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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
All Cats Are Grey in the Dark
Reading has long been a commercially successful
town and it once thrived as a river port on the
confluence of the Thames and the River Kennet,
which runs from its source in the Wiltshire Hills
through Marlborough, Hungerford and Newbury.
The River Kennet is navigable from the junction
with the Thames upstream to Newbury where it joins
the Kennet and Avon Canal. You can take a boat
from the Thames, 87 miles and 105 locks along the
River Kennet, onto the Kennet and Avon Canal to
Bath and then on the River Avon to Bristol. Your
boat can be as broad in the beam as 13’6” but no
taller out of the water than 7’10” or you won’t get
past Hungerford (Bridge 83) nor must it have a draft
any greater than 4’1” – that is the depth of water your
boat needs, or you’ll not clear the cill of Lock 44,
the Sir Hugh Stockwell Lock on the Caen Hill Flight.
Don’t Try Climbing the Caversham Pekes
The stuffed remains of the first ever Pekingese dog in
England are today displayed in a glass case at the
Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring.
The dog, called Ah Cum, had been born in China at
the Imperial Palace where Pekes had been bred for
centuries as
furry hot water bottles
. Ah Cum was
brought to England in 1896 and the dogs became
fashionable. Miss Mary de Pledge (above) bred
Pekes, including dogs of the Ah Cum bloodline, at
her Caversham Kennels and later across the water in
Reading from the 1920s until the 1960s. One of her
dogs was exported to America where the name
Caversham is to this day a legend in the world of
peke fanciers.
Cookham Dean where they enjoyed an idyllic
childhood messing about in boats and playing in
the Quarry Woods which would become the Wild
Wood in The Wind in the Willows published in
1908. Grahame’s book is written to mimic the river
itself, alternately slow paced and fast moving.
However Grahame’s life was not altogether a happy
one, he married late and by all accounts it was not a
happy marriage. His wife was a hypochondriac and
spent much time away taking cures at spas and his
troubled only son Alistair, given to tantrums
throughout his short life is thought by some to have
been the inspiration for Toad of Toad Hall.
Removed from Rugby after just six weeks, he went to
Eton College only to suffer a nervous breakdown.
His father used his contacts to get him a place at
Oxford where the boy laid down on the railway line
two days short of his 20
th
birthday. His father never
really recovered from the tragedy and is today buried
with his son in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.
Leaving Pangbourne, the Thames resumes an easterly
course at it flows through beautiful meadows at the
foot of the Chiltern Hills towards the largest town on
the river between Oxford and London – Reading. If
you’ve been watching the ever dishy Michael Wood
you’ll know that in 870 when the Danes invaded King
Aethelred’s Wessex they set up camp on the river
following their successful siege and the Battle of
Reading staying for the best part of a year before they
were defeated by Aethelred’s brother, the future King
Alfred the Great, at the Battle of Ashdown on the
Berkshire Downs and retreated to winter quarters in
London around the Old Village - the Aldwych.