The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thames Valley Villages, Volume 1 (of 2), by Charles G. Harper This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Thames Valley Villages, Volume 1 (of 2) Author: Charles G. Harper Illustrator: W. S. Campbell Release Date: June 23, 2018 [EBook #57365] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES, VOL 1 *** Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Transcriber’s Note: Illustrations have been moved so as not to fall in the middle of paragraphs (leaving them as close to the original position in the book as possible). A few minor printing errors were corrected. Volume II is available as Project Gutenberg ebook #57366. [i] Cover image THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old. The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike. The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway. The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway. The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols. The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway. The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols. The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway. The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History on an East Anglian Turnpike. The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols. The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway. The Hastings Road and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.” Cycle Rides Round London. A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction. [ii] Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols. The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.” The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels. The Dorset Coast. The South Devon Coast. The Old Inns of Old England. Two Vols. Love in the Harbour: a Longshore Comedy. Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey). Haunted Houses: Tales of the Supernatural. The Manchester and Glasgow Road. This way to Gretna Green. Two Vols. The North Devon Coast. Half Hours with the Highwaymen. Two Vols. The Autocar Road Book. Four Vols. The Tower of London: Fortress, Palace, and Prison. The Somerset Coast. The Smugglers: Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an Ancient Craft. The Cornish Coast. North. The Cornish Coast. South. The Kentish Coast. [In the Press. The Sussex Coast. [In the Press. AT ASHTON KEYNES. THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES BY [iii] [iv] [v] CHARLES G. HARPER VOL. I ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY W. S. CAMPBELL AND FROM DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR ISIS London: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd. 1910 PRINTED AND BOUND BY HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD., LONDON AND AYLESBURY. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 1 CHAPTER I Cirencester—Source of the Thames—Kemble—Ashton Keynes—Cricklade—St. Augustine’s Well 8 CHAPTER II Castle Eaton—Kempsford—By the Thames and Severn Canal to Inglesham Round House—Lechlade— Fairford—Eaton Hastings Weir—Kelmscott—Radcot Bridge 50 CHAPTER III Great Faringdon—Buckland—Bampton-in-the-Bush—Cote—Shifford 110 CHAPTER IV Harvests of the Thames: Willows, Osiers, Rushes 128 CHAPTER V New Bridge, The Oldest on the Thames—Standlake—Gaunt’s House—Northmoor—Stanton Harcourt— Besselsleigh 138 CHAPTER VI Cumnor, and the Tragedy of Amy Robsart 161 CHAPTER VII Wytham—The Old Road—Binsey and the Oratory of St. Frideswide—the Vanished Village of Seacourt— Godstow and “Fair Rosamond”—Medley—Folly Bridge 186 CHAPTER VIII [vi] [vii] [viii] Iffley, and the Way Thither—Nuneham, in Storm and in Sunshine 200 CHAPTER IX Abingdon 216 CHAPTER X Sutton Courtney—Long Wittenham—Little Wittenham—Clifton Hampden—Day’s Lock and Sinodun 234 CHAPTER XI Dorchester—Benson 260 CHAPTER XII Wallingford—Goring 272 CHAPTER XIII Streatley—Basildon—Pangbourne—Mapledurham—Purley 293 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS SEPARATE PLATES At Ashton Keynes Frontispiece PAGE Cirencester Church: Showing the Great Buttress 11 The Old Mill House, Ashton Keynes 23 The Infant Thames, Ashton Keynes 31 Approach to Cricklade 35 St. Sampson, Cricklade 39 Strainer-Buttress, St. Sampson’s, Cricklade 43 “Lertoll Well” 43 The Iron Girder Bridge, Castle Eaton 51 The Old Bridge, Castle Eaton 51 Castle Eaton Church: Showing Sanctus-Bell Turret 55 The Thames and Severn Canal, Near Kempsford 55 Kempsford Church 61 Inglesham Round House 67 A Street in Fairford 71 Lechlade 75 Fairford, from the River Coln 79 The Great West Window, Fairford, Displaying the “Doom” 83 Monument in the Park, Fairford, where the Famous Windows were Buried 87 Kelmscott Manor 95 Kelmscott Church 99 Radcot Bridge 103 A Thames-side Farm 125 Gateway, Cote House 125 A Thames-side Farm 129 New Bridge: the Oldest Bridge across the Thames 139 Northmoor: Church and Dovecote 143 Stanton Harcourt: Manor House and Church 147 Early English Screen (Unrestored), Stanton Harcourt 153 Cumnor Church 163 Statue of Queen Elizabeth, Cumnor Church 