Reach Above The Lock
About halfway along is Radcot Bridge the oldest surviving bridge on the river. The bridge crossing the main channel has a single arch, and was constructed in stone in the late 18th century. The A4095 road which it carries also crosses a backwater, which was once the county boundary between Berkshire and Oxfordshire. The backwater bridge dates from the 13th and 14th centuries, and has three arches, the outer two being pointed, with the central one less so, as a result of later rebuilding. There is a considerable amount of mooring at the backwaters here. Stone for the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral, obtained from local quarries was loaded on rafts near the bridge.
Above Radcot is a sharp bend called "Hell's Turn" or "Hell Gut", and further on a point known as "Schoolmaster's Hole".
The Thames Path, which is on the opposite side of the river from the lock, follows the northern bank to Grafton Lock.
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Famous quotes containing the words reach and/or lock:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There warn’t anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn’t any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summertime because it’s cool. If you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to; but a hog is different.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)