Sinodun and the clumps look nowhere more impressive than along the road between Culham and Wallingford, where they form not so much the boldly-isolated hills and tufts they appear to be from the river, as the culmination of the gradually-rising downlands. In the lap of the downs, just before they rise to these crests, are situated some ranges of farm-buildings in the open, hedgeless fields, and there you see the cattle-byres and the ricks looking small against the huge scale of their surroundings in this shivery setting. It is Anglo-Saxon Berkshire you see here, in all essentials, not the twentieth-century Berkshire typified by Reading; and more of a piece with White Horse Hill than with that bustling and thriving and increasing town.
The stranger who comes to Long Wittenham thinks, on first seeing its retired aspect, that if ever he wished to seclude himself from the world, it is to Long Wittenham he would go; but he has only to proceed to Little Wittenham for him at once to look upon Long Wittenham as, by force of contrast, a metropolitan centre. As the larger place is with a peculiar fitness styled “long,” so yet in a more appropriate manner is the smaller called “little.” It appears to consist solely of a church, a vicarage, and a farm.
Little, or Abbot’s, Wittenham, the manor having once belonged to Abingdon Abbey, is not merely little. It is also remote. Not a remoteness of great mileage, but the quite equal detachment of being situated on a road that leads to anywhere at all only by rustic and winding ways. It sits peacefully and slumberously at the very foot of Sinodun, enfolded amid delightful hedgerow elms, “the world forgetting, and by the world forgot.” Not always was Little Wittenham so retired from all rumours of the outer world, for here was situated, from the sixteenth century until 1800, when it was demolished, the manor-house of the Dunch family, who moved not obscurely in the society of their time. The Dunches finally died out in 1719, and now all that is left of them are some musty pedigrees in county histories, the mounds and trenches to the north of the church, where their mansion stood, and some tombs and brasses in the church itself, which was rebuilt, except the tower, in 1863. It is a tall, slim tower, picturesquely weatherworn, but not exceptionally remarkable, unless we take note of its small turret-window in the shape of an ace of spades (not an ace of clubs, as my late friend, Mr. J. E. Vincent, says in his Highways and Byways in Berkshire). Local legend tells us that this represents the ace with which the builder of the tower won a fortune; but it is really nothing more than a cross-slit window, mutilated in its upper half into that shape.
WITTENHAM CLUMPS.
Clifton Hampden, lying between the Wittenhams, is on the Oxfordshire side of the river. If there were ever a competition as to which is the prettiest village on the Thames below Oxford, surely Clifton Hampden would be bracketed with Sonning for first place. There is this chief difference between the two; that Sonning is a considerable village and Clifton a small one. They are alike in that they both possess a bridge, but different again in the fact that while Sonning bridge is of the eighteenth century, and with only its quaintness to recommend it, the bridge at Clifton is a beautiful building of the nineteenth, in the mediæval style, one of the most successful on the river, and only lacking the element of age. There is, sooth to say, no village at Clifton Hampden; just a bridge, a church, the lovely old thatched Barley Mow Inn, and a few scattered cottages, generally, in the summer months, with an artist in front of each, rendering it in the medium of water or of oil, upon paper or canvas. And the grassy banks come down to the river delightfully, and over on the Oxfordshire side rises the charming little Transitional Norman and Decorated church upon the abrupt sandstone bluff or cliff that gives Clifton its name. One may linger away contented afternoons here, perhaps with a book, perhaps watching from the bridge the minnows or the dace, or with amusement noting the evolutions of the flotillas of ducks and ducklings that come and go in company, like miniature navies. To see a duck dip down and stand on its head in the water is to watch a humorous feat: possibly, according to the observations of some naturalists, to witness a tragedy, for it would seem that the ferocious pike have not infrequently been known to seize by the head a duck so gymnastically exercising, and thus to make an end of it.
The quality of Clifton Hampden church is shown, as to its exterior, by the accompanying illustration; which also discloses the steep steps leading up to it, and the elaborate churchyard cross—all works of 1907. The Hampdens, who once owned the manor, have no memorials here, and the greatly-restored condition of the church is due to the Hucks-Gibbs family. The Transitional Norman south nave-arcade, with round-headed arches, simply sculptured capitals, and enormous bases to the columns, is entirely delightful: the plain painted north arcade, without capitals, poor and mean by comparison. In the church was once an ancient leaden font, of the Dorchester and Long Wittenham type, but this was sold for old metal by a vicar who thought it ugly!