The Thames hereabouts, notwithstanding the prevailing officialism, is very modest. At the period of my last visit I found that there had been no floods for eighteen months; and the river, as our boatman put it, had long wanted washing out. In its widest part in the neighbourhood of the first lock it is not more than twenty yards from bank to bank, and on each side there are thick margins of bull-rush, sedge, and flag. The water is fairly deep, but cumbered with masses of weeds, out of which spring the tall rank stems of water-parsnip, while here and there small, compact, yellow water-lilies gleam like moidores on a silver plate. The river runs parallel with the lock channel under St. John’s Bridge, a comparatively new and good-looking structure of one arch. It is about a mile from the town of Lechlade, and near it is the old-fashioned “Trout” Inn, still maintaining all the homely characteristics of the English countryside inn. A great sycamore overshadows it; there is an old-fashioned garden at the rear, and its little orchard, with a noble walnut-tree in the centre, offers a pathway to the pool. There is something in the semblance of a weir at St. John’s Bridge, though it is of the most rudimentary kind, having fallen naturally into decay, and even into desuetude. Still, the small sluices are occasionally lifted, and serviceable streams are formed to keep the pool in motion, and prevent the patriarchal trout from giving notice to quit. At the end of St. John’s Bridge tradition placed the priory of Black Canons, but of this there is no more substantial record than that of ink and paper. A few yards beyond the garden, on the left bank, the River Lech creeps into the Thames.
The regulation towpath exists from this point downwards, but for miles to come it is, like the boundaries of counties, a generally invisible line. The path is never trampled by horses, since barge traffic is unknown. For the towage of pleasure boats it is occasionally used, though these upper regions are rarely indeed penetrated by tourists. This is a pity; for there are a quietude and utter rurality about the river from Lechlade till within the precincts of Oxford that will be looked for in vain upon the busier haunts. Farther down there are glimpses—samples, so to speak—of what we have here in the bulk. We shall here find none of those notable Thames scenes that have been written about and painted from the olden times to the present day. Progressing from Lechlade downwards you feel altogether removed from the haunts of men. A patient angler sitting in his home-made boat under the overhanging boughs of a tree you will occasionally pass, and the presence of labourers toiling in the meadows informs you that this is not wholly a sleepy hollow. But river traffic, in the common meaning of the term, there is none. For a whole day you will probably not meet a boat; and there is no necessity to sigh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, some boundless contiguity of space, seeing that you have so excellent a substitute at hand. The solitude is, in truth, delightful. As you drop down between the banks you see drawn up in review order regiments of familiar friends—the dark glossy leaves of the water dock, bursting into seed in July; huge clumps of blue forget-me-nots that can only be plucked from a boat; ox-eyed daisies, well above high-water mark, gleaming as fixed stars in the floral firmament; the yellow-flowering great watercress, the purple loose-strife beginning to blossom, yellow iris, the white flowers of the common watercress, the pink persicaria, meadow-sweet, the comfreys, and sometimes a clump of arrowheads. From one to another flits the superb dragon-fly:—
“One almost fancies that such happy things,
With coloured hoods and richly-burnished wings,
Are fairy folk, in splendid masquerade
Disguised, as if of mortal folk afraid;
Keeping their joyous pranks a mystery still,
Lest glaring day should do their secrets ill.”
A mile and a half of winding and uniformly narrow river brings us to rare old Buscot. The days of its weather-stained lock and weir are numbered too, but so long as they remain they will be, in conjunction, an object such as the artist loves, and a reminder to us all of other days when the world was not so jaded as now, when things were not so new, and when the ways of men were more primitive. There is a very fine tumbling bay on the farther side of the weir, and a sharp sweep of swiftly-running water coursing over a gravelly shallow, upon which the trout come out to feed at eventide, and the silvery dace and bleak poise in happy security during the long summer days. One is tempted naturally to land at the little village. The square, solid, countryfied-looking church tower, surrounded by old trees, and approached through a flower-garden, suggests, as your boat pauses at the lock, that it will be better to spend a quarter of an hour afoot than in the tedious process of passing through. Buscot is not a large or a pretentious place, but it is pleasant to look at, and deserves mention in passing, as giving name to the first weir of goodly size. A particularly pretty bit of the river, winding, tree-lined, and narrow, is followed by a long unromantic stretch.
Quaint, time-honoured Hart’s Weir is so little a weir that the ordinary boat shoots the open half on the strength of a miniature rapid representing, at a summer level of the river, a fall of three or four inches only. The water there opens out into a wide bay that is purling rather than tumbling; and this is succeeded, in the ordinary course of nature, by a silted-up shallow, densely covered in their season with the white, yellow-eyed blossoms of the water crowfoot. Kelmscott on the north, and Eaton Hastings on the south, are the nearest villages. The banks of the Thames are now clearly defined by those trees which love to spread their branches to a river. The Thames does not, like the Loddon, encourage a monopoly of alder, but favours rather the familiar willow, the Lombardy poplar, and the plentiful hawthorn. Clumps of old elms, most picturesque of English trees when standing on village green, or as a rearguard to church or manor-house, vary the prospect. White and red wild roses are plentiful in the higher reaches of the river, and every turn of the narrow stream offers new combinations of wood and field:—