167 Tomb of Anthony Forster, Cumnor 173 Eynsham 187 Iffley Church: North Side 201 West Door, Iffley Church 205 The Bridge, Nuneham Courtney 209 [ix] [x] [xi] [xii] Carfax Conduit, Nuneham Courtney 213 Abingdon 217 The Town Hall, Abingdon 223 St. Helen’s, Abingdon 227 Old Houses, Steventon Causeway 231 Sutton Courtney Church 235 Sutton Courtney 239 Interior, Sutton Courtney Church 239 Ancient Timber Porch, Long Wittenham (Unrestored) 245 Day’s Lock, and Sinodun Hill 249 Clifton Hampden 257 Sedilia, Dorchester Abbey 261 The East Window, Dorchester Abbey 265 The Jesse Window (on the left), Dorchester Abbey 269 Dorchester 273 Dorchester Abbey 273 Wallingford 277 Wallingford: Town Hall, and Church of St. Mary-the-More 281 Goring Church 285 Hour-Glass Stand, South Stoke 285 Pangbourne Church 291 Basildon Church 291 Whitchurch 297 Mapledurham Mill 301 Mapledurham House 305 ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT Near Kemble 19 At Ewen 21 At Ashton Keynes 22 Ashton Keynes Mill 27 Old Woodwork, Castle Eaton 58 Norman Porch, Kempsford 60 Inglesham Church 65 Ancient Carving, Lechlade Church 73 Fiends 82, 85 Faringdon Clump 101 St. Stephen 107 Clanfield Church 108 Faringdon Market House 117 Wooden Bridge across the Upper Thames 118 Bampton Church 123 The Kitchen, Stanton Harcourt 150 Besselsleigh: Church and Fragment of Manor House 157 Binsey Church 192 Christ’s Hospital, Abingdon 221 St. Nicholas, Abingdon 225 The “King’s Head and Bell,” Abingdon 233 Norman Belfry-window, Sutton Courtney 238 Little Wittenham 245 Wittenham Clumps 253 SWEET THAMES, RUN SOFTLY TILL I END MY SONG [xiii] [xiv] With rushes fenced, with swaying osiers crowned, Old Thames from out the western country hies; By daisy-dappled meads his course is found, Bearing upon his breast brave argosies Of stately lilies. Poets loved to praise The stream whose tide doth calmly flow along, And this the echo of their tuneful lays: “Sweet Themmes, runne softly till I ende my song.” Past town and village, cot and lonely farm, His silver stream with murm’ring music goes; Singing glad anthems, full of drowsy charm; Sweet songs of praise, unheeded not by those Who know his banks full well, who often love To roam his course, his marge to pace along, While Spenser’s line re-echoes as we rove: “Sweet Themmes, runne softly till I ende my song.” THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES INTRODUCTORY The Thames we all know intimately, for the river was discovered by the holiday-maker in the ’seventies of the nineteenth century; but we do not all know the villages of the Thames Valley, and it was partly to satisfy a long- cherished curiosity on this point, and partly to make holiday in some of the little-known nooks yet remaining, that this tour was undertaken. To one who lives, or exists, or resides—the reader is invited to choose his own epithet—beside the lower Thames, there must needs at times come a longing to know that upper stream whence these mighty waters originate, to find that fount where “Father Thames” starts forth in hesitating, infantile fashion; to seek that spot where the stream, instead of flowing, merely trickles. To such an one there comes, with every recurrent spring, the longing to penetrate to the Beyond, away past where the towns and villages, the water-works and breweries cluster thickly beside the river-banks; above the town of Reading, the Biscuit Town, and town of sauce and seeds; beyond the fashionable summer scene of Henley Regatta, and past the city of Oxford, to the Upper River and its unconventionalised life. When spring comes and wakes the meadows with delight, and the osiers and the rushes again feel life stirring in their dank roots, the old schoolboy feeling of curiosity, of mystery, of a desire for exploration, springs anew. You walk down, it may be, to some slipway or draw-dock by Richmond or Teddington, or wander along those shores contemplating the high-water-marks left by the late winter floods, which not even the elaborate locking of the river seems able to prevent; and observing the curious line of refuse of every description brought down by the waters, and now left, high and dry, a matted mass of broken rushes, water weeds, twigs, string and the like, marvel at the wealth of corks that displays itself there. Children have been known to make expedition towards the distant hills, seeking that place where the rainbow touches the ground; for the sly old legend tells us that on the spot where the glorious bow meets the earth there lies buried a crock of gold. An equally speculative quest would be to fare forth and seek the Place whence the Corks Come. There (not for children, but for “grown-ups”) should be, you think, the Land of Heart’s Desire. There are, I take it, three chief things that the world of men most ardently wishes for. An unregenerate man’s first desires are to wealth, to a woman, and to a drink; or, in the words attributed to Martin Luther: Who loves not woman, wine, and song, He is a fool his whole life long; and the valley of the Thames, from Oxford to Richmond, would seem, by the evidence of these millions