THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
CHAPTER I
SONNING—HURST, “IN THE COUNTY OF WILTS”—SHOTTESBROOKE—WARGRAVE
As Reading can by no means be styled a village, seeing that its population numbers over 72,000, the fact of its not being treated of in these pages will perhaps be excused. You cannot rusticate at Reading: the electric tramways, the great commercial premises, and the crowded state of its streets forbid; but Reading, taken frankly as a town and a manufacturing town at that, is not at all a place for censure. The Kennet, however, that flows through it, has here become a very different Kennet from that which sparkles in the Berkshire meads between Hungerford and Kintbury, and has a very dubious and deterrent look where it is received into the Thames.
The flat, open shores at Reading presently give place to the wooded banks approaching Sonning, where the fine trees of Holme Park are reflected in the waters of the lock—the lock that was tended for many years, until his death, about 1889, by a lock-keeper who also kept bees, made beehives, and wrote poetry. Sonning, and its Thames-side “Parade,” certainly invite to poetry.
To say there is no Thames-side village prettier, or in any way more delightful, than Sonning is vague praise and also in some ways understates its peculiar attractiveness, which, strange to say, seems to increase, rather than decrease, with the years. It might have been expected that a village but three miles from the great and increasing town of Reading would suffer many indignities from that proximity, and would be infested with such flagrant nuisances as wayside advertisement-hoardings and street-loafers, but these manifestations of the zeitgeist are, happily, entirely absent.
Let us, however, halt for a moment to give a testimonial of character to Reading itself, which is far above the average of great towns in these and many other matters. Loafers and street-hoardings are found there, without doubt—and can we find the modern town of its size where they are not?—but they do not obtrude; and, in short, Reading is, with all its bustle of business, a likeable place.
There are reasons for Sonning remaining unspoiled. They are not altogether sufficient reasons, for they obtain in other once delightful villages similarly situated, which have unhappily been ravaged by modern progress; but here they have by chance sufficed. They are found chiefly in the happy circumstances that Sonning lies three-quarters of a mile off the main-road—off that Bath road, oh! my brethren, that was once so delightful, with its memories of a bypast coaching-age; and is now little better than a race-track for motor-cars, and, by reason of their steel-studded tyres, cursed with a bumpy surface full of pot-holes. Time was when the surface of the Bath road was perfection. Nowadays, no ingenuity of mortal road-surveyors can keep it in repair, for the suction of air caused by pneumatic tyres travelling at great speed tears out the binding material and leaves only loose grit and stones. The Bath road on a fine summer’s day has become unendurable by reason of the dust raised in this manner. If you stand a distance away, in the fields, out of sight of the actual road, its course can yet be distinctly traced for a long way by the billows of dust, rising like smoke from it.
Happily, motor-cars do but rarely come into Sonning, although at the turning out of the high road a prominent advertisement of the Bull, the White Hart, or the French Horn—the three hostelries that Sonning can boast—invites them hither.