Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  BURCOT: Bryda’s cottage, or Bride’s Cottage. Perhaps a dowry? Charles Dickens junior reported it to be “of no importance.”

  LONG WITTENHAM and LITTLE WITTENHAM: The settlement or meadows of Witta by the bend in the river. Originally a single Wittenham, which eventually diverged into two. They are 1 mile apart by road but—because of the bend in the river—31/2 miles apart by water. Antiquities have been found here in abundance, including the skeleton of an Anglo-Saxon. An altar to Jupiter Optimus Maximus was found at Little Wittenham. At Long Wittenham the same burial place had been used continually through the Iron Age, Roman, Saxon and Christian eras. Here the Thame meets the Thames.

  BENSON: The farm of Baensa, or settlement of Benesa’s people. Previously known as Bensington. Offa’s palace was close to the church here. It was the site of a battle between Wessex and Mercia. Nothing much has since happened, although it was said to have been a refuge for St. Frideswide during one of that saint’s unhappy flights.

  WALLINGFORD: Ford owned by the tribe of Wealh or the Walingas (unlike Shillingford, close by, which was under the control of the Scillingas). Wealh is the Anglo-Saxon word for foreigner, or slave, or Briton—hence “welsh.” It seems likely, then, that the ford was once protected or defended by a group of indigenous Britons, most likely the Berkshire tribe of the Atrebates. It may then be the chief city known in the Itinerary of Antoninus as Calleva, and may claim a history as old as that of London. Others more prosaically derive the name from “walled ford.” The town was once enclosed by Saxon earth-works, which can still be seen; the river lay on the fourth side, and the streets were laid out in a military grid pattern in the Roman manner. A Norman castle was built here on the foundations of an old Roman fortification. But this great castle was, even by Leland’s time, “sore in ruines, and for the most part defaced.” It was eventually destroyed during the Civil War. The bridge has seventeen arches. There were once fourteen churches, but the town was severely depopulated by the Black Death in the fourteenth century. In the twentieth century it was the home of Agatha Christie.

  STREATLEY and GORING: “Twinned” towns on either bank of the river, not a unique phenomenon along the Thames. The names refer, in turn, to a grove or clearing by the road and the place of Gara’s people (Goring was once known as Garinges). The “street” of Streatley may be the Ridgeway that passes along the chalk downs, crosses the Icknield Way, and then drops down here to create a ford across the river, or may refer to the Icknield Way itself, the oldest road in Britain, extending from Norfolk to Buckinghamshire. They are both tracks of great antiquity, therefore, and their meeting at Streatley and Goring is a matter of some significance. Certainly there has been a settlement here, as they said in the middle ages, beyond the memory of man. Here the river cuts through the chalk, north to south, to create the “Goring gap.” It inspired a famous verse:

  I’d rather much sit here and laze

  Than scale the hill at Streatley.

  The climb is by no means arduous, however, and the views of the river are rewarding. The Thames now turns fatefully eastward, adopts the Kennet at Reading, and flows on towards the sea. Each town had its own church and its own mill. Oscar Wilde stayed here in 1893, and one of the characters in An Ideal Husband is named Lord Goring.

  WHITCHURCH and PANGBOURNE: Another pairing: the place of the white church, and a stream belonging to the sons of Paega. A son of the Thames, Kenneth Grahame, used to live at Pangbourne.

  MAPLEDURHAM: A settlement by the maple trees. Mapulder is the British name for the maple. The mill here is mentioned in the Domesday Book; it is still in operation, and is thus the oldest working mill upon the river. Mapledurham House, of Tudor construction, is still owned by members of the original family. It has been the fictional home of Soames Forsyte and Mr. Toad.

  READING: Settlement of Reada’s tribe, Reada being a local Saxon leader who led his people up the Thames and invaded this territory. Other derivations trace it from rhea meaning river and from redin meaning fern; Leland said that fern was “growing hereabouts in great plenty.” There was once a great castle, and an even greater abbey, here. The earliest known English song, “Sumer is icumen in,” was written in its cloisters. In the nineteenth century the town was well known, and somewhat scorned, as the principal manufactory of biscuits. From the ruins of the abbey you can see the prison where Oscar Wilde was incarcerated. The town is now a thriving centre of technology, and has little regard for its past.