of corks of all kinds, to be a place flowing with champagne, light wines, all kinds of mineral waters, and bottled beers. Corks, rubber rings from broken mineral-water bottles, and big bungs that hint of two-or three-gallon jars, abound; these last telling in no uncertain manner of the magnificent thirsts inspired among anglers who sit in punts all day long, and do nothing but keep an eye on the float, and maintain the glass circulating. A thirsty person wandering by these bestrewn towing-paths must sigh to think of the exquisite drinks that have gone before, leaving in this multitude of corks the only evidence of their evanescent existence. Shall we not seek it, this land [1] [2] [3] of the foaming champagne, that comes creaming to the brim of the generous glass; shall we not hope to locate those shores, far or near, where the bottled Bass, poured into the ready tumbler, tantalises the parched would-be drinker of it in the all-too-slowly-subsiding mass of froth that lies between him and his expectant palate? Shall we not, at least if we be of “temperance” leanings, quaff the cool and refreshing “stone-bottle” ginger-beer; or, failing that, the skimpy and deleterious “mineral-water” “lemonade” that is chiefly compounded of sugar and carbonic-acid gas, and blows painfully and at high-pressure through the titivated nostrils? Shall we not—— but hold there! Waiter, bring me—what shall it be? —an iced stone-bottle ginger! That was the brave time, the golden age of the river, when, rather more than a generation ago, the discovery of the Thames as a holiday haunt was first made. The fine rapture of those early tourists, who, deserting the traditional seaside lounge for a cruise down along the placid bosom of the Thames, from Lechlade to Oxford, and from Oxford to Richmond, were (something after the Ancient Mariner sort) the first to burst into these hitherto unknown reaches, can never be recaptured. The bloom has been brushed from off the peach by the rude hands of crowds of later visitors. The waterside inns, once so simple under their heavy beetling eaves of thatch, are now modish, instead of modest; and Swiss and German waiters, clothed in deplorable reach-me-down dress-suits and lamentable English of the Whitechapel-atte-Bowe variety, have replaced the neat-handed—if heavy-footed—Phyllises, who were almost in the likeness of those who waited upon old Izaak Walton, two centuries and a quarter ago. To-day, along the margin of the Thames below Oxford, some expectant mercenary awaits at every slipway and landing-place the arrival of the frequent row-boat and the plenteous and easily-earned tip; and the lawns of riparian villas on either hand exhibit a monotonous repetition of “No Landing-Place,” “Private,” and “Trespassers Prosecuted” notices; while side-channels are not infrequently marked “Private Backwater.” All the villages immediately giving upon the stream have suffered an equally marked change, and have become uncharacteristic of their old selves, and converted into the likeness of no other villages in this our England, in these our times. There is, for example, a kind of theatrical prettiness and pettiness about Whitchurch, over against Pangbourne; and instead of looking upon it as a real, living three-hundred-and-sixty-five-days-in-the-year kind of place, you are apt to think of what a pretty “set” it makes; and, doing so, to speak of its bearings in other than the usual geographical terms of east and west, north and south; and to refer to them, indeed, after the fashion of the stage, as “P.” or “O.P.” sides. But if we find at Whitchurch a meticulous neatness, a compact and small-scale prettiness eminently theatrical, what shall we say of its neighbour, Pangbourne, on the Berkshire bank of the river? That is of the other modern riverain type: an old village spoiled by the expansion that comes of being situated on a beautiful reach of the Thames, and with a railway station in its very midst. Detestable so-styled “villas,” and that kind of shops you find nowhere else than in these Thames-side spots, have wrought Pangbourne into something new and strange; and motor-cars have put the final touch of sacrilege upon it. Perhaps you would like to know of what type the typical Thames-side village shop may be, nowadays? Nothing easier than to draw its portrait in few words. It is, to begin with, inevitably a “Stores,” and is obviously stocked with the first object of supplying boating-parties and campers with the necessaries of life, as understood by campers and boating-parties. As tinned provisions take a prominent place in those holiday commissariats, it follows that the shop- windows are almost completely furnished with supplies of tinned everything, festering in the sun. For the rest, you have cheap camp-kettles, spirit-stoves, tin enamelled cups and saucers, and the like utensils, hammocks and lounge-chairs. Thus the modern riverside village is unpleasing to those who like to see places retain their old natural appearance, and dislike the modern fate that has given it a spurious activity in a boating-season of three months, with a