Privilege Forts like to appear immortal. That after all is how privilege protects itself: by seeding the belief that it’s innate, essential, morally ordained, rather than a violent seizure of power within history.
Can you look on a Tower of London or a Windsor Castle, and dare imagine the scene without them there?
How about the Thames’s other great castle?
Yes. There was a third. It was every bit as mighty, massive and politically consequential as the other two. Unlike them it actually had to fight off siege after siege after siege. And it did. It capped the entire set of core English strongholds; only those two were a match for its power and prestige.
Ever heard of Wallingford? Thought not.
Today the river brings us to a Privilege Fort of yesterday, although its retirement appears more comfortable than most. Nestled at the bottom of the Oxford Plain where once it guarded the Goring Gap, the little town of Wallingford potters quietly about in the rustic margins between Oxford and Reading. But get up close and poke it, and you might just get it to tell you the story of its days as the capital of the royal centre, the unbreakable shield of dynasties, and the pivot of those conquests, rebellions and civil wars in whose bloody crucible a shape was first carved for the English nation.
Which begs the question: What happened to it?
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| The castle once filled this entire plateau. Does something like that simply disappear? From memory as much as from landscape? |
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| Perhaps it was murdered. Wallingford was also the later-life home of the detective-novel writer Agatha Christie – recognised by Guinness as the best-selling fiction writer of all time – as well as a principal filming site for the TV drama Midsomer Murders. One is advised to stay alert to suspicious middle-class people with knives and poisons leaping out from its innumerable little corners like this one. |
This mystery awaits in a straight strike north from the Goring Gap. This is more or less a two-phase walk: there is the spruced-up high-bourgeois white fantasyland beyond Goring and Streatley, followed by a wilder push through Berkshire bush the rest of the way. All in all it’s very green, and if you can bear the typical all-pervading English structural injustice then it actually offers some really nice walking on a warm summer’s day like this one.
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| The river north of Streatley. There’s plenty of space to walk around people on this one, but be considerate on occasional narrower passages through foliage. |
Among those injustices, do not forget, of course, that this country’s self-inflicted COVID-19 disaster goes on. While most of this route is out in the open, social distancing, face masks, and general hygiene considerateness are strongly advised in the built-up settlements and on public transport.
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| North from Goring Bridge, with the Swan Hotel of Streatley at left. |
Start:Goring Bridge (nearest station: Goring and Streatley)
End:Wallingford Bridge (nearest station: Cholsey – 10 minutes by Bus 136 from Wallingford Market Place)
Length: 11.2km/7 miles
Location: Berkshire – West Berkshire; Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire
Topics: Streatley, Moulsford, Wallingford: Saxon fort, Norman castle, English ruin
Streatley
We begin by crossing back to the west riverbank for a quick duck through Goring-on-Thames’s counterpart of Streatley. The village’s name, suggesting a clearing (leah) on a road (stræt), identifies its long strategic importance. Most likely the road in question is the old north-south Roman road through the gap in the chalk hills, though it could also refer to the far older east-west Ridgeway.
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| The Swan Inn that dominates the Streatley riverside goes back to at least the mid-nineteenth century, though is thought to be considerably older. Its current incarnation is as a posh hotel, restaurant and rental space for functions. |
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| Behind the Swan is Streatley’s St. Mary’s Church, a nineteenth-century extensive rebuild of a Norman thirteenth-century structure (which itself likely superseded one still older). |
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| From there it’s straight into the woods and back to the river. |
Hemmed in by the Berkshire Downs, Streatley is tiny, with Goring getting most new development when the railway came through. It ends almost as soon as it began, conceding the riverbank to a succession of farms and open fields.
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| For now the path is the remnant of the old working towpath, where horses once pulled barges along the river. Today’s terrain is easy walking for the most part. |
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| Flower meadows abound on these reaches. |
Meanwhile the lavish property-playgrounds of Goring sprawl their monied way up an east bank replete with gardens, follies and boatyards. Their growling lawnmowers puncture the chorus of insect and bird chirps, while the water itself endures a regular traffic of their pleasure-cruisers.
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| This one has the lookout turret for a cleverly-disguised subterranean bunker, no doubt for sheltering from the consequences of the English caste system. |
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| Here on the west side, what was probably once a working inlet has been repurposed as a water feature for well-off residences. |
A pleasant wide meadow then opens up, popular with such dog-walkers, picnickers, small children and fishing parties as are a frequent sight through this section. Here the pleasure-craft back up as they queue to get through Cleeve Lock, the only lock and weir we will pass today.
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| Some sizeable hard-worked thistles here. |
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| Cleeve Lock is one of the smaller ones, built first in 1787 then rebuilt in 1874. Cleeve was a separate village that has since been absorbed into Goring. |
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| The old mill with the weir has joined the ranks of Goring’s lavish private mansions. River travellers like to note that the downriver reach to Goring Lock is the Thames’s shortest between locks, while the upriver reach to Benson Lock (beyond Wallingford) is its longest. |
Beyond the lock the property-incursions grow gradually sparser. To the west, views open up of golden wheat fields trailing off the Berkshire Downs.
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| The Leatherne Bottel on the east bank is another old establishment that has since been fancily done up by the leisured classes, in this case into the Don Giovanni Italian restaurant. It is something of a celebrity-magnet, but the site’s repute goes back at least three or four hundred years to when its springs were said to have medicinal properties and drew visitors over great distances. |
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| A heron keeps a watchful eye on passers-by. |
Eventually the river ducks into a copse of willow trees at Runsford Hole, a pocket of denser greenery that precedes the approach to the only settlement on this side between the Goring Gap and Wallingford.
