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C. J. Cornish - The Naturalist on the Thames
Basin, and the beds of drifts and brick earth in which lie bedded the frames and fragments of its
prehistoric beasts. In and beside its valley are great woods, parks, downs, springs, ancient mills and
fortresses, palaces and villages, and such homes of prehistoric man as Sinodun Hill and the hut remains
at Northfield. It has 151 miles of fresh water and 77 of tideway, and is almost the only river in England
in which there are islands, the famous eyots, the lowest and largest of which at Chiswick touches the
London boundary.
After leaving Oxford the writer has lived for many years opposite this typical and almost unspoilt reach
of the London river, and for a considerable time shot over the estate on the upper Thames of which
Sinodun Hill is the hub and centre. This fine outlier of the chalk, with its twin mount Harp Hill,
dominates not only the whole of the Thames valley at its feet, but the two cross vales of the Thame and
the Ock. On the bank opposite the Thame joins the Isis, and from thence flows on the THAMES. Weeks
and months spent there at all seasons of the year gave even better opportunities for becoming acquainted
with the life of the Upper Thames, than the London river did of learning what the tidal stream really is
and may become. Fish, fowl and foxes, rare Thames flowers and shy Thames chub, butterflies, eel-traps,
fountains and springs, river shells and water insects, are all parts of the "natural commodities" of the
district. There is no better and more representative part of the river than this. Close by is Nuneham, one
of the finest of Thames-side parks, and behind that the remains of wild Oxfordshire show in Thame Lane
and Clifton Heath. How many centuries look down from the stronghold on Sinodun Hill, reckoning
centuries by human occupation, no one knows or will know. There stands the fortress of some forgotten
race, and below it the double rampart of a Roman camp, running from Thame to Isis. Beyond is
Dorchester, the abbey of the oldest see in Wessex, and the Abbey Mill. The feet of the hills are clothed
by Wittenham Wood, and above the wood stretches the weir, and round to the west, on another great
loop of the river, is Long Wittenham and its lovely backwater. Even in winter, when the snow is falling
like bags of flour, and the river is chinking with ice, there is plenty to see and learn, or in the floods,
when the water roars through the lifted hatches and the rush of the river throbs across the misty flats, and
the weeds and sedges smell rank as the stream stews them in its mash-tub in the pool below the weir.
[1] Phillips, "Geology of Oxford and of the Valley of the Thames."
THE FILLING OF THE THAMES
In the late autumn of 1893, one of the driest years ever known, I went to the weir pool above the wood,
and found the shepherd fishing. The river was lower than had ever been known or seen, and on the hills
round the "dowsers" had been called in with their divining rods to find the vanished waters.
"Thee've got no water in 'ee, and if 'ee don't fill'ee avore New Year, 'ee'll be no more good for a
stree-um"! Thus briefly, to Father Thames, the shepherd of Sinodun Hill. He had pitched his float into
the pool below the weir - the pool which lies in the broad, flat fields, with scarce a house in sight but the
lockman's cottage - and for the first time on a Saturday's fishing he saw his bait go clear to the bottom
instead of being lost to view instantly in the boiling water of the weir-pool. He could even see the broken
piles and masses of concrete which the river in its days of strength had torn up and scattered on the
bottom, and among them the shoals of fat river fish eyeing his worm as critically as his master would a
sample of most inferior oats. Yet the pool was beautiful to look upon. Where the water had sunk the
rushes had grown taller than ever, and covered the little sandbanks left by the ebbing river with a forest
of green and of red gold, where the frost had laid its finger on them. In the back eddies and shallows the
dying lily leaves covered the surface with scales of red and copper, and all along the banks teazles and
frogbits, and brown and green reeds, and sedges of bronze and russet, made a screen, through which the
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