Page 5 - July 2013 Kettle published 2

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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
where the Thames has cut through the greensand
which also forms a group of small Oxfordshire hills
in the otherwise rather flat Thames Valley. In Roman
times coarse grits extracted from the greensand were
used to line the inner surface of grinding bowls
known as mortaria (hence mortar and pestle) that
were made in the pottery kilns of Oxfordshire.
The Sinudon Hills, from the Celtic
Seno-Dunum
or Old Fort were once nicknamed Mother Dunch’s
Buttocks after a local Lady of the Manor but they
are better known today as the Wittenham Clumps.
There is a great view from the Iron-Age fort down
to the Abbey and Dorchester and the Days Lock on
the river at Little Wittenham where the Pooh Sticks
World championships have been held since 1984
having been set up by the Days Lock Keeper Lynn
David. When she retired in 1997 the Rotary Club
of Sinudon based in nearby Wallingford took over
organizing the event and more recently the Rotary
Club of Oxford Spires has taken it on. Usually held in
March but cancelled this year by bad weather the
2013 Championships will be held on 13 October.
Fifty miles from London on the road to Wales it was
possible to cross the Thames at the
Welsh ford
or
Wallingford. King Alfred, the Saxon King of Wessex,
founded Wallingford in the 10
th
century and such was
the strategic importance of this Thames crossing
place that William the Conqueror and his army
crossed the river here after the Battle of Hastings
some 200 years later. Today there is a 900-foot long
mediaeval stone bridge – a reflection of the town’s
former importance. President of the Sinudon Players,
the Wallingford am-dram group from 1951 until she
died in 1976 was local resident Dame Agatha Christie
who lived in nearby Cholsey with her archaeologist
husband Max Mallowan.
The Goring Gap
After Wallingford the Thames, which mostly flows
West to East, flows South for a while, cutting its way
through the chalky Chiltern Hills and forming a gorge
known as the Goring Gap. Here two very ancient
routes, The Ridgeway and the Icknield Way cross
the Thames. For 5000 years The Ridgeway was a
reliable all weather trading and pilgrimage route
from the Dorset coast to The Wash in Norfolk. The
Icknield Way is a largely lowland Pre-historic route
that traces much the same path as the Ridgeway
from the Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire to
Knettishall Heath in Norfolk where our ancestors
could pick up The Peddars Way to take them on to
the Norfolk Coast. The villages of Goring and
Streatley lie on opposite sides of the Thames in the
Goring Gap – the river is the country boundary:
Goring in Oxfordshire, Streatley in Berkshire.
With Granny Ingles at Cookham Dean
Whitchurch-on-Thames, Oxfordshire and
Pangbourne, Berkshire also face each other across
the river and across the country boundary. Because
of a 1792 Act of Parliament you still have to pay
20p to cross the Whitchurch Toll Bridge but you
can sail beneath it for free. Here the tiny River Pang
empties into the Thames and the village sign includes
a Viking ship, King John holding Magna Carta and
an open book in which is written
The Wind in the
Willows
in tribute to Kenneth Grahame who lived
at Church Cottage Pangbourne for eleven years from
when he retired from the Bank of England to 1932
when he died. Grahame was Scottish by birth but his
mother died from Scarlet Fever when he was five and
his alcoholic father had entrusted him and his siblings
to the care of their Granny Ingles on the Thames at