A Walk Along The Thames Path -

Gareth Huw Davies

Michael Joseph

1989

234 páginas

7h 48m

ISBN-10: 0718129695

The River Thames has been the object of more artistic and literary marvelling than any single natural feature in our islands. Now it can be walked,from the point of its first tentative gurgling in a Gloucestershire field, through its stately middle reaches rich i royal associations, down to the wide waters of the estuary where the banks are peopled with characters worthy of Dickens.
Gareth Huw Davies spent a summer tracing the 180-mile route, soon to be the Countryside Commission's latest Long Distance Trail, with backpack, stout shoes and a notebook. His aim was to write a living portrait of the river: it's wildlife, architecture, literature and the personalities who live and work upon it.
He saw mills and water meadows, bridges ancient and modern, places and elegant watering points, towns, and cities rising out of the fields and from deserted docklands. He talked to famous boatbuilders, to conservationists and archaeologists. He met old watermen with Thames blood in their veins and young entrepeneurs with plans to restore its animated bustle. He encountered a lady miller, a bankside pavement artist and the rollicking riverborne officers of the world's oldest police force. He was an uninvited guest at the Henley Regatta.

The result is a book brimful with personality and adventure; an enchanting discovery of one of our best known and yet most enigmatic national treasures.

Background illustration: Cathy Morley
Inset ilustrations: Fiona Silver