The river’s been holding out on us. Not anymore. The floods and clouds recede over a flawless dreamscape. The Chiltern hillsides erupt in fresh spring blooms, the screech of red kites slices the air, and through it all the everlasting ribbon of crystal-smooth water glints in the sunshine. Welcome, it says, to Wind in the Willows territory.

"Nice? It's the only thing," said the Water Rat solemnly as he leant forward for his stroke. "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing," he went on dreamily: "messing—about—in—boats; messing—"

And so the dream crashes to a thousand splinters.

Oh make no mistake, this dream, in this place, on this day, is reality. You can walk in this gorgeousness, immerse all your senses in it, feel better for the fact it exists – and then you can weep. Because realities constantly change, and all realities are in contact with each other. All that this is, indicates all it is not. And what this is not, it will be soon, for this is the calm before the most terrible storm in their lives.

The picture has four sides. Underneath lurks English class violence in the ruins of modernity. To the left, upriver, up the flow of time, the winter tempests rage and the floods rear up to claim their due. And to the right, it careens down the stream of time toward the doom that has now arrived: COVID-19, the pandemic that has laid bare to the English, and all humankind, the disgrace of their social and political arrangements. All that is needed to complete this sorry meta-picture is the alien civilisations off the top, studying us with alarm and concern and wondering how the hell, with a planet so abundant as this, we could have got it so wrong.

Yet in the dreamscape of the Thames valley, many have found it easy to tune out what lies beyond its frames.

But now the coronavirus has come in for its lunch. Though invisible to the eye, it pinches all one’s senses round the picture-frame of this progress through the best of the Thames valley so far, undertaken just before the pandemic exploded. Walkers leave the paths to semicircle round each other at wide berths; nervous conversations are overheard in pubs and parks. Most telling of all, the water itself is empty of people.

That is unthinkable, because this stretch ends down a long and famous straight in the settlement of Henley-on-Thames. Henley is the command centre and primary base of the English rowing establishment, a juggernaut we first encountered on its University Boat Race in London and must now confront in its nest. As such, one would expect the Thames here to teem with boats, bristle with oars and erupt with the grunts, heaves, hollers, sweat and megaphone-assisted admonishments of an activity tethered to English national pride with the toughest of ropes and regimented to military extremes as they drill for their lives…

…but not today. The river is silent. And when an enemy is fearsome enough to confine the boats and paddles of Henley to their racks, you know it heralds the end of an era.

Start:Marlow Bridge (nearest station: Marlow)

End:Henley Bridge (nearest station: Henley-on-Thames)

Length: 13.6km/8.5 miles

Location: Buckinghamshire – Wycombe; Berkshire – Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, Wokingham; Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire

Topics: Bisham Abbey and the Temple Mills, The Wind in the Willows, Hurley, Medmenham and the Hellfire Club, Remenham, Henley-on-Thames and the Plagues

With that it is farewell to Marlow as the river strikes west. From here it winds through its remotest landscapes yet, along the base of the Chiltern Hills: that chalk escarpment that is the closest thing (at about 250m high, not really that close) that the English south has to mountains. Here the fields and woods unfurl, and the timelines, no longer bound to strong urban anchors, shift insecure.

In short order a stocky Norman church, with its twelfth-century Go-Away tower, asserts itself on the opposite riverbank. It is the All Saints Church of Bishamvillage, which will be familiar if you have been following this journey because it was where the monks of Chertsey Abbey gave it a final go after Henry VIII broke up their monastery.

The monastery complex was built just upriver, and centred on a manor house which survives to the present day. The manor came first, built for the formidable Knights Templar, but they were brutally suppressed in 1307 as the European kings feared their growing power. From there Bisham passed through various titled hands till it ended up with the Earls of Salisbury, who founded the Bisham Priory monastic community around it. Like the other monasteries it was crushed under Henry VIII’s purge in the 1530s, but unusually got a short second lease of life – when the Chertsey monks retreated here – before getting broken for good in 1538, after which all the monastery buildings were torn down.

But to look closer at the manor house’s grounds is to spot land uses one identifies with neither manors nor monasteries: tennis courts, squash courts, football and hockey pitches, a golf course and a sizeable gym. This is because Bisham Abbey – which still keeps that name – has fallen into the hands of Sport England as one of its three National Sports Centres. These are serious world-class facilities dedicated to nurturing English elite sporting efforts, including its national football and rugby teams.