deadly-dull off-season of nine other months every year. We may make shift to not actively dislike these sophisticated places in summer, but let us not, if we value our peace of mind, seek to know them in winter; when the sloppy street is empty, even of dogs and cats; when rain patters like small-shot on the roof of the inevitable tin-tabernacle that supplements the over-restored, and spoiled, parish church; and when the roar of the swollen weir fills the air with a thudding reverberance. Pah! The villas, the “maisonettes,” are empty: the gardens draggle-tailed; the “Nest” is “To Let”; the “Moorings” “To be Sold”; and a general air of “has been” pervades the place, with a desolating feeling that “will again be” is impossible. But let us put these things behind us, and come to the river itself; to the foaming weir under the lowering sky, where such a head of water comes hurrying down that no summer frequenter of the river can ever see. There is no dead, hopeless season in nature; for although the trees may be bare, and the groves dismantled, the wintry woods have their own beauty, and even in mid-winter give promise of better times. But along the uppermost Thames, from Thames Head to Lechlade and Oxford, the waterside villages are still very much what they have always been. All through the year they live their own life. Not there do the villas rise redundant, nor the old inns masquerade as hotels, nor chorus-girls inhabit at weekends, in imitative simplicity. A voyage along the thirty-two miles of narrow, winding river from Lechlade to Oxford has no incidents more exciting than the shooting of a weir, or the watching of a moor-hen and her brood. Below Oxford, we have but to adventure some little way to right or left of the stream, and there, in the byways (for main roads do not often approach the higher reaches of the river), the unaltered villages abound. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] CHAPTER I CIRENCESTER—SOURCE OF THE THAMES—KEMBLE—ASHTON KEYNES—CRICKLADE—ST. AUGUSTINE’S WELL The head-spring of the Thames is, in summer, not so easy a place to find. It rises on the borders of Wilts and Gloucestershire, and has been marked down and written about sufficiently often; but the exact spot is quested for with difficulty, and when the traveller has found it, he is, after all, not sure of his find, for the place is supplied, in these latter days, with no recognisable landmark, and even the road-men and the infrequent wayfarers along that ancient way, the Akeman Street, which runs close by, appear uncertain. That it is “over there, somewhere,” is the most exact information the enquirer is likely, at a venture, to obtain. There are excellent reasons for this distressing incertitude. The winter reason is that Trewsbury Mead, the great flat meadow in which Thames Head is situated, is so water-logged that it is often a morass, and not infrequently a lake. In summer, on the other hand, the spot is so parched, partly on account of the season, but much more by reason of the pumping-works in the immediate neighbourhood, that not only the Thames Head spring is quite dry, but the bed of the infant Thames itself is generally dry for the first two miles of its course. Thames Head is situated three miles south-west of Cirencester, that beautiful old stone-built town whose name we are traditionally told to pronounce “Ciceter,” just as Shakespeare wrote it. That was the old popular way, before the folks of the surrounding country could read or write, and knew no better; but to-day, when “education” is the birthright of all, though culture be the acquisition of few, they are the rustic-folk—the “lower orders”—who say “Cirencester,” as my lords and gentlemen and ladies were wont to do; while nowadays the upper circles refer to “Ciceter.” It is a curious reversal. If you say, in these times, “Cirencester,” you, in so doing, proclaim yourself, socially, an outsider, fit only to feed out of the same trough as those creatures who pronounce “Marjoribanks,” “Cholmondeley,” or “Wemyss” as spelled. We all know—or ought—that “Marshbanks,” “Chumley,” and “Weems” are your only ways, if you would be socially saved. These are the last resorts of those who have no other distinction to mark them out from the common herd: just a verbal inflection, combined, possibly, with a method of hand-shaking. To what straits we are reduced, in these democratic times, to express our superiority! There is another way to the pronunciation of “Cirencester,” lately come into favour with provincials of this neighbourhood. It is a method of the simplest: merely the adoption of the clipped way common to the local milestones, which tell the tale of so many miles to “Ciren.” The noblest thing in Cirencester is the beautiful old church, which rises in its midst, beside the remarkably broad High Street, with much of that scale and stateliness we commonly associate with a cathedral. It is one of the noblest works of the Perpendicular period, when architects grew aspiring, but did not always succeed in building artistically as well as big. Here the two aims have been