller, his wife, Fay, handed us each a steaming cup of tea and told us they were headed down the Thames to Oxford, where they would turn into a canal system that would take them through the Midlands to Nottingham, a journey they expected would take 16 or 17 days.
“We only go about 2 miles an hour,” Faulkner said. “But there’s no point in going faster, is there? You don’t see anything.”
At Bablock Hythe, we spent the night at the Ferryman’s Inn, where a ferry has been crossing the Thames nearly continually since monks first settled along the riverbank in 945 A.D. Poet Matthew Arnold immortalized the crossing in the 1853 poem “Scholar Gypsy,” whose protagonist “oft was met crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock-hyth.”
Since the ferry operates only sporadically, the Thames Path officially detours away from the river to another crossing downstream. But in the morning the barman was glad to ferry us across the river, where we could walk the tree-shaded towpath on the right bank until we rejoined the official path at Pinkhill Lock.
The river makes a sharp bend to the south, and here we came to the ruins of an 11th Century abbey called Godstow. It was along this stretch of the Thames that an Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson rowed Alice Liddell and her two sisters on a summer day in 1862, amusing them with stories of White Rabbits and Mad Hatters, which he later published under his pen name, Lewis Carroll. It was perhaps fortunate that Dodgson took a particular shine to Alice and not her younger sister, or his book might have been called “Edith in Wonderland.”
Across the river, cattle were grazing at Port Meadow, which has been a free common in continual use since William the Conqueror presented it to the burgesses of Oxford nearly 1,000 years ago.
And just around the corner we caught our first sight of those dreaming spires of Oxford, where astronomer Edmund Halley first predicted the return of his comet, where penicillin was invented and where a young Rhodes scholar named Bill Clinton didn’t inhale.
At Osney Bridge we turned off from the Thames into the sudden bustle of downtown Oxford, and our journey ended.
On the other side of the bridge, though, the Thames Path continued–past Lullebrook Manor, the inspiration for Toad Hall in “The Wind in the Willows”; past Hampton Court, home of Henry VIII and his unfortunate wives; past Runnymeade Meadow, where King John signed the Magna Carta; past Windsor Castle and the playing fields of Eton; past Syon House, where Pocahontas once lived; past the gravesite of Captain Bligh, of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame; and past the site of the London slums that inspired Charles Dickens to write “Oliver Twist.”
But that’s another journey, another story, another bit of liquid history.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
From London’s Paddington Station, frequent trains leave for Kemble, with a change in Swindon. From Kemble’s train station it’s about a mile’s walk to the source of the Thames.
LOGISTICS
Ideally, you could walk from the source to Cricklade the first day, to Lechlade the second, to Tadpole Bridge the third, to Bablock Hythe the fourth and to Oxford the fifth. These days average 10 to 12 miles. Accommodations along this stretch are limited, though, and it pays to book in advance, particularly in summer. We waited too long and couldn’t always get our first choice. What follows were our overnight stops, all of which were comfortable and friendly, and some notes on alternatives.
Thames Head Inn, Tetbury Road, Cirencester, Gloucester GL7 6NZ, Great Britain; phone/fax: 011-44-1285-770259. Doubles, 45 pounds (about $68) a night. Located a few minutes’ walk from the source. An alternative would be to stay in Cirencester, 3 miles away, a handsome old Roman town with many B&Bs to choose from. Taxi rides to and from the source run about 6 pounds ($9.)
Waterhay Farm B&B, Leigh, Cricklade, Wilts SN6 6QY, Great Britain; phone: 011-44-1285-861253. Doubles, 38-50 pounds ($57-$75) a night. A pub for evening meals is 15 minutes walk away. The B&B is only 8 1/2 miles from the source, making for an easy first day–and a long second day. An alternative would be to stay in the village of Cricklade, 3 miles further down the trail.
The New Inn, Market Square, Lechlade, Gloucestershire GL7 3AB, Great Britain; phone: 011-44-1367-252296; fax: 011-44-1367-252315. Doubles, 42.50 ($64) a night; breakfast is extra. An old coaching inn in the center of town. One or two other B&Bs are available in Lechlade, as are several pubs and restaurants. It’s about 12 miles from Cricklade.
Chimney House Farmhouse B&B, Chimney on Thames, Aston, Bampton, Oxfordshire OX18 2EH, Great Britain; phone: 011-44-1367-870279. Doubles, 50 pounds ($75). Currently it’s a 1 1/2-mile detour from the Thames Path, but when the path is rerouted along the south bank of the river, it will be just minutes off the route. It’s about 12 miles from Lechlade. In the morning a shortcut, fairly obvious on the map, shaves off a long detour away from the river. We ate dinner at the Trout Inn (Tadpole Bridge, Buckland Marsh, Oxon SN7 8RF, Great Britain; phone 011-44-1367-870382; www.troutinn.co.uk), where we enjoyed the best pub meal we’ve ever had in Britain. Dinner for two, including two pints of ale and two glasses of wine, came to 34 pounds ($51). By next summer the Trout Inn plans to offer rooms, making this a convenient overnight stop. (Note that there is a Trout Inn every few miles along the Thames. This refers to the one at Tadpole Bridge.)
The Ferryman Inn, Bablock Hythe, Northmoor, Oxon OX8 1BL, Great Britain; phone/fax 011-44-1865-880028. Doubles, 45 pounds ($68) per night. Using the shortcut mentioned above, it’s about 9 miles from the Chimney House Farmhouse. In the morning, ask the owner to ferry you across the river. You can follow a good trail along the right bank, eliminating another long detour away from the river.
The Old Bank Hotel, 92094 High Street, Oxford; phone: 011-44-1865-799599; fax 011-44-1865-799598; www.oxford-hotels-restaurants.co.uk. Doubles from 155 pounds ($234) a night, breakfast extra. An end-of-the-walk splurge, this is a smart and comfortable new hotel built in a 200-year-old building in the center of the old town.
GUIDEBOOKS
The essential guide is “The Thames Path,” a National Trail Guide by David Sharp (Aurum Press, published in association with The Ramblers’ Association; 12.99 pounds/$19.63. Available in the U.S. from Amazon.com). It has a detailed verbal description of the route, plus the appropriate sections of 1:25,000-scale Ordnance Survey maps. “The Thames Path National Trail Companion,” by Jos Joslin and Alison Muldal (National Trails Office; 4.95 pounds; $7.50) covers B&Bs, hotels, pubs, public transportation and other information useful to Thames Path walkers.
INFORMATION
Contact the British Tourist Authority, 625 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1510, Chicago, IL 60611; 877-899-8391.
A good source of information on walking in Britain is the Ramblers Association, Camelford House, 87-90 Albert Embankment, London, SE1 7TW, Great Britain; phone 011-44-171-339-8500; fax 011-44-171-339-8501; www.ramblers.org.uk.
These Web sites offer information about the River Thames and the Thames Path: www.thames-path.co.uk/; www.nationaltrails.gov.uk; www.river-thames.org; dhart.future.easyspace.com/thames.htm.
— J.F.