The fate of Bisham Abbey exemplifies two themes that colour the banks ahead. One is the ruins of worlds gone by, moved into and repurposed anew: abbeys and mills and forts turned to offices, cultural and educational facilities, or the usual unaffordable housing. The other theme is the decidedly sporty turn the river is taking, sustained by a constellation of rowing and sailing clubs till it crosses its white-hot finish line at Henley.

Temple Mill Island also fell within the Bisham monastery’s sphere of influence. Conveniently the ‘Mill’ refers to the watermills which stood on it, as mills do on river islands, since long before the monastery came along, while the ‘Temple’ descends from the old Knights Templar presence.

The mills outlasted both them and the monks. Indeed, mill owners’ control over the river gave them considerable power, blocking its course with their weirs and – in the days before the present ‘pound’ locks – holding traffic at the mercy of their ‘flash’ locks. Those were basically gates in the weir for boats to dangerously ‘flash’ down or get hauled up, with the millers typically charging their captains through the nose to use them (which upset the City of London big merchants the latter worked for, part of the reason the Magna Carta was so concerned with regulating mills and weirs on the river).

When the monastery was demolished, the mills remained and struck out on their own. After lifetimes in the tranquil service of agriculture, they too transformed beneath an industrial sky into clanging, sweaty foundries of copper and brass, astonishing a passing Daniel Defoe in 1722 with their kettles and pans. They boomed through the British imperial wars till around the 1840s, when they switched to paper-making, but the decline of industry a hundred years later finally finished them off, and by the end of the 1970s Temple Mill Island for the first time had neither Templars nor Mills.

So far the usual fate of these leafy spaces has been to get taken over by people with too much money, aligning their pretentious Private Properties along the waterfront and asking the river what it’s going to do about it till it answers in inundating ways they ought to have expected. So here they take things up a level. These reaches were or are the domains of individual country mansions, raised or set back from the water with spreading blankets of field and membranes of wood.

The perception of other worlds explored round the Cookham bend, layered above or below this one yet ever blending into it, returns here. They amount to an emotional confusion: the carefree romance of the rustic Thames does not mix easy with the blooded spikes of class and market forces, nor with the spectral undercurrents of devastation by plague which have always lurked as one of the river’s dark secrets.

Perhaps they jar so much because the rustic romance is at its strongest in these parts. So it was for a young Scottish boy called Kenneth Grahame who, growing up hereabouts in the 1860s in the anguish of having lost his mother to post-natal illness and his father down the bottle (the latter still lived but would abandon him), found precious sanctuary in the magical otherworld of the Thames. While Stanley Spencer opened a way to that world with his paintbrush, Grahame would build the portal with his pen. That portal, The Wind in the Willows, has ever since invited the mundane English into one of their most treasured dream-journeys on the itinerary of English transcendence, and perhaps the Thames world’s most familiar of all: one in which the animals talk, enjoy the comforts of home and harvest, and participate in (or in one gloriously infamous case, run rings around) the good old public institutions of the English countryside.

The Wind in the Willows is the paradigm of the Thames pastoral fantasy. It centres on the adventures of a small group of furry friends: the everyman Mole, the rustically cultured and comradely Rat, the gruff and scary-but-actually-kind hermit Badger, and the rather more problematic Toad who warrants his own treatment at length. “Adventures” really means faffing around in boats, delighting in the warmth of the burrow and the treasures of the well-stocked larder, getting lost in the woods, and other such experiences of the natural cosiness and tranquility of their Thames valley home. One of the book’s standouts is its copious descriptions of that nature, which Grahame’s prose rolls and cascades across at such length, like the tributaries of the river itself, that publishers today would surely flick the contents of their haughty nostrils at it. Yet it is precisely these tumblings down the reedbeds and rabbit-holes that made the work such a vessel for the mythscape of the rural Thames in English imagination, so bringing it to life down the generations.

Naturally it is the river itself – ‘a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea’ – that threads through the length of this dream and binds it all together with its ribbon.