  SONNING: Settlement of Sunna’s people, another tribal division of the Saxons by the river. But there is a previous history of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic settlers. There is a ritual enclosure here dating from 2000 BC. There is also a piece of nineteenth-century doggerel by James Sadler:

  Is there a spot more lovely than the rest,

  By art improved, by nature truly blest?

  A noble river at its base is running,

  It is a little village known as Sonning.

  SHIPLAKE: The stretch of water where sheep are washed. Tennyson married in the church, and Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) lived here as a boy. Just beyond the village, by the weir, the river Loddon joins the Thames. The confluence provides the setting for Leucojum aestivum: the Loddon lily or summer snowflake. It is also the habitat for the less attractive Loddon pondweed.

  WARGRAVE: The grove by the weirs, where the Loddon decants into the Thames. There was a village recorded here from the eleventh century. The church was burned down by suffragettes in 1914, on the grounds that the vicar refused to remove the verb “obey” from the marriage service. Madame Tussaud is buried in the churchyard. She lies near Thomas Day, once well known for his didactic novel Sandford and Merton. He died after being thrown from a horse, while trying to prove that animals can best be tamed by kindness. The river at this point is the site of the annual Wargrave and Shiplake Regatta which includes more than 600 competitors, and 350 races, within the space of two days. The boatsmen compete with traditional skiffs, which have been on the river since the nineteenth century.

  HENLEY: The meaning is contested between “high wood” or “clearing” or “the old place.” If it is the last then the British term—hen-le (on the same principle as hen-dre meaning old town and hen-gwrt meaning old court) would suggest that it is very old indeed. In the ancient records of the corporation it is also named Hanleganz and Hannebury. At the time of the Domesday Book there were three manors and one church in the area. Once largely populated by bargemen, by the eighteenth century it had become a popular resort. It is in large part a Georgian town, and the bridge (1786) is very fine. The site of the famous regatta, the course of water here was chosen for the first university boat races between Oxford and Cambridge. The Cambridge colour was then pink. In the first ever boat race of June 1829 the two boats collided, and the race was started again. Oxford won. The Red Lion inn here inspired the following lines from Thomas Shenstone, who scratched them upon one of its windows:

  Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,

  Where’er his stages may have been,

  May sigh to think he still has found

  The warmest welcome at an inn.

  Along the bank can be found the River and Rowing Museum. The famous boating firm of Hobbs & Sons is close by.

  MEDMENHAM: Variously explicated as the middle ham or homestead, a middlesized settlement or the land remaining after the draining of a pool. The manor house or “abbey” once housed a small community of Cistercian monks, but it became more celebrated as the home of the Hell Fire Club whose motto was Fay ce que voudra, or “Do what you will.” Its leading member, Sir Francis Dashwood, decorated the existing house with fanciful arches in the Gothic style. Their misdeeds were somewhat exaggerated, but it has been reported that the devil once appeared among them in the shape of a baboon. By the end of the eighteenth century it had been colonised by poor families who showed around curious visitors. It was restored in 1898, and is now used by the Royal Air Force.

