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Updated: May 7, 2025
In another category, possessing a different type of communal life, already thinking of themselves as towns, we should have Cricklade, Lechlade, Abingdon, and Kingston among the smaller, though probably possessing a population not much larger than that of the larger villages; while of considerable centres there were but three: Reading the smallest, almost a town, but one upon which we have no true or sufficient data; Wallingford the largest, with the population of a flourishing county town in our own days, and Oxford, a place which, though in worse repair, ran Wallingford close.
Rising a few miles from Cheltenham, it runs into the Thames near Lechlade, and affords some fifteen miles or more of excellent fishing. The scenery is of that quiet and homely type that belongs so exclusively to the chalk and limestone streams of the south of England.
Here again is a fine ancient church with a comely spire, "a pretty pyramis of stone," as the old Itinerary says, overlooking a charming gabled house, among walled and terraced gardens, with stone balls on the corner-posts and a quaint pavilion, the river running below; and so on to a bridge over the yet slender Thames, where the river water spouted clear and fragrant into a wide pool; and across the flat meadows, bright with kingcups, the spire of Lechlade towered over the clustered house-roofs to the west.
On this trip Mary saw Shelley's old quarters at Oxford, where they spent a night, and they must have lingered in Lechlade Churchyard, as the sweet verses there written indicate.
And to see a run one must have a good horse, not necessarily an expensive one, for "good" and "expensive" are by no means synonymous terms with regard to horseflesh. On Saturdays the Cirencester brigade will hunt with Mr. Miller. Fairford, Lechlade, Kempsford, and Water-Eaton are some of the meets. Here we have a totally different country from any yet considered.
On a certain morning when we were walking in the fields Rossetti told me that Morris was coming down for a day’s fishing with George Hake, and that “Mouse,” the Icelandic pony, was to be sent to the Lechlade railway station to meet them. “You are now going to be introduced to my fellow partner,” Rossetti said.
But the Thames, upon the river I could really travel, day after day, from Teddington Lock upwards to Windsor, to Oxford, on to quiet Lechlade, or even farther deep into the meadows by Cricklade.
We dined at Lechlade; and it had long been dark when we rattled into the courtyard of the Bell Inn at Gloucester, where we were to pass the Sunday. Oh, how tired I was! almost too tired to sleep. On Sunday, we went to church at the Cathedral, where we had a very dull sermon from a Minor Canon. In the afternoon, as we sat in the host's parlour, Ephraim said to me,
It is good for an Englishman to stand here and listen to the brown waters lapping on the old walls and caulked timbers; to hear, as an under murmur, voices of Lechlade and Bablockhythe, for all intervening leagues of wood and meadow not altogether lost: before this persistence and continuity of youth to feel high thoughts stir within him and solemnize the nativity of new resolve.
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