But this is not a separate world. Grahame portrays these anthropomorphic animals as living across both realities as though they are one. They have their animal world, but also operate within that of the humans who seem totally unfazed by this curious state of affairs. The result is a real charm in the unremarkability of the animals’ use of human shops, pubs, and post offices, and by far most of all in Mr. Toad’s seamless – if to him quite unwelcome – interactions with the police, courts and prisons (in which he ‘passed his days and nights for several weeks, refusing his meals or intermediate light refreshments, though the grim and ancient gaoler, knowing that Toad's pockets were well lined, frequently pointed out that many comforts, and indeed luxuries, could by arrangement be sent in—at a price—from outside’).

Perhaps it is by building this dream not in a separate dimension but on this liminal space at its edge, overlapping with this reality, reachable from it, that Grahame achieved his work’s ready appeal. These animals really do inhabit the riverbanks after all, with relationships and ways of life mysterious to humans yet physically significant to the shape of this landscape. Even if an otter isn’t about to enter the pub and order a few pints in literal terms, depictions like that still offer the Thames’s human inhabitants ways to relate to their environment, to make shared meaning with it, and – if all goes well – to value and interact healthily with it at a heartfelt depth that empirical understanding of its ecology, however vital, struggles to reach on its own.

Consider, for example, this speculative psychology of bird migrations as told by a sparrow:

This is shamanicwork, which every now and again wanders well off the Thames towpath into all-out mystical territory. In a chapter often omitted from adaptations (perhaps due to monotheistic fragility?), the animals encounter a ‘piper at the gates of dawn’: a horned, hoofed demigod figure who seems to represent a helping and healing force in nature’s narrow places, his pan-pipe melodies carrying like wind through the reeds. At other times they ruminate on philosophical fare, as in the Badger’s explanation of his remarkable house, built into subterranean ruins:

Emphasis added, because this sounds like the sort of scenario to which a certain virus acquaintance might have something to contribute.

If the setting still sounds somewhat twee, another presence in the narrative bone-marrow is felt not three paragraphs in, when the Mole, on his way out, is accosted by a rabbit who demands “Sixpence for the privilege of passing by the private road!”. Class, as performed through such propertied behaviours, is everything in England, and causes the tenor of The Wind in the Willowsto change dramatically when it turns to follow the figure through which it is most humorously explored: the hilariously conceited Toad – ‘Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night’. When he’s not scorching a wake of accidents, fines, arrests and hospitalisations through his obsession with speeding around in stolen motor-cars, still a novel technology at the time, he lazes around, splurging his inherited wealth on satisfying his crazes (which he cycles through arbitrarily) from the comfort of his mansion, Toad Hall, an archetype of those massive estates which dominate such huge swathes of riverside land in these parts. It is “an eligible, self-contained gentleman's residence, very unique; dating in part from the fourteenth century, but replete with every modern convenience. Up-to-date sanitation. Five minutes from church, post-office, and golf-links…”

…as he later describes it to the warden’s daughter while languishing in jail. His collisions with the apparatus of the law dispense with the darkness of both sides of this English equation – the guffawing impunity of the high-propertied, versus the vicious and prejudiced cruelty of ‘law and order’ in the age of Oscar Wilde – to set up a fair contest between the two in which one is left at times pitying the jollified public officials in their pursuit of this slippery menace, and at other times hoping for their frustration, if only because the Toad cycles between such comically over-the-top self-celebration in victory and abject wallowing self-pity in defeat that the effect is most splendid when the leap or fall from one to the other occurs over the greatest distance.

Domesticated as these ruinous English class phenomena may be in this work, there is more than the occasional subtle dig at, say, the pretences of officialdom and questionable integrity of the rule of law. Take a look at how Toad receives his sentence, with a few discretionary emphases added:

The class commentary continues as Toad escapes from jail in the disguise of an elderly washer-woman – a relative of the warden’s daughter, who takes pity on the wretched creature.

But this impersonation of a cleaning lady, falling in his mind many rungs beneath his social position, does not come easily to him. The result is a catalogue of ludicrous ordeals he brings on himself while on the run, most often in encounters with the labouring classes to whom he speaks in suspiciously pompous diction and, when upset, cannot resist bursting out of the persona his freedom depends on to vituperate at them with high-caste condescension.

Mr. Toad’s lovable rampages, deceptions and histrionics contrast with the seamier end of the class spectrum: the coarse and violent ne’er-do-wells that are the weasels, stoats and ferrets of the Wild Wood. This is the menacing working-class slum of the Wind in the Willows world.