  HURLEY: A curve in the river. Once known
as Esgareston or the town of Esgar, it is an ancient place. The first church was built, during the mission of St. Birinus, in approximately AD 635. During that saint’s mission churches sprang up on both banks of the Thames beside the sites where he preached and baptised; thus the churches at Windsor and Eton, Hurley and Medmenham, Whitchurch and Pangbourne, Goring and Streatley, and so on. This little-known saint can truly be said to have changed the topography of the Thames. The sister of Edward the Confessor, Editha, was buried somewhere beneath the flagstones of Hurley Church. The Domesday Book records the presence of twenty-five villagers and ten slaves. The inn, the Olde Bell, is said to be the oldest public house in the country; it was originally the guest house of the monastery. The wall of the eleventh-century monastery can still be seen in the courtyard, or “paradise,” of a house by the river. There is a plaque here: “The priory of St. Mary, Hurley, founded in the reign of William the Conqueror by Geoffrey de Mandeville and his wife Lecelina, AD 1086. A cell to Westminster Abbey.” A cell means here an extension, not a gaol. In 1391 the prior complained to Richard II that “they are troubled by Thames floods, their houses laid in ruins, and the deaths of their occupants.” There are two twelfth-century barns. Early in his reign Henry VIII granted to the Benedictines “the great wood called Hurley Wood” in exchange for their garden in London “called Covent Garden.” It was a good bargain for the sovereign. On the ruins of the monastery was built Ladye Place, in the cellars of which was plotted the deposition of James II. The house was demolished in 1837, and three bodies in Benedictine habits were found beneath the pavement.

  BISHAM: Bissel’s ham or homestead, or perhaps hamlet on the river Biss. It is sometimes difficult to disentangle place names from family names, when they were for centuries indistinguishable. Did the territory get its name from the people, or the people from the territory? Most noticeable for the presence of Bisham Abbey, a Tudor manor house built on the remnants of a twelfth-century abbey. Henry VIII granted the original house to Anne of Cleves, after he had ungraciously abandoned her, but she eventually passed it to Sir Philip Hoby. It was he who restored the present house. The princess Elizabeth was “entertained,” or imprisoned, here for three years, during the reign of her sister, but the building is most celebrated for the “Bisham ghost.” Lady Hoby murdered her son, for the sin of blotting his copy-books, by the simple expedient of shutting him up in a room in the house. Some say that she whipped him to death. Of course her spirit eternally regrets the deed, and forever washes its hands in a self-supporting basin. Curiously enough, copy-books were found under the floorboards during a later restoration. Bisham Abbey is now a national sports centre.

  MARLOW: Low and marshy ground, or perhaps the residue of a lake or mere. Camden derives it from “the chalk commonly called marle,” however, which he believed to be plentiful in the region. The Roman Catholic church of St. Peter’s here harbours the mummified hand of St. James, rescued from Reading Abbey. The fingers are curled into a kind of claw. In the vestry of All Saints hangs a portrait of the Spotted Boy, a young black boy with an unfortunate disfigurement of large white spots; he and the showman who exhibited him are both buried in the same grave within the churchyard. The builder of the suspension bridge here, William Tierney Clark, erected the famous bridge that links Buda with Pest. The town is perhaps most famous for the residence of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley in West Street; a new book about them, published by the Marlow Society, is entitled The Monsters of Marlow. Mary Shelley wrote much of Frankenstein here and, down the road, Thomas Love Peacock wrote Nightmare Abbey. There must be something in the air. The young T. S. Eliot also resided here. Did Marlow inspire part of The Waste Land? There was once a famous question, “Who ate the puppy pie under Marlow Bridge?,” designed to throw the local bargees and boatmen into a fit of vituperative bad temper. The landlord of the inn at Medmenham had received information that certain bargemen were about to raid his kitchen. Having only moments before drowned a litter of puppies, he cooked them and baked them in a pie that he placed in the larder. The larder was robbed, the pie taken and consumed, according to legend, beneath Marlow Bridge. The provocative question is rarely asked now, on the very good grounds that it would not be understood. There may not in any case be much laughter. James Thorne, in his Rambles by Rivers (1847), said of Marlow that “the countrymen hereabouts are not of a mirthful character, and their liveliness is of a very laborious character.”