achieved. But a third desideratum, that of building securely, was not originally included, it would appear, for one of the most astonishing things about this structure is the great masonry strut which would be called a “shore” if it were only in timber, and is so clearly for utility, and absolutely unbeautiful and unarchitectural, that to style it a buttress would be to disparage the exquisite adornments that buttresses at their best are capable of being. This great crutch for a noble tower in danger of falling so soon as it was built, nearly five hundred years ago, is, however, justified of its existence, for the lofty belfry yet stands securely. The ingenious way in which the supporting masonry is built diagonally through the west wall of the south aisle, down to the ground, compels admiration for the engineering skill displayed. [8] [9] [10] [11] CIRENCESTER CHURCH: SHOWING THE GREAT BUTTRESS. The great three-storeyed porch, by far the largest porch, and certainly the most singular, in England, built in advance of the south aisle, and looking proudly upon the street, would seem to have been built for the convenience of the many priests who served the large number of chantries established from time to time in the church. It is a very late and very beautiful Perpendicular work. Not long after its completion the greasy rascals were sent packing, in the life-giving Reformation that saved the nation. It for long afterwards served as the Town Hall, but was commonly known as “the Vice”—a strange survival and corruption of “parvise.” The interior of the church discloses a nave-arcade of very lofty and graceful proportions; a work probably as completely satisfactory as anything in this country. And there is very much else to study here. There are monuments, worn and battered, to knights and dames, wine-merchants, wool-merchants, grocers, and other old tradesmen of the town. Among them may be noticed the brass to Reginald Spycer, 1442, with his four wives—Reginald in the middle, and the four ladies beside him, two and two. A late example is that of Philip Marner, 1587, representing him full-length, robed, with staff in one hand and a flower in the other. A dog sits beside him. In the upper left-hand is a pair of shears, indicating that he was a clothier. The rhymed inscription says:— In Lent by will a sermon he devised, And yerely Precher with a noble prised. Seven Nobles he did geue ye poore for to defend, and 80 li to xvi men did lend, In Cicester, Burford, Abington, and Tetburie, ever to be to them a stocke Yerly. In a glazed frame is preserved an ancient blue velvet pulpit-cloth, given in 1478 by Ralph Parsons, a priest, whose cope it had been. The road that runs, white and broad, in a straight undeviating line, from Cirencester to Thames Head, and so on at last, after many miles, to Bath—the “Akemanceaster” that has given the Akeman Street its name—comes in three miles to a stone bridge spanning a canal. This is “Thames Head Bridge,” and the canal is the Thames and Severn Canal, which, beginning at Inglesham, just above Lechlade, ends at Stroud. The length of this water-way is thirty miles. The works were begun in 1783 and completed in 1789. The object of the Thames and Severn Canal, which joins the Stroudwater Canal, and reaches the Severn at Framilode, was to provide a commercial water-way between the highest point of the navigable Thames, near Lechlade, [12] [13] [14] and the Bristol Channel. Its course lies along some very high ground just beyond Thames Head, going westward, and in all there are forty-four locks, rising 241 ft. 3 in. There is also a remarkable piece of engineering in the Sapperton Tunnel, through which the canal takes its course. The tunnel is fifteen feet wide, and is driven through Sapperton Hill at a point 250 feet beneath its summit. It follows that of necessity a canal, so elevated above the surrounding country, must be provided with water by artificial means, and a supply is provided by a pumping-station close at hand to Thames Head Bridge. This raises water to the extent of three million gallons a day: hence the dried-up character of the Thames Head spring, except in winter, and the usual summer phenomenon of the infant Thames being quite innocent of water for a distance of two miles from its source. Of late years the Great Western Railway, which has a station at Kemble, a mile and a half away, has erected a still larger and more powerful pumping-station, for the purpose of supplying water for its own needs at Swindon, fourteen miles distant. The Akeman Street here divides Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. If we descend from the Thames Head Canal bridge and follow the towing-path in a westerly direction, into Gloucestershire, for half a mile, we come, by scrambling down the canal-bank to the meadow below, to the source of the river, and at the same time to the destruction of a cherished illusion. Picturesque old histories of the Thames have made us familiar with Thames Head, and have shown us dainty vignettes of that spring. One such I have before me as I write these words. It shows a