Cookham Idyll

A couple of weekends ago now (how quickly the summer goes) R and I caught the train to Cookham to spend an afternoon walking along the drowsy bank of the River Thames and climb Winter Hill, where we would picnic in honour of the fullness of summer. Follow the Thames west of London up towards it’s source and you will barely recognise it as the murky waterway that bisects the city’s heart; indeed, follow it as far west as Oxford and it has another name – the Isis.

The day was hot and sunny with a refreshing breeze as we approached the flank of the Hill along a towpath riotous with wildflowers. The breeze however kept dragonflies and damselflies to a minimum, though we did get to see this little marvel, a female Beautiful Damoiselle.

Cookham is famous as the home of the visionary artist Stanley Spencer, who painted biblical scenes as if they had occurred in his native village. After viewing some of his oddly hallucinatory work in the Stanley Spencer Museum the landscape, already vivid in the summer heat took on a strange intensity as if I were looking directly through the artists eyes. Cookham is also a home to the arcane practice of Swan Upping, the ceremonial rounding up of mute swans by the Queen’s Swan Markers, the Worshipful Company of Vintners and the Worshipful Company of Dyers. Cookham, in short,  is as beautifully English as it gets, and more than mildly eccentric to boot.

One of the best reasons to visit this part of the world (apart from it’s singular beauty) is the chance to see Red Kites. Once almost extinct in the UK and still globally threatened, these spectacular birds ride the skies like no other bird I’ve ever seen, and around Cookham and Winter Hill there is a sizeable local population. On a previous visit we’d been startled by a tawny flash erupting from a wheat field right in front of us as one of these birds shot into the sky, leaving us gasping with disbelief. On that occasion we didn’t know that these birds were locally common, and while eating our picnic on the hill’s crest we shook our heads in wonder while watching more than one bird flirting with the breeze at eye level no more than twenty yards away. On this visit we got our first sighting while in the beer garden of the Bounty Pub,  taking turns with the binoculars to watch a soaring pair while we slapped on sun cream, drank a sustaining coffee and prepared for our climb.

Don’t get me wrong; the climb is hardly arduous – I don’t know for sure but I’d be surprised if Winter Hill tops two hundred feet. It’s steep though, and the sun was bright and harsh. Lush vivid green meadows nodding with wildflowers clung to the slope and as we climbed it’s steepest point our hot faces drew level with Harebells, Clustered Bellflowers,  Scabious. Butterflies commute busily between patches of flowers and at the top rabbits, unafraid, graze near the sheltering brambles.

The view from the top of Winter Hill on a beautiful late summer day repays the modest effort a thousandfold – the flat lands of the Thames roll out like a richly patterned carpet, and in the dancing shade of oak and ash we sat down to drink it all in.

No picture could do justice to the panorama of many coloured patchwork fields, the toy like train on it’s track, the subtle glint of the Thames below. We unpacked our picnic of strawberries and wine and toasted the sun dazed landscape.

Exploring the crest of the hill I was delighted to find some fat new Parasol Mushrooms growing up through dried out cow pats – Parasol mushrooms are good eating, but I’m always a little nervous about id’ing mushrooms in the field so we left them unmolested.

Further along I found this beastie gorging it’s-self on Ragwort. It’s the gaudy caterpillar of the just as gaudy Cinnabar moth, and it’s football jersey colouration serves as a warning to predators – keep away, I taste bad, I will make you very sick! It’s food plant – Ragwort – is full of poisonous alkaloids which the caterpillar stores safely in it’s body, rendering it, too, poisonous. They have a voracious appetite and will completely devour their host plant down to the ground, which will sometimes result in the caterpillars turning cannibal in the absence of anything else to eat. As this was the only Ragwort plant to be seen, and as it had already been quite comprehensively munched, and as there was only one caterpillar doing the munching… well I have to come to the conclusion that this greedy creature may well have been the sole survivor of a cannibal feast.  Enough of the grisly nature lesson – don’t you think our stripy friend would look well sitting on a fully opened parasol mushroom – just like the caterpillar in Alice In Wonderland? The landscape may be full of gentle beauty, but just a quick glimpse of it at a different scale reveals a strangeness to match anything Lewis Carrol dreamed up.

