SUTTON COURTNEY—LONG WITTENHAM—LITTLE WITTENHAM—CLIFTON
HAMPDEN—DAY’S LOCK AND SINODUN
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.
[Illustration: SUTTON COURTNEY CHURCH.]
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.
[Illustration: NORMAN BELFRY-WINDOW, SUTTON COURTNEY]
[Illustration: SUTTON COURTNEY.]
[Illustration: INTERIOR, SUTTON COURTNEY CHURCH.]
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.
[Illustration: LITTLE WITTENHAM.]
[Illustration: ANCIENT TIMBER PORCH, LONG WITTENHAM (UNRESTORED).]
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.”
[Illustration: DAY’S LOCK, AND SINODUN HILL.]
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.
[Illustration: WITTENHAM CLUMPS.]
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!
[Illustration: CLIFTON HAMPDEN.]
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.