Walk, Thames Path from Windsor to Maidenhead, 11.73 miles

8 April

Ruth surprised me by offering to come with me for this one. We took the train (well, two trains) around 9:30am from Reading to Windsor & Eton Central. On arrival, Ruth decided she was hungry and needed fortifying before we set off - this wasn't unexpected, but her sudden craving for a sausage roll was, meaning that we had to walk past lots of nice potential second breakfast spots in the 'Windsor Royal Shopping' arcade and ended up at a fairly terrible café on Thames Street called 'Lilebet's' - I can find no reference to it online which seems odd. To prove it exists, here's our receipt. The 'Misc Food' was two sausage rolls - I only had a couple of bites of mine as it was fairly dire. We agreed later to airbrush the incident out of history. Except that I've just recorded it here.

We crossed the pedestrianised Windsor Bridge into Eton and turned left to cross the Brocas, following bends in the river for a while, passing Royal Windsor Racecourse on the opposite bank, before we briefly detoured to look at the chapel of St Mary Magdalene, Boveney. Cute little church with a weatherboarded tower. It's apparently under the care of the Friends of Friendless Churches, which is nice. Very plain building but it looked well cared for.

The path passed close to one end of the huge Dorney Lake and its clubhouse, where we once held an event when I worked for Progress South Central. A while further on, more interestingly, we passed Oakley Court, a Victorian Gothic house that was briefly home to Hammer Films in the late 1940s/early 1950s. Hammer seem to have made a bit of a thing of shooting in country houses - prior to moving to Oakley, they apparently occupied another large house in Cookham Dean - variously referred to online as Dial Close and as Dial Place; I didn't manage to find a photo - before being asked to leave after locals complained about the noise. After leaving Oakley, they seem to have moved to a house in Essex and then back to the Thames again to Down Place, which became Bray Studios. The site unfortunately seems to be under threat - I guess the temptation to sell the prime Thames-side site for housing will be just too tempting. We did pass Down Place a short way on from Oakley Court, looking derelict. On a brighter note, Oakley Court is clearly thriving in its current guise as a luxury hotel - its lawns were covered in people sunning themselves when we passed.

Chapel of St Mary Magdalene, Boveney	Oakley Court
Sunny path	The former Bray Studios

At Summerleaze Footbridge we crossed to the Bray side of the river and took a rather longer than expected detour into the village to look for lunch. I had naively imagined it might have something like a café doing cheese toasties, but there's nothing there apart from high-end looking pubs and restaurants. We made for The Crown, which was the most accessible-looking one, though we soon realised it was fairly posh. The staff were lovely though and we had a very pleasant lunch in the sunny courtyard. I only discovered later that it's owned by Heston Blumenthal, who evidently owns several establishments in Bray. There's a complimentary review of The Crown here.

Map of the route

After lunch we retraced our steps to the footbridge - we'd hoped it might be possible to re-cross the Thames at Bray Lock, but it isn't (we established this from the helpful valet outside The Waterside Inn). We trundled on for the remaining couple of miles to Maidenhead Bridge and then the remaining mile through the town to the railway station.

Bray and The Waterside Inn from the opposite bank