Swinford Bridge to Newbridge

This was the remotest section of the Thames we had walked so far and it was a struggle to work out how to do this using only public transport. But in the event rural buses turned up when they were supposed to and everything went smoothly. The weather on Easter Saturday was completely bonkers. When we started the walk there was a heavy blanket of cloud and none of us could imagine there being much sun at all during the day...But there was a lot of sun as well as a couple of hailstorms; three or four snow showers and two or three blizzards. There is a film of one of these blizzards on the blog this week. There was also a lot of flooding along the path and we had to jump over a fence to bypass an inundated kissing gate and navigate tortuous zig zags through watery fields. At a couple of points including one just south of Bablock Hythe (below) the path became a narrow strip between the river and flooded fields.

The walk began under heavy cloud

Ray and Natasha

The weather was real feature of this walk with threatening skies overhead and strong squalls of wind blowing whirlpools into the surface of the water.

A painterly light cast on the waters downstream from Pinkhill weir

After an hour's walking the sun burst through the clouds and patches of blue sky appeared

Ray and Raja

Chopped wood in a field near Stanton Harcourt. Stanton Harcourt is the site of archeological digs that showed for the first time that elephants and mammoths coexisted in the same area during warm interglacial periods.

See Scott K., 2001, Late Middle Pleistocene Mammoths and Elephants of the Thames Valley, Oxfordshire

http://www.cq.rm.cnr.it/elephants2001/pdf/247_254.pdf

Sheep in flooded field near Bablock Hythe

Chalet village near Bablock Hythe

Raja and Natasha at the Ferryman's Inn at Bablock Hythe where we had lunch. A chain mechanism pulled a flat-bottomed ferry across the river at this point operated until the 1950s by a Polish refugee ferryman called John.

Bablock Hythe ferry in the 1950s

Blizzard outside the Ferryman Inn at Bablock Hythe

Ten minutes after the blizzard the sun returned

Windmill, pylon and street sign

Makeshift flood level marker from Summer 2007

Hart's Weir footbridge

Natasha at the footbridge

Tank trap near Hart's Weir footbridge. This was the second tank trap we had seen along the Thames the first one being near Shepperton. This type of Toblerone-shaped tank traps were also known as Dragon's Teeth.

Newbridge is misleadingly named. Built in 1250 it is actually one of the oldest bridges on the Thames. There are two pubs on either side of the river here The Rose Revived and The Maybush.

The Windrush, a poetically-named 35 mile-long Cotswolds river, flows into the Thames at Newbridge

No useful bus passes Newbridge so we walked south on bridleways across the fields for a couple of miles to Southmoor to pick up a bus on the main Faringdon to Oxford road

Once over the ridge we were out of the main Thames valley and into the Vale of the White Horse. Here is the first white horse we saw.

Toby's evening shadow walking across the fields into the Vale of the White Horse