rustic well, overhung by graceful trees, with a little country-girl in homely pinafore dipping a foot in the water as it gushes forth. We need expect no such scene nowadays. The well is buried under fallen masses of the dull, ochre-coloured earth of Trewsbury Mead, and all we see is a rough, dry hollow, overhung by trees which refuse to live up to the grace suggested by the old illustrations. We need not wonder any more why so few people know Thames Head, or why the spot is unmarked. It is merely a memory, and Peacock’s charming verse has long ceased to be applicable:— Let fancy lead from Trewsbury Mead, With hazel fringed, and copsewood deep; Where scarcely seen, through brilliant green, Thy infant waters softly creep. But although the pumping-stations so greedily suck up all the available moisture in summer, the spring is said often to burst out in winter, three feet high; and at such times it is only necessary to drive a walking-stick anywhere into the turf of this meadow for a little fount to spring up from the hole thus drilled. The river thus originated is known alternatively as the “Isis,” and in the writings of old pedantic antiquaries retains that alternative name until Oxford is passed and Dorchester reached; where, according to such authorities, in the confluence of the Isis and the Thame, the “Thame-Isis,” becomes the “Tamesis,” or Thames. To the Oxford boating-man, however, the streams below and above Oxford are respectively the Lower and the Upper River, and “Isis” is reserved for the title of a University magazine, or the name of a boating-club. “Isis” is, of course, a Latinised form of “Ouse,” which in its turn is a modified form of the Celtic “uisc,” for water, and gives us such other river-names as Usk, Axe, Exe, and Wye; while we find it hidden again in the names of Kirkby Wiske, in Yorkshire, and in that of “whisky,” deriving from “usquebaugh.” The time when the Upper Thames was first called “Isis” is uncertain. The name is certainly a Latinised form of “Ouse”; but the Romans do not appear to have so styled it. Julius Cæsar, in his Commentaries, speaks only of “Tamesis”; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a.d. 905, mentions only the “Thames.” We do not, in fact, read of anything like “Isis” until 1359, when a monk of Chester, Ranulphus Higden, wrote in his Polychronicon a passage which, rendered into English from his Latin original, runs thus: “Tamisa seems to be composed from the names of two rivers, the Ysa, or Usa, and the Thama. The Thama, running by Dorchester, falls into the Ysa; thence the whole river, from its source to the eastern sea, is called Thamisa.” A much later writer, Leland, I think, says, in that rarefied, detached way we expect in old writers, “The common people call it the ‘Thames,’ but scholars call it the ‘Isis.’” The name of “Thames” is equally Celtic with that of the Latinised “Isis,” nor is it the only Thames in the country, for the river Tamar, dividing Devon and Cornwall; the Teme, in Shropshire and Herefordshire; and the Tame, in Staffordshire, are each closely allied in name. The generally-accepted source of the Thames at Thames Head has by no means gone undisputed, and a rival exists at Seven Springs, three miles south-east of Cheltenham. This spot is the source of the river Churn, which, falling into the Thames at Cricklade, after a course of sixteen or seventeen miles, takes the stream some ten miles farther up-country than that which issues from Thames Head. Thus we have the singular paradox, that the Churn, this first tributary of the Thames, is considerably longer than the parent stream. This is a problem that would have desolated the logical mind of Euclid, and it has worried geographers and writers of books for uncounted years. No matter how diligently we may seek to track this heresy to its lair—to its original propagation—we shall inevitably be foiled; nor indeed (as in the case of rival religious dogmas) shall we ever be able to definitely settle which of the two is the heresy, and which the true faith. If we rely upon the canon that the source of any river is that point which is situated farthest from its mouth, and then refer to the maps, there can be no doubt whatever that the Churn is the true Thames, and that the Seven Springs source is its head-spring. It is an unavoidable conclusion, like it or like it not; and if we take the trouble to visit Seven Springs, we shall discover that some one has been concerned to mark the spot prominently with the same belief, in the [15] [16] [17] [18] inscription set up there on a wall going down into the pool:— Hic tuus, O Tamesine Pater, Septemgeminus fons. or, in English, Here flows, O Father Thames, Thy sevenfold source. We can only assume, in the difficulty with which we are thus faced, that the original error, of placing Thames Head at Trewsbury Mead, and naming the stream which issues from Seven Springs the “Churn,” arose in those very remote times, before even the Romans came to Britain, when surveying and map-making were unknown and relative distances were uncertain. That the river Churn bore its present