West on the Thames Path

I’m up before Simon and drink my morning coffee on the foredeck. It’s a beautiful sunny morning. I’m visited by a lone female duck who gobbles down our stale baguette and hangs around hoping for more. A couple of small fish bounce across the river surface like skimmed stones. After a comfortable night we are both showered, breakfasted and out by 10am. 

We follow the Thames Path back to Shillingford village, cross the A4074 and walk along it to where the Thames Path rejoins the river, close to where the Thame joins the Thames, south of Dorchester. 

 We cross the river at Day’s lock and continue along the opposite bank. It’s farming country, mostly cattle and sheep, and the flimsy electric fence doesn’t seem enough to deter a determined bovine. Across the river large properties boast impressive gardens and boathouses, but overlook the power station at Didcot beyond the river and fields. We walk among clouds of white butterflies, which gather in spectacular numbers around pink blossoms; we see a heron, red kites and a deer which watches us calmly and doesn’t bother to get up.

The Thames Path crosses the river again at the bridge in Clifton Hampden; we’ve been walking for around two hours now and feel like a break. We stop at the Barley Mow for lunch and then turn back the way we came. 

Just past Day’s Lock there’s a footbridge towards Little Wittenham so we cross it and take the path towards the Wittenham Clumps; a pair of chalk hills topped by some of the oldest beech woods in England, the lower of which was formerly the site of an iron age hill fort. An alternative colloquial name is Mother Dunch’s buttocks, after a lady of the manor.

It’s a warm afternoon and the ascent is hard work but the view is pretty spectacular if you disregard the power station. We walk back along a bridle path through forests and farmland which emerges at the far end of the Shillingford Bridge Hotel’s car park. After grabbing a much-needed cold drink from the fridge in the boat, we drive to Waitrose in Wallingford to pick up ingredients then sit on deck to enjoy the last of the afternoon sun before dinner.

After dinner we cross Shillingford Bridge and walk the Thames Path as far as Benson where we have a drink at The Waterfront Café (a fairly regular summer lunch haunt for us) and watch the sun go down. Walking back in the dark is a bit of a challenge!