and the successful attempt recently made by the Flyfishers’ Club of Hungerford to introduce grayling into it reminds one of the super-excellent quality of the fish indigenous to its waters. The Kennet and Avon navigation makes the connection of this portion of Berkshire with the River Thames direct and valuable. The canal navigation, forming a waterway between the Thames and the West of England, is for the first nineteen miles, namely, from Reading to Newbury, the River Kennet itself; from Newbury to Bath, the canal proper is cut for a distance of fifty-six miles; and the Avon river completes the communication to Bristol. The numerous locks in the Vale of Kennet are connected with this system of navigation, which is practically associated with the concerns of the Great Western Railway. Hungerford, the town which has been here noticed as standing upon the Kennet, was described by Evelyn as a “town famous for its troutes,” and it has well preserved its reputation. Amongst the inns of the town is one named after John o’ Gaunt, who was a person of note in both Hampshire and Berkshire. His association with Reading has been already signified in the reference to the burials and funerals which took place in the abbey; and in Hungerford is a horn, highly honoured as a gift of John o’ Gaunt to the town, and as a memento of the right of fishing enjoyed by the commoners, who still maintain the custom of fishing the Kennet three days per week. At Hungerford, in 1688, the negotiations which ended in the substitution of James II. by William of Orange were conducted.
The Vale of Kennet, from the Hungerford meadows to within a few miles of Reading, is a compact stretch of rural loveliness. We hear of the Vale of Avoca, the Vale of Llangollen, and the Vale of Health, but we do not find the valley through which the Kennet flows magnified in song, though of the smiling and peaceful order of valley landscape it has few competitors in England. Its green pastures lie by still waters, and its little hills seem to drop fatness. Between Reading and Marlborough the eye may, right or left, almost at any moment, rest upon limpid and often rippling water. Narrowed here to the dimensions and restless volume of a goodly lowland trout stream, it there journeys at an even pace, betraying anger and vexation only when subject to artificial restraint; as, for example, when it boils and swirls at a mill-tail, or races impetuously round into the repose of a backwater. The Kennet and Avon Canal is mixed up rather bewilderingly, to a run-and-read stranger, with the river. Pleasant brooks and brooklets thread the water-meads, garnished with forget-me-nots and cuckoo-pints; while in the moist hollows the marsh marigold blossoms in golden clusters. Ancient roofs of thatch-covered tenements, built in another generation, appear now and then; and long-established farmhouses and beautiful mansions vary the prospect on either side of the valley in whose typical English country scenery there is no break of continuity.
At the town of Newbury the Kennet becomes navigable, and so continues throughout the remainder of its course, which is concluded a little below the town of Reading, at the point where the Thames dips to the south as if to meet it, and almost touches the Great Western Railway line. Newbury is a very old town, as the description in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,” of the burning of Palmer, Askew, and Gwyn, in the middle of the sixteenth century, will show. In the fifteenth century Newbury was famous for its cloth weaving, and “Jack of Newbury,” who may almost be said to be the patron saint of the town, was a wealthy cloth manufacturer. He kept a hundred looms at work, and on the invasion of the country by the Scots marched the entire force into the field, and received much compliment upon their martial bearing and superior garments. The two battles between Charles I. and his masterful parliamentarians are historical, and the canal near Newbury Lock passes the ground where the Roundheads camped prior to the first battle of Newbury. In the corn-fields and grass-lands of the rural outskirts of the town, occasional traces are unearthed of a battle in which six thousand men were killed, and a suitable monument, raised by public subscription, stands to commemorate where—
“On this field
Did Falkland fall, the blameless and the brave,”
and to record that Lord Carnarvon, Lord Sutherland, and other Cavaliers also, perished in the unfortunate cause of their unfortunate king.
SONNING-ON-THAMES.