  COOKHAM: Perhaps from cwch-ium, the Celtic for boat-place; or perhaps from cocc-ham, or home on the hill. Could it really mean cook’s home? In Domesday it is spelled as Cocheham. Lower, in his Patronymica Britannica (1860), believes that coke is the old spelling for cook from the Latin coquus. Skeat also believes that the Saxon coc or cook in Cookham is derived from the Latin. Curiously enough the cook of Eleanor of Aquitaine is buried in the local church, as well as the “master spicer” of Henry VI. What’s in a name? Cookham is one of the most famous places upon the river largely because of the residence, and the paintings, of Stanley Spencer. But it has other claims to attention. There are two megaliths here, known as the Cookham Stone and the Tarry Stone. The latter, however, may be a meteorite. On the Cookham floodplain were found a cluster of Bronze Age burial mounds. It seems likely that the earliest inhabitants here had travelled upstream from their first settlements in Kent. Roman and Saxon skeletons have been found in abundance. There is a field of Cookham known as Noah’s Ark, and this name is believed to derive from the story that the first and wholly legendary king of the Anglo-Saxons, Sceaf, was the son of Noah and was born in the Ark. So the Bible came to Cookham before the paintings of Stanley Spencer confirmed the association. The Saxon witenamagot met here during the reign of Ethelred the Unready, very likely by the Tarry Stone. There was an abbey in Cookham by AD 716. It is a place of ancient association and ancient settlement in which the layers of the past are impacted just beneath the surface. The historic and the prehistoric are rarely found in such close connection. The river-bed, especially along the course of the old ferry, has yielded relics of every period. When the modern owners of a cottage wished to install a damp course, the builders found several layers of previous floors—reverting, in the end, to a floor of beaten chalk that could not be dated. A house may always have been there, ever since the arrival of humankind in Cookham.

  CLIVEDEN: A steep valley in the cliffs. It is now the spectacular setting for a mansion with an eminent if somewhat chequered history. The first house was built in 1666 by George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham. It burned down in 1795, the fatal result of a maid-servant reading by candlelight in bed. The succeeding house also burned down in 1849. The present house was constructed in 1851 by Sir Charles Barry, and was described at the time as resembling three or four large packing-cases. It has housed among others the Duke of Westminster, William Waldorf Astor, the National Trust and Stanford University of California. It is now advertised as a luxury hotel. The gardens, however, are open to the public. Charles Kingsley wrote that it harboured “the most beautiful landscape that I have ever seen or care to see in the vale of the Thames from Taplow or from Cliveden.” The Cliveden woods or “hanging woods” are a remnant of the primaeval forests that once covered the region. The cliff itself rises 140 feet (42 m), and offers harmonies of oak and beech, ash and chestnut, in profusion. They are rivalled only by the Quarry Woods, opposite Marlow, where the beech and oak and ash and evergreen riot. The woods by the Thames are indeed magical places, redolent with intimations of ancientness. The Quarry Woods are the paradigm of the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows. Green lichen spreads here in autumn. It is here that the Mole experiences “the Terror of the Wild Wood”: “The whole wood seemed running now, running hard, hunting, chasing, closing in round something or—somebody?” It is the cold touch of the primaeval world.

  MAIDENHEAD: It was believed by Camden that the town was named after the head of a maiden saint once venerated here as a sacred relic. The head was popularly believed to have once adorned the neck of on
e of the eleven thousand virgins martyred with St. Ursula at Cologne. Skeat and Ekwall both believed that the word derives from maegden hyth or “landing place for maidens”—in other words, an easy place to land. It has also been deemed to be taken from a hythe by a meadow, a magne or large hythe, a mid-hythe between Windsor and Reading, or a mai dun hythe, meaning a hythe by a great hill. The great hill in question is in fact the burial mound of the Saxon chieftain Taeppa (who gave his name to Taplow on the opposite bank) whose funereal effects are now to be found in the British Museum. In any case, at the time of Domesday, the place was called Elenstone or Ellington. The railway bridge is that depicted by Turner in Rain, Steam, and Speed. It was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and, at the time, people believed it was impossible that the bridge would stand up; there are two elliptical spans of brick arching, each one of 128 feet, with no support except their own structure. They are still the widest and flattest brick arches in the world. It is also known as the “echo” bridge, to the delight of those who use the tow-path.