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load. Salt from Cheshire which had travelled on pack
horses down the Old Salt Way was loaded onto
barges headed for Oxford and London together with
wool, cheese and stone. Where there’s trade there’s
taxes and so at Lechlade we find the first toll keepers
cottage at the Ha’Penny Bridge. At Kelmscott it flows
past a village of honey-coloured Cotswolds stone
where William Morris rented the riverside manor
house as his summer home and today lies buried in
the church yard. For 30 miles the river will slowly
meander through meadows and sleepy countryside.
At Radcot in 1387 Henry Bolingbroke defeated the
Earl of Oxford in his campaign to become Henry IV
and some 250 years later Prince Rupert and his
Cavaliers fought off the Parliamentarians. At Radcot
riverside stone from the Taynton Quarry was loaded
onto barges and off it went for the construction of the
colleges of Oxford, the castle at Windsor, the college
at Eton and the Cathedral of St Paul’s in the City
of London. At Swinford the beautiful 18
th
century
sandstone bridge is privately owned and motorists
must still pay a toll of five pence.
Slow Beginnings
As world rivers go the Thames is a mere squirt.
It’s not even the longest British river - that honour
goes to the Severn (new tour coming soon!). For most
of its way the Thames is slow and meandering and
very, very rural. As more and more tributaries empty
into the Thames so the flow picks up speed and the
river widens. Most rivers are tributaries, which simply
means that they join other rivers before they reach the
sea and it is believed that the River Thames was once
a tributary of the Rhine until the glaciers of the last
Ice Age changed its course. Tributaries bring water
to a main river from a wide area of land known as its
drainage basin or catchment area. The Thames Basin
(illustrated to the right) covers more than 5,000 square
miles and is home to some 13 million people – 11
million of them in London. The Amazon Basin is
700 times bigger which helps explain how there are
still lost tribes turning up every now and then. There
are no lost tribes of the Thames Valley, only lost
accents – note that the one-size-fits-all accent first
documented in 1984 was christened Estuary English!
The first village that the infant river runs through is
Ewen (from the Anglo-Saxon fort). Here the first
tributary, the Swill brook, joins the Thames and it is
just 6 feet wide. By the time it reaches Lechlade it’s
been joined by the Rivers Colne and Leach and it is 60
feet wide, 250 feet at Oxford, 325 feet at Teddington,
870 feet at London Bridge, 1470 feet at Woolwich,
2400 feet at Gravesend and by the time it reaches the
estuary it is a full five miles from Sheerness on the
Kent side to Southend on the Essex side.
Where There’s Trade There’s Taxes
The Thames riverside in the Cotswolds market town
of Lechlade was once a busy wharf - the name is a
combination of the River Leach and lade meaning to