PANGBOURNE CHURCH.
BASILDON CHURCH.
CHAPTER XIII
STREATLEY—BASILDON—PANGBOURNE—MAPLEDURHAM—PURLEY
Beside the long rustic street of Streatley is the restored—nay, the rebuilt—church, with a new font and almost everything else new. The old font has been walled into the masonry at the junction of nave and chancel.
The street goes mounting towards the broad high road that runs closely neighbouring the river on this Berkshire side, between Wallingford and Reading. Between this and Wallingford we have only the two villages of Moulsford and Cholsey, and they lack interest. Cholsey is the “Celsea” of Domesday. Boating-men know Moulsford only as that place where the old waterside inn, the Beetle and Wedge, is situated. The queer sign has puzzled many town dwellers, but it presents no difficulties to country folk, for a “beetle” is well known to them as a heavy wooden mallet, used in splitting timber, and the “wedge” is the iron wedge inserted in the timber and struck by the “beetle.” The inn has, like most other Thames-side inns, been largely added to and altered; but old frequenters of the river have ardent memories of it and their morning “rum-and-milk.”