Vale of White Horse - Geography

Geography

It is the valley of the Ock, a stream which joins the Thames from the West at Abingdon. The Vale is almost flat and well-wooded; its green meadows and foliage contrasting richly with the bald summits of the Berkshire Downs, which flank it on the south. The numerous elm trees, that once were a major feature of the Vale, were lost to Dutch Elm Disease. To the North, a low ridge separates it from the upper Thames Valley, holding back the soft Jurassic sedimentary deposits (Greensand, Gault and Kimmeridge Clay) behind a hard corallian limestone escarpment ridge, in what is technically a hanging valley; but local usage sometimes extends the vale to cover all the ground between the Cotswolds (on the north) and the Berkshire Downs. According to the geographical definition, however, the Vale is from two to five miles wide, and the distance by road from Abingdon to Shrivenham at its head is 18 miles.

Wantage is the only town in the heart of the Vale (although Faringdon, on the northwestern rim, is also a "Vale" town), lying in a sheltered hollow at the foot of the hills, along which, moreover, villages are more numerous than elsewhere in the vale. There are numerous springs emanating from the chalk hills, which allowed these settlements to thrive in former times.