Thames Valley Villages, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Charles G. Harper

MONUMENT IN THE PARK, FAIRFORD, WHERE THE FAMOUS WINDOWS WERE BURIED.

The first lock of the forty-two locks on the Thames is that of St. John’s, which, like Lechlade Bridge, often styled “St. John’s Bridge,” takes its name from the Priory of St. John the Baptist that once stood hard by. The Priory was a Hospice as well, and was charged with the care of travellers who came this way. As part of their charge the Black Canons who formed the establishment built the original bridge across the Thames here.

St. John’s Bridge, like some carefully-restored old dowager, by no means looks its age, but all those who care to know are credibly informed that “This bridge, though often repaired and altered on the upper part, is the original structure of great antiquity, having existed prior to the reign of Henry III.” The “Trout” inn, formerly the “St. John Baptist’s Head,” stands beside a backwater, on the site of the Priory that was disestablished so long ago as 1473.

At St. John’s Lock the lock-keeper not only hands you the first of the many threepenny pink tickets that are painfully familiar to those who cruise upon the Thames, but another in addition, for Buscot Lock, one-mile-and-a-quarter onward, where the poor, impoverished (or, perhaps more likely, the mean, parsimonious) Conservancy cannot, or at least does not, maintain a resident lock-keeper; with the result that you have the choice of working your own way through, or of leaving the job to the official hands of the keeper at St. John’s, who in the latter event cycles the distance. But in any case you pay your threepence for each lock.

The Thames from this point becomes singularly lonely. Few roads cross it, and the villages are small and infrequent, and are rarely to be seen from a boat. The ideal method of exploration is to take a bicycle on the boat and to lay it across the bows, where it is out of the way and yet easily within reach when wanted. Then, at some convenient point, where a road or path comes down to the river, and places likely to be of interest are but a mile, or two or three miles, distant, it is your easiest method to have out the machine and explore swiftly and with ease, among little-visited ways.

Buscot, however, on the Berkshire shore, is so close at hand that its church may easily be seen from the boat and visited by the mere effort of pulling to the bank under the hoary willows, and stepping into the meadow beside whose buttercup-spangled grass it stands.

Buscot—formerly Burwardscott, then corrupted into Burscott, and finally into the present rendering—is a place of some note, artistically and agriculturally, for the little parish church has an east window by Burne-Jones, representing the Good Shepherd, instead of the usual ecclesiastical-furnishers’ impossible stained-glass saints. We may perhaps, without offence, congratulate ourselves and all concerned that those stained-glass freaks are, and must ever have been, impossibilities. They have the most unprepossessing countenances, of an impossibly holy type, and generally the vilest taste in coloured robes; while of the Burne-Jones saints we can at least say that, although commonly eight feet high in proportion to their heads, and generally of a consumptive type, they are at least recognisably like human beings. And a saint, you know, was originally, before he or she was given his or her halo and other extraordinary attachments, merely a more than usually good person of just ordinary physical attributes. I don’t think anyone will have the hardihood to deny that. One other prime curiosity the church of Buscot possesses: a very highly enriched pulpit of wood, with panels painted in various religious subjects, by or after artists of the Italian School. A panel representing the Annunciation is more remarkable than ever was intended, for among the attendant Wise Men from the East is shown a negro with black head and arms and white legs! “Can the Ethiopian change his skin?” Partially, it should seem.

Buscot manor-house is as notable for containing the Burne-Jones “Briar Rose” sequence of paintings illustrating the ancient legend of the Sleeping Beauty, as the owner is for his successful shire-horse breeding. It is not often that the love of art and keen interest in shire horses are shared equally by one man, as they are by Sir Alexander Henderson, of Buscot, who is at once the owner of the finest Burne-Jones pictures and the breeder of “Buscot Harold,” champion of three successive London Shire Horse Shows.

It is interesting to know that Buscot manor-house, standing in its park on the ridge above the river, on the way to Faringdon, was built from the stones of the demolished palace at Kempsford, even though we may see only an eighteenth-century solidity and comfort, rather than any hint of beauty or history in the re-edified stones.