Eventually it was time to dawdle our way back down and catch the train back to London. We thought we’d seen everything we could possibly want to see as we strolled along the river, scanning the waters with our binoculars for nothing in particular. Then I spotted this Great Crested Grebe diving, and soon it had a plump fish in it’s beak. Curious as to why it did not eat it’s prize immediately I kept the binoculars trained on the bird and was lucky to see it swim to it’s mate and give the fish to her – she could not dive for her own dinner because their chicks were riding upon her back, their fuzzy grey heads peeking out between her wings.

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Beneath the pavement, the Beach

This weekend we felt giddy with summer and took a spontaneous day trip along the South Bank. There is usually something entertaining happening there; this time it outdid itself. It was the day of the Coin Street festival, an intimate, quirky event that saw Polish experimental musicians rubbing shoulders with riotous gypsy bands and local heavy metal kids. The Meltdown festival hosted by Massive Attack was opening at the Royal Festival Hall, there was a wacky architecture event on at the Hayward gallery, plus a glorious exhibition about coral reefs, impossible mathematical objects and crochet. The sun was out, the sky was a riot of restless cloud, the pavements full of happy, strolling, culture guzzling people.

But what lies below the thronged pavements of the Thames Embankment? On this particular Saturday old lady Thames was having a particularly low tide, so a glance over the embankment railings revealed a pocket of golden sandy beach. It’s true that most of the wide and neglected Thames beach is shingle and quite a bit is mud, but it seems strange to me that aside from the work of these sculptors even the sandy parts lie utterly deserted. I have always loved walking along this secret shore, but the tide has never been out as far as this on the other occasions I’ve come to explore it.

We raced down the stone steps to beach level and walked the relatively short stretch from Waterloo bridge to the Tate Modern, revelling in the unique views to be had from this unusual angle. The tide must have gone out by about twenty or thirty metres, revealing bridge supports and hidden structures built below street and river level, invisible to the oblivious crowds on the busy pavements above. A pier which normally juts out into deep water was completely exposed, and St Paul’s Cathedral and the glass towers of the city could be glimpsed through its massive legs.

One of the fun things about such low tides (if you are like me) is the chance to examine the strand line. The Thames is no longer the filthy stinking river it once was; it is home once more to (reintroduced) salmon, and quite fabulously, a rare colony of seahorses has been found in deepest industrial Dagenham. Even in the very centre of this great Metropolis the water is reasonably clean. Lady Thames is grand enough to be, to some extent, still untamed. A serious beachcomber on the Thames is supposed to obtain a license – the swift tides and estuarine mud further downriver can be treacherous and if you are to spend long hours gleaning the shores you need to understand the dangers. Just as important, many items of historical significance can be found and it is important that such discoveries are recorded. Those licensed to search the shores are known as Mudlarks. As well as antique bottles, ceramic shards and old clay pipes, Roman coins have been known to get washed up on the strand.

I’ve never been that lucky but I don’t care; it’s all interesting to me. True, there is as on any shore in the world now, a certain amount of plastic rubbish (I have helped with the clearing up after a Reclaim the Beach festival in the past but sadly I rarely remember to take a bin bag for litter picking on my solo jaunts) but the items stranded are fascinating in themselves. Why are there so many ceramic shards in one particular place – was there a china factory there? The pub a couple of hundred metres upstream could explain why there is a large amount of brown and green glass below their establishment, but I doubt that they’d know anything about the large quantities of delicately coloured art glass that is to be found all along the stretch we walked. One part of the shore is littered with eroded but still distinctive yellow London clay bricks – a spoil heap for a building site, or was there once a brickworks in the area? Are the clam and oyster shells a tip off that these creatures are living somewhere in the river, or were they simply dumped here by a local restaurant?

We gleaned a few pretty ceramic fragments and some interesting bits of old glass, watched the cormorants and herring gulls and feral pigeons squabble and wheel, idly turned over a few stones, then climbed the steps back up into the other world, the world of busy crowds and conventional city views.

After exploring all the good clean civilized fun to be had in the Tate and the Royal Festival Hall, we re-emerged to find the sun had gone down. In a mere two hours the tide had turned, the water having risen almost to the level of the pavements, and the buildings and bridges were lit up and shining as if gilded. The places where we had stood in sunny daylight were now under twenty metres of black water, the mysteries that the river had briefly shared now taken back into its depths.

In this built up and heavily populated place, below the inky ripples gaudily lit by street lights, over my footsteps from this day, the fishes are now swimming.

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