A group of rustic villages nestles undisturbed by any press of traffic on the right, or Berkshire, bank of the river: Drayton, Sutton Courtney, and Appleford; with Steventon and Milton away back in the hinterland, all very charming, and wholly unaltered. At Steventon are to be found the most delightful old cottages. There are no better in Berkshire. This is a sweeping statement, but true. The proof of it lies partly in visiting that coy spot: coy, because the said cottages lie off the high road along the by-lane known as Steventon Causeway.

One might say much about Sutton Courtney, the “south town” of the Courtneys, who owned it in the long ago, with Nuneham Courtney, to the north of it. Here is an “Abbey,” but it is in private occupation as a residence, and is not a show-house; and very much the same may be added of the old manor-house and its “Court House,” adjoining the church. The “Abbey” was really a place to which the brethren of the Abbey of Abingdon might occasionally retire for rest and for health’s sake.

The manor of Sutton Courtney finally passed from the family in the sixteenth century, when Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, was attainted and his property seized. The old manor-house, built around a courtyard, still retains its ancient hall, with minstrels’ gallery. The so-called “Court House,” in the grounds, is a late Norman building, with lancet windows, and is thought by competent authorities to be the hall of justice of the original manor-house.

There is much quiet charm in Sutton Courtney, and much interest: the charm and interest of long existence, with changes only brought about by slow effluxion of time. I suppose there is little new about Sutton Courtney except the young chestnut-trees that line the grassy way to the church; always excepting the last few puling infants that have been carried that way to be christened. The church itself is an example of gradual change, yet of the continuity that marks this dear ancestral God’s own country of Old England, in which we are unworthy co-partners. It is of all periods, from Norman to Perpendicular; its last development seen in the south porch, rendered in red brick, in strong contrast with the stone of the rest of the building. The porch is by courtesy Perpendicular, but is rather in the domestic Gothic style than of ecclesiastical type, and looks remarkably as though some one had found a small house and brought it to the church and left it to be called for. There is a particularly charming little late Norman belfry window, with interlacing arches, well worth notice, and a row of grotesquely-sculptured corbels of the same period, with an odd variety of sick and sorry expressions. On the same face of the tower is a prettily-decorated sun-dial.

The pulpit, with quaint sounding-board above and the fine Transitional Norman arch next it, form a charming picture. It is easily obvious that this enriched arch, now forming that of the easternmost bay of the south aisle, was formerly the chancel arch, before the church was rebuilt on a larger scale than the original structure; for although the arch itself has found a new situation, the columns on either side of it have been used again to support the newer and broader chancel-opening.

Two curious black-and-white frescoes, at the west end of the north and south aisles respectively, are worth notice. They represent the administration of the Andrews Charity, by which six poor widows, and as many men, were given clothes, a penny loaf each on Sundays, and on three certain days yearly, money to buy meat. They were, unhappily, obliged to listen to a sermon preached on Corpus Christi day, on the goodness of Andrews and the humility and thankfulness proper to bedesmen and receivers of doles. The frescoes represent the old men and the old women receiving the clothes, which they appear to be doing in a somewhat tentative and timorous, not to say condescending, manner, at the hands of one who looks like a ferocious beadle, or suchlike functionary.

There is a bridge at Sutton Courtney where toll is still demanded. It is variously “Sutton” bridge or “Culham” bridge: this last name productive of some confusion with the bridge at Culham ford (or Culham Hithe) between Dorchester and Abingdon.

From Culham and Sutton Courtney one comes by river in a mile under the ugly Great Western Railway bridge at Appleford, and then in another mile to the lovely winding backwater on which Long Wittenham is situated. Although now a backwater, it is the real original course of the river, and the straight waterway on the left, through which all the traffic passes on to Clifton Lock, is a formal cut, made for convenience, and for shortening the distance. Long Wittenham, by reason of this circumstance, is nowadays not only on a river backwater, but also, owing to the main roads passing it at a considerable distance away, on a backwater of life as well; and those who seek to reach it by road will find that the way is not only long, but circuitous and puzzling; while to those who may essay to leave it by a specious short-cut for Appleford, the only advice to be offered, if they ride bicycles, is “don’t!” especially as no reasonable person, having once seen Appleford, which consists of a railway crossing and a few cottages, and a rebuilt church, ever wants to go there again.

The picturesque and interesting church of Long Wittenham, partaking of all periods of Gothic architecture, has two especial claims to notice. The first is in the Early English leaden font, one of the twenty-nine leaden fonts known to exist in England. The lower part of it is arcaded, the arches filled with effigies of bishops; the upper part decorated at irregular intervals with curious whorl devices. The Jacobean wooden carved font-cover also is not without interest.