name even at the period when the Romans descended upon Britain is an assured thing, for the Romans named Corinium—the present “Cirencester”—from its situation on the Churn. The existing form of the place-name is of Saxon origin, and is really “Churnchester”—the “castle on the Churn.” Near Kemble. Kemble Junction, the railway station that dominates this neighbourhood, marks where the little four-mile branch of the Great Western Railway goes off to Cirencester from the line to Stroud and Gloucester. There is no likely expectation that Cirencester will begin to grow and to lose its old-world character while it remains, as now, at the loose end of this little single-track branch railway; and the hunting-men of this Vale of White Horse district remain quite unconcerned and unafraid of developments. This country, between Cirencester, Cricklade and Lechlade, is a hunting country and an agricultural country, and long centuries ago it lost to Leeds and Bradford, and other like centres, the clothing industry for which this Cotswold district was in mediæval times and after famed. Thus Kemble Junction is by no means a junction of the Swindon or the Clapham Junction type, and is rather a peaceful than a bustling place. The village itself stands on rising ground above this district of springs. Even though it be more remarkable for its stone walls than for anything else, it is a not unpleasing village, for in a neighbourhood such as this, where laminated stone is easily dug out from a few feet below the level of the soil, we expect dry stone walling and stone-built houses; and certainly the hard stony effect is softened by the plentiful trees of the place. The Early English church, with tall spire, 120 feet high, has been so thoroughly “restored,” and swept and garnished, and so plentifully endued with plaster, that architects with a love of antiquity, and all antiquaries, looking upon it, can scarce refrain from tears. Inside the church is a curious monument— Dedicated to the memory of Beatrice and Edward, the deare wife and son of Mr. Richard Pitt, both interred within these walls, shee the 26th day of Aprill 1650, hee the 29th day of March 1656 { Conflicted } { militant were buried materiall Do reigne triumphant. She died i’ th’ noone, he in the morne, of Age, yet virtue (though not yeres) fil’d their lives’ page. [19] [20] who in ye Church Resurgemus Posuit maritus mæstissimus paterque plorans. We shall probably not be wrong in regarding this as one of the ultra-Puritan families of that Puritan age. Just below Kemble, on the way to the hamlet of Ewen, the course of the Thames is in summer hardly to be distinguished in the meadows through which it runs. Grass covers it, in common with the meadows themselves; only the grass is of a ranker and coarser kind, and largely admixed with docks. The dry-walling of one of these meadows shows the winter direction of the stream clearly enough, in the row of holes left in building the wall for the water to pass through. AT EWEN. Ewen, standing by the roadside, is remarkable only for its rustic cottages, but they are particularly beautiful in their old unstudied way; heavily thatched, and surrounded with old-fashioned gardens. The Thames begins to flow, or to trickle, regularly at Upper Somerford Mill, whose water-wheel, immense in proportion to the little stream, is picturesquely sheltered under wide-spreading trees. The village of Somerford Keynes lies close at hand. AT ASHTON KEYNES. The way between this village and Ashton Keynes passes over rough common-land, and enters Ashton Keynes romantically, past the great church, and along a fine avenue of elms beside the manor-house, emerging at what, until a few years ago, was Ashton Keynes Mill. The elm avenue of Ashton Keynes is other than we should expect, if we come to the place primed with a knowledge of what the “Keynes” in the place-name signifies. Those elms should be oaks, for “Keynes” derives from the ancient Norman word for an oak-tree; in later French, “chênaie.” Hence also the name of Horsted Keynes, in Sussex. [21] [22] [23] THE OLD MILL HOUSE, ASHTON KEYNES. Upper Somerford Mill. All the old mills that once made the Thames additionally picturesque are disappearing. Some go up in flame and smoke, like Iffley Mill, below Oxford, painted and sketched by a thousand artists, and described by a hundred writers of books and descriptive articles, to whose lasting sorrow it was destroyed by fire in 1907. Shiplake Mill met a similar fate a little earlier, and modern milling conditions forbid their ever being rebuilt. Ashton Keynes Mill became disestablished, as a mill, because it could no longer compete with the modern steam-roller flour-mills, that nowadays grind flour much more expeditiously and cheaply than the old water-driven mills. But the old mill-house stands, little altered. It is built substantially, of stone, and has old peaked gables and casemented windows, and so, when its ancient commercial career came at last to an end, its own picturesqueness, and its strikingly beautiful setting, appealed irresistibly to some appreciative person seeking