Shillingford Bridge; Wittenham Clumps
In hot weather, it’s good to head to a wide, sloped, grassy riverbank in the country. One such spot is the river frontage of the Shillingford Bridge Hotel, on the Thames between Dorchester and Wallingford in Oxfordshire, at a point where the upstream view is due west towards spectacular sunsets.
A lovely, late Georgian bridge spans the river in three arches. On the northern bank is Shillingford village, occupying relatively flat ground. It is an affluent looking place, with easy connections to fast commuting (remember that?) from nearby Didcot. On the southern side, there’s a steep bank, part of a line of hills going west.
Underneath this bank lies the hotel, and its pleasant expanse of grass falling away to the river. The hotel, although quite large, is squashed in by the hill, the bridge road, and the river. The space between the hotel’s frontage and the riverbank is given over to paid-for parking. This is not a wonderful immediate prospect for the hotel’s residents, but is very useful for the day visitors who come on sunny weekends. Vehicles cram in; their occupants head to the bank, or to the hotel’s bar. Fortunately, the grassy area is so large that it easily absorbs the bodies that the car park disgorges. Carpark full; bank spaciously occupied.
The Thames thereabouts presents many faces: the wide, gently insistent river (no recent heavy rain), between banks that are on the whole lushly green with trees and bushes, punctuated by little natural gaps for fishers and bathers; ducks, and a majestic family of two adult and three adolescent swans;
splashy swimmers; eager and larking paddleboarders; stately canal boats; raked motor yachts; and strange little craft resembling floating caravans (which is their function). All of these mix in watery equilibrium, neither too much of any, nor conflict over precedence. Or so it seemed to me observing.
The southern side of the river between Shillingford and Dorchester is roadless for a fair way south of the river. (The opposite is true on the north side, where the river is for some way hemmed by a busy main road.)
There are farm tracks and byways. But the main preservers of the peace are the protected sites of Wittenham Wood and the steep twin hills overlooking the Thames and the land around for miles in all directions. These hills are the Wittenham Clumps (from their dense crowns of ancient beech trees).
The slopes are wonderfully wild-flowered to the South and grassy to the North.
Peering into the beech density from the top of the slopes is to experience a Brothers Grimm or Stephen King moment. In the thickly set, but low branched woods, you can imagine all sorts of horrors lurking. But probably nothing more threatening than the ghosts of iron age tribes that once extensively populated these natural defensive positions, and farmed all around.
Paul Nash, the passionate painter of the the First World War trenches, was drawn to the Clumps throughout his life.
Below the Clumps lie the hamlet of Little Wittenham and a lock and footbridge over the Thames. Paths wind over the flood plain to Dorchester.
Dorchester is a small town with a large medieval abbey. The latter met its fate as an abbey in Tudor times, but has since been revived and restored over the centuries. It is now an improbably magnificent parish church.
On the Dorchester side of the river runs the Thames Path. It crosses a sluggish tributary stream, called, somewhat lazily one thinks, the Thame.
And then, alas, above Shillingford the path is truncated. The unsuspecting walker is callously diverted for several hundred metres onto a very narrow footway beside the hurtling main road. Eventually one can dive off through Shillingford village, back to the Bridge.
July 2021
