The Summer Ramble was Caversham’s version of the Santiago di Compostela pilgrimage, linking as it did the three churches in the benefice and finishing at St Andrew’s Sonning.
Various assorted clerics, dogs, children and adults walked the riverside path observing the gleaming newly restored cross on St Margaret’s, and the windows and capital in St Peter’s and traversing the new bridge near St John’s and the historic pack-horse bridge, which Rodney told us had a narrow escape in the seventies. We saw a heron and black swan amongst other wildlife and enjoyed Sussex apple cake at St Peter’s and tea and ice-creams at Sonning Lock.
There were plenty of river-craft and as Jerome K. Jerome wrote over a hundred years ago, “All the inhabitants of [Sonning] dress themselves up in their boating costume and come and mooch around the lock with their dogs, and flirt, and smoke and watch the boats, and altogether, what with the …excited dogs, the moving boats, …the pleasant landscape, and the sparkling water, it is one of the gayest sights I know of…” (Three Men in a Boat).
The Autumn Ramble will take place on the afternoon of Sunday, 13th November.