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| Regrettably there’s lots of this too. In fact the land belongs only to itself, and you should refrain from the activities listed here out of consideration for the actual land and others who use it, not imaginary claims to its ownership. |
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| Runsford Hole is obscure. Few clues remain as to where the name comes from, or what feature on this bit of river afforded it a name in the first place. These willows appear to be coppiced; perhaps they were regularly managed and harvested in earlier times. Osiers, they call them in that capacity. You can make lots of stuff out of them. |
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| Younger willow shoots up thick here, necessitating a little pushing through their growths. |
Now here’s another imaginary line. It is hereabouts that the wayfarer passes, unremarked, from Berkshire into Oxfordshire. However this has only been the case since the administrative reforms of 1974. For over a thousand years prior Berkshire extended some way further up the Thames’s western flank, beyond the Berkshire Downs and out across the Vale of White Horse.
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| To the west, the farmed slopes of the Berkshire Downs roll into the Oxford Plain. The Vale of White Horse runs off between these foothills and the Thames’s uppermost reaches. |
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| It’s quite nice here. You could almost forget what a state this country is in. Almost. Countries which forcibly deport people for their skin colour don’t deserve to be allowed to forget it. |
Moulsford
Suddenly there materialises a built embankment lined with small boats, followed by the re-emergence of affluent residences. It is the approach to Moulsford, a village that briefly breaks up this old Berkshire rurality.
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| One of these parts’ more bizarre riverside properties: Moulsford’s ‘Egyptian House’, completed in 1999 under apparent commission by a professional Egyptologist. |
Moulsford was traditionally a manor held from Norman times by the ennobled Carew family, though more recently it has served as a hotel, US Air Force facility, and a nursing home before falling into private control. To more immediate aggravation it gave rise to another set of riverside property-grabs, thus forcing the towpath onto the opposite bank past another manorial remnant, the hamlet of South Stoke.
With the demise of the Moulsford Ferry by which the river workers got around this problem, wayfarers are left with no choice but to detour inland up the A329, the descendant of the old Roman road.
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| The Beetle and Wedge Boathouse – now another fancy restaurant – sits on the former timber wharf which ran the ferry until 1967. Its name records its prior incarnation as a workers’ trading inn: a beetle in this sense was a mallet used for driving wedges into logs, which would have been split here then floated down the river. |
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| For all its long history, the road through Moulsford today has little to recommend it. The village is upper-bourgeois residential with a couple of prestigious private schools. |
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| Moulsford’s little church, with distinct timber bellcote, is an 1840s Gothic Revival piece that replaced a twelfth-century chapel. |
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| At the north end of the village the buildings and sports fields of Moulsford Preparatory School (boys only, because this is a shamefully gendered country) occupy a large riverside complex. Here they seem to be expanding across the road to build an additional school facility for smaller children. |
Moulsford has one other major structure, which faces explorers who make it past the settled area and find the farm track back to the river.
Moulsford Railway Bridge is a monumental four-arch Isambard Kingdom Brunel piece much like its nearby counterpart at Gatehampton. Like that one it was constructed at the end of the 1830s to run the Great Western Railway up to Oxford, and has remained in decent service since with few structural alterations.
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| A boardwalk helpfully enables walkers to proceed through the westernmost arch without getting wet. |
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| From this angle you can see it’s actually two bridges. They added the second in the 1890s to increase capacity, building it as close to Brunel’s design as they could. |
From here the grass grows taller and the brush thicker with life. A more immersive nature walk through wooded fields and marshes offers a temporary respite from the nightmares of humankind.
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| Before, beyond, and through it all, there is the river. |
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| Others have come and just as surely gone. No-one can own it or claim special entitlement to its services. All are its guests. |
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| During an ITV interview in 2017, then-Prime Minister Theresa May, when asked to identify the naughtiest thing she’d ever done, infamously replied that she’d run through fields of wheat as a child. The blank stares might have subsided by now but the very image of English wheat fields may be forever tarnished by the association. |
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| A Red Admiral butterfly. Crickets thrum through the meadows here, and a professional birdwatcher was encountered with camera fixed resolutely into the trees. This unbuilt stretch has got to be one of the most biodiverse on the middle Thames. |
Even here however, this people’s dodgy history necessarily intrudes on the scene.
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| Sightings of these World War II pillboxes grow more frequent as we follow the river into Oxfordshire. One is led to suspect they were systematically installed under a single operation. |
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| Goodness knows what this one is. It’s thoroughly overgrown and plastered with warning signs. Gateway to another world perhaps (if only). |
By the time the towpath returns to this bank we are in Cholsey Marsh, a protected nature reserve. A rare riverside marsh that hasn’t been drained for agriculture, it provides a haven for birds like kingfishers as well as some very uncommon lily and snail species.
Historically the marsh extended further. On its inland side (up a road called Ferry Lane, where presumably an old ferry provided crossings between towpath segments) the village of Cholsey grew up in the Anglo-Saxon centuries on what was then an island in the marshes called Ceol’s Eye. It later passed to Reading Abbey, whose monks built a barn there in the fourteenth century to hold the taxes that farmers paid them in produce (tithes). Apparently one of the most massive barns ever built in the world, it was torn down in 1815 when later occupants lacked money to pay for its repair.
