FOR OLD THAMES’ SAKE
Matthew Holt does an eight-night hike along the 294km official length of the English river
The Thames is my favourite river. Steeped in history, it takes you through the heart of England. And, more pertinently, if you’re thinking of following its course, it’s a manageable length.
Having already rowed and kayaked stretches, I decided to hike its banks. After all, as the German poet Johann Goethe wrote, “You’ve only really been where you’ve walked.”
Handily, there is a public footpath — based on old towpaths — accompanying the river for most of its journey.
Alighting at Kemble train station, Mandy Ramsden and I picked our way round ploughed fields to the river’s official source, marked by a stone, plus a sign indicating that we faced 294km to the Thames Barrier.
It was a classic country scene, with stone walls, wooden stiles and grazing cows. The only thing missing was water, which only appears here after heavy floods.
DOWNHILL FROM HERE
We set off, content in the knowledge it was downhill all the way, the source 110m above sea level. Within a few kilometres we saw intermittent hints of the river’s existence — thin, muddy channels penned in beside houses boasting names like “Thames View”.
It was only at Cricklade, after 20km, that the river swelled to a permanent presence, albeit still impassable to even the smallest vessel. We spent our first night in a riverside pub in Lechlade, the official start of the navigable Thames. The next morning, we came to St John’s Lock, the first of 45 locks, built from the 17th century onwards to enable boats to negotiate rapids that once obstructed the river’s course.
Beyond Lechlade, the river quickly grew in confidence and size. Dotted along the banks were concrete pillboxes, erected in World War 2 as a last line of defence lest Germany invaded.
A PAUSE FOR PLASTERS
In the first two days we managed 90km. By then, Mandy had blisters up to her ankles and I’d developed trench foot. After stocking up in Oxford on painkillers and plasters, we scaled back our ambitions to 30km per day.
The stretch from Clifton Hampden to Dorchester was like a Constable painting, with small sandy beaches and meadows rising up to Wittenham Clumps, a pair of chalk hills topped with beech trees.
Our third night was spent in the village of Dorchester. Though one can camp for free at the locks, we weren’t lugging camping gear, so we booked accommodation along the way. This curtailed our flexibility, but meant we enjoyed hot baths and traditional English pub fare, typically served by Eastern Europeans or — in Dorchester’s case —
South Africans.
On the fourth day, we passed Goring, where virtually every house had a long lawn rolling down to the river and a teak motor-boat moored at the bank. We slept a few kilometres further on, in Pangbourne.
We met several hikers and joggers on the path, but nobody else tackling the whole trail. The majority were anglers, armed with rods thick enough to extract sharks. We also encountered bevvies of swans, rafts of ducks, herds of deer and gangs of cows, the latter typically mooching around stiles, obstructing our path so we had to barge through. I only later learnt that, in the past eight years, at least 18 British ramblers have been fatally mauled by cows.
Shortly after the quaint village of
Sonning came Henley, the holy grail of British rowing. With the regatta just over, the town was still decked in bunting and the banks lined with marquees.
INTO THE CITY
The path wasn’t all picturesque, though. There were dreary stretches, especially around big towns, where the river felt sullied with litter and vandalised signposts.
Below Staines, the conurbations got closer together, the stretches of open countryside got shorter and there were fewer trees. Then, abruptly the meadows vanished and increasingly we were amidst housing, tarmac and traffic.
On the eighth morning we reached Teddington Lock, where a stone obelisk marked the boundary between the Upper River and tidal, lower section.
Below Putney came a procession of landmarks — Battersea Power Station, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, the London Eye, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tate
Modern — though we came upon them a bit slower than this sentence suggests.
After spending our final night by Tower Bridge, we followed the north bank through Wapping and Canary Wharf to the Isle of Dogs, descending 100 steps into a gloomy, dank underground tunnel. We were pleasantly surprised to emerge on the south bank, amidst the grand maritime architecture of Greenwich.
From here, the path strayed from the river, passing by shabby construction sites and grubby warehouses. After the beauty of the Upper River and splendour of central London, it seemed a demeaning end. Fortunately, by the time we reached the end of the path at the Thames Barrier, opened in 1984 to protect London from tidal floods, this chain of steel capsules was gleaming in sunlight like a string of pearls.