The Naturalist on the Thames | Page 2

country. They are an organic whole, in
which the river and its tributaries support a vast and separate life of
animals and plants, and modify that of the hills and valleys by their
course. Civil law has recognised the Thames system as a separate area,
and given to it a special government, that of the Conservators, whose
control now extends from the Nore to the remotest springs in the
hamlets in its watershed; and natural law did so long before, when the
valley became one of the migration routes of certain southward-flying
birds. Its course is of such remote antiquity that there are those who
hold that its bed may twice have been sunk beneath the sea, and twice
risen again above the face of the waters.[1] It has ever been a masterful
stream holding its own against the inner forces of the earth; for where
the chalk hills rose, silently, invisibly, in the long line from the vale of
White Horse to the Chilterns the river seems to have worn them down
as they rose at the crossing point at Pangbourne, and kept them under,
so that there was no barring of the Thames, and no subsequent splitting
of the barrier with gorges, cliffs, and falls. Its clear waters pass from
the oolite of the Cotswolds, by the blue lias and its fossils, the
sandstone rock at Clifton Hampden, the gravels of Wittenham, the great
chalk range of the downs, the greensand, the Reading Beds, to the
geological pie of the London 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