1 FLORA OF BERKSHIRE 



Clay until it is received by the Thames at Oxford at the height of 190 

 feet above sea level. 



At Abingdon, the Thames is replenished by the Ock, a purely 

 Berkshire watercourse, whose numerous sluggish streams, excavated 

 for the most part in the Kimeridge Clay, drain the Vale of the White 

 Horse, which extends from Faringdon — a picturesque town seated 

 amidst banks of Coralline Oolite and Kimeridge Clay, capped here and 

 there by sandy hills and bropd floors of shelly gravels — to Longcott 

 eastwards and to the Thames. 



The Genge or Guige brook, a similar but smaller stream, enters the 

 Thames near Sutton Courtney. At Clifton Hampden, with its 

 beautiful church, the Thames flows past bold cliffs of conglomerate 

 formed by the Greensand to Dorchester, the site of the Roman camp 

 Durocina (itself occupying an earlier British settlement), which gave 

 its name to the episcopal see founded by Birinus A. n. 634. Under the 

 wall of the magnificent church flows the Thame, which rising in the 

 high ground of Quainton and Brill and the escarpment of the Lower 

 Chalk near Tring in Buckinghamshire, drains in its flexuous course 

 a very similar tract of Oxfordshire country to that drained by the Ock 

 in Berkshire, and reaches the Thames a little way below Dorchestei', 

 opposite the Chalk outliers called the Wittenham Clumps, where the 

 river is 169 feet above the sea. 



At historic Wallingford the Thames, now flowing through creta- 

 ceous rocks, which it traverses nearly at right angles to their strike, 

 receives the Moreton brook, which drains the district around Blewbury 

 in Berkshire ; from thence it continues its southern course, winding 

 among softly swelling hills of Chalk in a narrow and beautiful green 

 valley adorned with fine elms, and receiving on its way to Reading 

 one small stream only, the Pang, so named, it is said, from a Saxon 

 word signifying pain, on account of the hardness of its waters. This 

 stream springs from the Upper Chalk near Hampstead Norris, and 

 drains a small, but most interesting, portion of the county from 

 ancient Ilsley, Chievely, and the pretty parish of Hermitage in the 

 west, to the great common ground of Bucklebury and Sulham's lovely 

 woods in the south, and the village of Pangbourn, beloved by artists, 

 where its clear, bright water mingles, at a height above sea level of 

 144 feet, with the greener coloured Thames, which now passes by 

 Maple Durham's charming mill and the Elizabethan mansion of the 

 Blounts, to the busy town of Reading, where, at a height of 123 feet 

 above sea level, it receives an important feeder in the Kennet. ' The 

 Kennet swift, for silver eels renowned,' rises on the high ground between 

 Swindon and Calne in Wiltshire, where the lowest parts of the water- 

 shed are more than 500. feet above the sea. In its early course it 

 receives the Winterbourne and other small streams, and at Marlborough 