The second of these special features is a curious piscina in the shallow south transept of early fourteenth-century date, combining with the purpose of a holy-water stoup that of a monument to the founder of the church. This takes the form of a miniature recumbent effigy, two feet in length, of an armed knight, cross-legged, and with drawn sword in hand and shield on arm. Two angels, sculptured in low relief, crown the arch. A third claim that Long Wittenham church may well make upon the lovers of things venerable and beautiful is the very fine old timber porch, romantically weathered. The accompanying illustration displays this to excellent advantage, and also emphatically discloses the massive character of the timbering, seen especially in the verge-or barge-boards, consisting of but two separate pieces, of great thickness. It is a truly worshipful piece of craftsmanship.

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Long Wittenham may well be called long. From the ancient cross at one end of it, past the church, it goes on and on in a single street, and finally loses itself indeterminately between making on the one hand for Clifton Hampden, and on the other for the vast hedgeless fields across which lies the way to Little Wittenham, one mile distant. Those widespreading fields of this district are a distinct and remarkable feature of this countryside. Whether they be pasture, or corn, or turnip fields, they give a sense of largeness and strangeness to the traveller in these parts, accustomed only to the little five- or six-acre enclosures of other neighbourhoods. Here vast fifty-acre expanses of wheat or swedes go in swooping undulations over the hillsides, and you rarely see the boundaries of them. These peculiarities of Berkshire agricultural conditions certainly make for economical farming, with less space wasted upon unproductive hedges; and they certainly also make for picturesqueness here, where the great double hill of Sinodun rises boldly in roughly pyramidal shape from the lower levels. There are huge prehistoric earthworks on the summit of Sinodun: vast concentric circumvallations and fosses reared by long-forgotten folk, the vastness of whose defensible works gives, almost like an arithmetical exercise, the measure of their fears. Who were those who slaved so strenuously at this fortification, and who those others against whose expected onslaught they made such preparations? ArchÆologists have their theories, indeed, but no one knows. Really, from all available evidence, it would appear that Sinodun was fortified from the very earliest times, and that each conquering race which settled in Britain, and in turn decayed in manhood and the arts of war, and so gave opportunity for a newer conquest at the hands of uncultured but virile barbarians, in turn occupied this hill-top and were attacked and slain in it, in those pitiless battles of extermination that were the usual features of the world’s youth.

Sinodun and its fellow-hill are in these times crested with plantations of trees, known far and near as “Wittenham Clumps”; and there is a third clump, a minimus infant brother, or poor relation, kind of clump, on a lesser eminence, not unremotely reminiscent of Landseer’s picture, “Dignity and Impudence.”

The traveller across Didcot downs, the boating-man on the Thames—all, in fact, who come within view of them—are obsessed by Wittenham Clumps, which dominate all views, and from the river, at any rate, are always appearing in the most unexpected quarters. Even the traveller by railway remarks them. Such an one, journeying along the Great Western main-line and gazing from the carriage-windows, sees those black blotches of trees on the hill-tops come whirling into view, and thinks of them in relation to his journey, with the mental note, “Now we are near Didcot.”

Sinodun and the clumps look nowhere more impressive than along the road between Culham and Wallingford, where they form not so much the boldly-isolated hills and tufts they appear to be from the river, as the culmination of the gradually-rising downlands. In the lap of the downs, just before they rise to these crests, are situated some ranges of farm-buildings in the open, hedgeless fields, and there you see the cattle-byres and the ricks looking small against the huge scale of their surroundings in this shivery setting. It is Anglo-Saxon Berkshire you see here, in all essentials, not the twentieth-century Berkshire typified by Reading; and more of a piece with White Horse Hill than with that bustling and thriving and increasing town.

The stranger who comes to Long Wittenham thinks, on first seeing its retired aspect, that if ever he wished to seclude himself from the world, it is to Long Wittenham he would go; but he has only to proceed to Little Wittenham for him at once to look upon Long Wittenham as, by force of contrast, a metropolitan centre. As the larger place is with a peculiar fitness styled “long,” so yet in a more appropriate manner is the smaller called “little.” It appears to consist solely of a church, a vicarage, and a farm.