an old English home; with the result that it has been converted into a very charming private residence. Little need be said about Ashton Keynes church, for it is of very late Gothic, and plentifully uninteresting; but the village itself is a delight. It is the queen of Upper Thames villages, with a picture at every turn. Here the Thames flows quietly down one side of the village street, and at the beginning of that rural, cottage-bordered, tree-shaded highway is the first bridge across the river; an ancient Gothic bridge, with a slipway beside it, where the horses are brought down to wash their legs in summer. Beside the bridge stand the remains of one of the three fifteenth-century wayside crosses which once gave Ashton Keynes a peculiarly sanctified look. The ruins of all three are still here,—smashed originally during the seventeenth-century troubles in which King, Church, Parliament and Puritans contended violently together; [24] [25] [26] and further damaged by the mischievous pranks of many generations of village children. Ashton Keynes Mill. There are many little bridges spanning the Thames at Ashton Keynes, for the stream washes the old stone garden- walls of a long line of cottages, and the entrance to each cottage necessitates a bridge of stone, of brick, or of timber. Stonecrop, candytuft, wallflowers, arabis, snapdragon, and many other semi-wild plants grow in the crevices of these old walls, and drape them all the summer with an unimaginable mantle of beauty; and where the cottages end, and the highway becomes a straight flat road, making for Cricklade, a modern country residence has been built, with the walls of it going down in the same way into the water, and the wild flowers encouraged in the like fashion to inhabit there. A contemplative person might pass a pleasant time at Ashton Keynes, where there is a homely inn, but none of those unamusing “amusements” which serve to render places of holiday resort unendurable. For those not very numerous persons who are satisfied with their own company Ashton Keynes affords decided attractions. No one ever goes there, for it is on the road to Nowhere in Particular, and not even the motor-car is a very familiar sight. Thus the ruminative stranger will have his privacy respected; unless indeed he happens to be either an artist or a photographer, when he is certain to be surrounded by a dense crowd of children, who seem to become instinctively aware of an open sketch- book or a camera at hand, and surround the owners of them in most embarrassing fashion. The artist is the more fortunate of the two, for it is only an easily-satisfied curiosity to see what he is doing which attracts these unwelcome attentions; while the unfortunate photographer is pestered with requests to be “took,” and worried to extremity of despair by hordes of fleeting children obscuring his camera’s field of vision, or posing grotesquely and in most damaging fashion in his choicest foregrounds. Below Ashton Keynes the Thames is joined by the little Swillbrook, and crossed at the confluence by the small, three-arched masonry Oaklade Bridge. A mile or so below this is Water Hay Bridge, a typical “county” bridge, whose frame of iron girders and railings, painted white, ill assorts with the luxuriance of swaying reeds and thickly-clustered alders that here enshrouds the stream. We read in old accounts of the Thames that it was navigable for barges as far as this point, and “Water Hay” may possibly be a corruption of Water Hythe, indicating a wharf. It is in this connection to be noted that the Cricklade and Ashton Keynes road crosses here, and that however unlikely it may now seem that the stream could ever have been navigable to this spot for such heavy craft as barges, it must always be borne in mind that, in the many general causes that have led to the shrinkage of rivers throughout the country, and here in especial in the pumping away of the head- spring of the Thames, the stream cannot now closely compare with its old self of a hundred and fifty years ago. We may therefore very well believe those old writers who speak of the Thames being navigable to this point, and imagine, readily enough, a rude wharf where goods were landed, and left for Ashton Keynes and surrounding villages, in days when even the few roads of the present time either did not exist at all, or were so bad that haulage along them was almost impossible, by reason either of the mud, or of the water that very often flooded them. Between this and the little town of Cricklade the stream winds continually, but the road goes straight over Water Hay Bridge and makes direct for the townlet, three miles distant. The navigation of these first few miles of the Thames was long ago considered to be so irretrievably a thing of the past, that it was permitted the constructors of the North Wilts Canal, in crossing the stream, one mile above Cricklade, to build a brick bridge or aqueduct so low-pitched across it that the crown of the arch scarcely appears above water, and effectually stops any attempt to get even a canoe through. [27] [28] [29] [30] [31]