Thames Travelling
Look out for loads of Rose Bay Willow Herb, a bushy shrub with pink flowers. It grows in disturbed ground and there is a lot of it around the Thames where development has taken place.

Rose Bay Willow Herb

The path takes you up over a footbridge which crosses the River Kennet. Where the River Kennet runs under the railway and joins the Thames there was once an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. “Reading” derives its name from the Anglo-Saxon root “Reada's inga” (People of Reada – the Reada Tribal settlement), growing in the Dark Ages following the departure of the Roman legions in 410 AD.

From where you stand, you are looking across the flood plain of the River Thames, a view very different now from that 21 thousand years ago, when the gravels under your feet were being deposited.

Then, the river had a broad plain. Not one channel but many channels that flowed fast with the Spring snow melt, more sluggishly at other times, and then frigid and deep frozen during long winters.

At this time Britain was in the grip of the last glaciation, with a major ice sheet extending across Scotland, Wales, Northern England and the Wash, its spring thaws feeding the Thames with coarse gravel flushed in with melt-water floods. Migratory reindeer and bison herds, tormented by billions of biting flies, grazed during the cool summers, when new stone age hunters (our direct ancestors) came to the area to hunt.

MANYTHANKS TO PROFESSOR BRUCE SELLWOOD OF READING UNIVERSITY FOR ALL OF HIS HELP WITH THIS WALK