Little, or Abbot’s, Wittenham, the manor having once belonged to Abingdon Abbey, is not merely little. It is also remote. Not a remoteness of great mileage, but the quite equal detachment of being situated on a road that leads to anywhere at all only by rustic and winding ways. It sits peacefully and slumberously at the very foot of Sinodun, enfolded amid delightful hedgerow elms, “the world forgetting, and by the world forgot.” Not always was Little Wittenham so retired from all rumours of the outer world, for here was situated, from the sixteenth century until 1800, when it was demolished, the manor-house of the Dunch family, who moved not obscurely in the society of their time. The Dunches finally died out in 1719, and now all that is left of them are some musty pedigrees in county histories, the mounds and trenches to the north of the church, where their mansion stood, and some tombs and brasses in the church itself, which was rebuilt, except the tower, in 1863. It is a tall, slim tower, picturesquely weatherworn, but not exceptionally remarkable, unless we take note of its small turret-window in the shape of an ace of spades (not an ace of clubs, as my late friend, Mr. J. E. Vincent, says in his Highways and Byways in Berkshire). Local legend tells us that this represents the ace with which the builder of the tower won a fortune; but it is really nothing more than a cross-slit window, mutilated in its upper half into that shape.

Clifton Hampden, lying between the Wittenhams, is on the Oxfordshire side of the river. If there were ever a competition as to which is the prettiest village on the Thames below Oxford, surely Clifton Hampden would be bracketed with Sonning for first place. There is this chief difference between the two; that Sonning is a considerable village and Clifton a small one. They are alike in that they both possess a bridge, but different again in the fact that while Sonning bridge is of the eighteenth century, and with only its quaintness to recommend it, the bridge at Clifton is a beautiful building of the nineteenth, in the mediÆval style, one of the most successful on the river, and only lacking the element of age. There is, sooth to say, no village at Clifton Hampden; just a bridge, a church, the lovely old thatched Barley Mow Inn, and a few scattered cottages, generally, in the summer months, with an artist in front of each, rendering it in the medium of water or of oil, upon paper or canvas. And the grassy banks come down to the river delightfully, and over on the Oxfordshire side rises the charming little Transitional Norman and Decorated church upon the abrupt sandstone bluff or cliff that gives Clifton its name. One may linger away contented afternoons here, perhaps with a book, perhaps watching from the bridge the minnows or the dace, or with amusement noting the evolutions of the flotillas of ducks and ducklings that come and go in company, like miniature navies. To see a duck dip down and stand on its head in the water is to watch a humorous feat: possibly, according to the observations of some naturalists, to witness a tragedy, for it would seem that the ferocious pike have not infrequently been known to seize by the head a duck so gymnastically exercising, and thus to make an end of it.

The quality of Clifton Hampden church is shown, as to its exterior, by the accompanying illustration; which also discloses the steep steps leading up to it, and the elaborate churchyard cross—all works of 1907. The Hampdens, who once owned the manor, have no memorials here, and the greatly-restored condition of the church is due to the Hucks-Gibbs family. The Transitional Norman south nave-arcade, with round-headed arches, simply sculptured capitals, and enormous bases to the columns, is entirely delightful: the plain painted north arcade, without capitals, poor and mean by comparison. In the church was once an ancient leaden font, of the Dorchester and Long Wittenham type, but this was sold for old metal by a vicar who thought it ugly!

Sinodun Hill, whose aspects and history have already been remarked upon, groups grandly as one drops down river to Day’s Lock, as perhaps the illustration may serve to indicate. The original Day who, ages ago, conferred his name upon the lock is forgotten, but at any rate the proprietary style of the lock’s name and of those of one or two others reminds people who know anything about the history of the river of those times before the coming of the Thames Conservancy, when the stream and the towing-paths along it were regarded very much as the private property of the landowners whose fields ran down to their water-course. We read much of the mediÆval robber-barons of the Rhine, and their fellows in this country were those riparian property-owners, who made up for the lack of ferocity which characterised their continental counterparts by a cunning assumption of legality, very much more difficult to dispose of than sheer brute force. Much of the history of the Thames is concerned with actions in courts of law to assert or to contest these rights, real or assumed. So early as 1624 an Act of Parliament providing for the better navigation of the Thames referred incidentally to the “Exactions of the Occupiers of Locks and Weirs upon the River of Thames Westward,” and set out to do away with them; but that was a long business, and for many a year afterwards Day, of Day’s Lock, and Boulter, of Boulter’s Lock, and their brethren, owned, or rented from landowners, the locks still named after them, and charged just what they pleased for traffic passing through.

Beyond Day’s Lock comes Dorchester, i.e. Dwr chester, the fortress on the water. Plenty of water here, at any rate, to give point to the place-name, for at this spot the Thame, meandering along through oozy meadows, joins the Thames. It cannot be said, by any exactness of imagery, to “fall” into it; to use that well-worn expression beloved by the writers of geography primers.

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