Ideas for Your Group to Do on Your Own Or with Us
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The Kettle August 2013 An online monthly magazine for group travel organisers Inside this issue This month we bring you an Upper Thames Special -The Guided Tour On Paper is a journey down river from the source of the Thames to Windsor Plus: Messing About in Boats, A Guide’s Eye View of Growing Up By the Thames, Thames Wildlife & Nature and five day trips including cruises on the Upper Thames Ideas for your group to do on your own or with us Published by City & Village Tours Going With The Stream: Thames Head to Windsor The River Thames bubbles up from a spring in the low level and trickles down the slope of the meadow to limestone hills of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, the begin its 215 mile journey through nine English precise location of which, despite the incredible know counties to the North Sea. Mostly though it’s not how of geologists and geographers and other men and until about a mile from the source when the Lyd Well women of science is still disputed. Some say Seven at Kemble pumps a bit of life into the Thames that Springs to the north of Cirencester in the Churn you’ll actually see anything wet let alone river-like. Valley (which is marked as the source on our earliest But gradually the river volume will build and that important map The Gough Map kept at the Bodleian drop of 356 feet, the equivalent of a building with Library in Oxford) but most say the source is a sleepy 35 floors, from the source to the sea is why we need sort of spring called Thames Head by an ancient ash locks and weirs on the non-tidal Thames to manage in a field called Trewsbury Mead about three miles flooding and maintain depths for navigation by boats. South-West of Cirencester. Nowadays topographical About ten miles from Thames Head is Cricklade, the pilgrims seeking the source of the Mighty Thames only Wiltshire town on the Thames. The name means must make do with an underwhelming scattering of place by the river crossing and here for the first time stones in a dusty dip in a field and a roughly hewn with the addition of water from the River Churn there stone that has all the promise of an ancient monolith is sufficient depth of water in the nascent Thames for but all the disappointment of a much more recent small craft but it’s not much more than a foot deep inscription: although it was once deep enough for barges to arrive 'The conservation of the River Thames 1857-1974. here from London. Today the official start of the This stone was placed here to mark the source of the navigable Thames is St John’s Lock just above River Thames.' Lechlade, (where lounges Old Father Thames, above) The best you can hope for is a seep! After heavy rain the first of 45 locks and weirs that divide the River the stones are submerged in a shallow pool of clear Thames into 44 narrow lakes known as Thames water broken by the occasional bubble as the Thames Reaches. The last lock before the start of the tidal Head spring breaks the surface 356 feet above sea River Thames is Teddington – Tide End Town. Slow Beginnings As world rivers go the Thames is a mere squirt. It’s not even the longest British river - that honour goes to the Severn (new tour coming soon!). For most of its way the Thames is slow and meandering and very, very rural. As more and more tributaries empty into the Thames so the flow picks up speed and the river widens. Most rivers are tributaries, which simply means that they join other rivers before they reach the sea and it is believed that the River Thames was once a tributary of the Rhine until the glaciers of the last Ice Age changed its course. Tributaries bring water to a main river from a wide area of land known as its drainage basin or catchment area. The Thames Basin (illustrated to the right) covers more than 5,000 square load. Salt from Cheshire which had travelled on pack miles and is home to some 13 million people – 11 horses down the Old Salt Way was loaded onto million of them in London. The Amazon Basin is barges headed for Oxford and London together with 700 times bigger which helps explain how there are wool, cheese and stone. Where there’s trade there’s still lost tribes turning up every now and then. There taxes and so at Lechlade we find the first toll keepers are no lost tribes of the Thames Valley, only lost cottage at the Ha’Penny Bridge. At Kelmscott it flows accents – note that the one-size-fits-all accent first past a village of honey-coloured Cotswolds stone documented in 1984 was christened Estuary English! where William Morris rented the riverside manor The first village that the infant river runs through is house as his summer home and today lies buried in Ewen (from the Anglo-Saxon fort). Here the first the church yard. For 30 miles the river will slowly tributary, the Swill brook, joins the Thames and it is meander through meadows and sleepy countryside. just 6 feet wide. By the time it reaches Lechlade it’s At Radcot in 1387 Henry Bolingbroke defeated the been joined by the Rivers Colne and Leach and it is 60 Earl of Oxford in his campaign to become Henry IV feet wide, 250 feet at Oxford, 325 feet at Teddington, and some 250 years later Prince Rupert and his 870 feet at London Bridge, 1470 feet at Woolwich, Cavaliers fought off the Parliamentarians. At Radcot 2400 feet at Gravesend and by the time it reaches the riverside stone from the Taynton Quarry was loaded estuary it is a full five miles from Sheerness on the onto barges and off it went for the construction of the Kent side to Southend on the Essex side. colleges of Oxford, the castle at Windsor, the college at Eton and the Cathedral of St Paul’s in the City Where There’s Trade There’s Taxes th The Thames riverside in the Cotswolds market town of London. At Swinford the beautiful 18 century of Lechlade was once a busy wharf - the name is a sandstone bridge is privately owned and motorists combination of the River Leach and lade meaning to must still pay a toll of five pence. 3 City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 [email protected] At Newbridge, where, despite the name, the bridge to Dorchester-on-Thames where the River Isis meets (of Taynton limestone) is 800 years old, the River the River Thame. Only then do these rivers combine Windrush joins the Thames having flowed from the to become the Thames-Isis from which, say the Cotswold Hills down through Burford and Bourton academics, comes the Celtic name Tamesis. and Witney. Port Meadow, just above Oxford is an The academics of Oxford are a powerful lobbying ancient grazing land that has never been put to the force and if you look at a modern Ordnance Survey plough. It was given to Oxford by William the map the river is still labeled Thames or Isis until Conqueror to make them like him and to this very Dorchester. day the 200 Freemen of Oxford as well as the After ten more miles of lush meadows the River commoners of Binsey and Wolvercote are entitled to Thames (or Isis) reaches Abingdon, one of several graze their livestock here. contenders for the title of Britain’s oldest continuously The settlement of Oxenaforda grew up in 8th occupied town with a proven history of 6000 years of Century in the meadows surrounding a Priory by a settlement. In 1084 William the Conqueror celebrated crossing on the Thames. Today, in Oxford you can Christmas at Abingdon Abbey leaving his son here, see buildings of every English architectural style the future Henry I, to be educated by the monks. from the Saxon to the present day. The University is Abingdon was once the county town of Berkshire and first mentioned in records from the 1100s but most built a very impressive County Hall in the 17th century of the colleges were established during the 1200s to fend off a challenge by Reading to whom it finally when new translations of the writings of the Greek lost the title when it made the mistake of failing to philosophers were inspiring scientific discoveries engage fully with the railway revolution by refusing and new ideologies throughout Europe. Sponsored a main line station. In 1974 Abingdon became part of by the church the University colleges were an Oxfordshire – previously the River Thames had attempt to reconcile the Greek philosophies with formed the boundary between Berkshire and Christian theology. Oxfordshire. Old Mother Isis & Mother Dunch’s Buttocks The bridge at Clifton Hampden - a chocolate box Historically and especially in Victorian times village of Elizabethan thatched cottages - is so gazetteers and cartographers, Oxford academics all, narrow that it has traffic lights and the river here insisted that the River Thames above the Iffley Lock was once so shallow that it was an important crossing and through Oxford should correctly be called Isis point for cattle. The name describes how the village from the source at Thames Head in Gloucestershire and its church are raised high above the river on a cliff 4 City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 [email protected] where the Thames has cut through the greensand The Goring Gap which also forms a group of small Oxfordshire hills After Wallingford the Thames, which mostly flows in the otherwise rather flat Thames Valley.