Autumn on the Thames

Summer gets most of the credit for the Thames, all those photographs of boats and picnic rugs and long evenings on the bank. Autumn is the season that suits this stretch of river best, and the season that suits it most quietly, which may be why it goes comparatively unmentioned. The water slows further as the summer traffic thins. The light comes in low and sideways rather than overhead. And the trees that line almost every bank between Maidenhead and Cliveden turn, over a few short weeks, into the best reason to be outdoors all year.

Mist before the light finds it

Autumn mornings on the Thames have a particular quality that neither summer nor winter quite manages: a mist that sits low over the water at first light and burns off slowly as the sun climbs, leaving the bridges and moored boats to emerge out of it gradually rather than all at once. Maidenhead Bridge on a still October morning can disappear almost entirely into this mist, its stone arches visible only as a suggestion until the sun has properly cleared the trees. Walking the towpath at this hour, before most of the town is awake, is one of the few genuinely reliable ways to see the river behaving like something out of an older, quieter century.

It does not last. By mid-morning the mist has generally gone and the day settles into whatever it plans to be. But it is worth being up for, at least once, if the season and the weather cooperate. Swans tend to hold their ground through this hour better than any other creature on the river, unbothered by the cold or the low visibility, and there is something steadying about watching one glide out of the mist as though the season had made no difference to it at all.

The mist thins first over the main channel, where the current keeps the water moving, and lingers longest in the still backwaters and around the islands, where it can sit for another hour after the main river has cleared. Anyone walking the towpath early enough to catch both states in the same outing gets, in effect, two different rivers within the same short walk.

Colour on the reach below Cliveden

Nowhere on this stretch of the Thames wears autumn better than the wooded slope beneath Cliveden, where beech and oak climb steeply from the water and turn, through October, into a dense stack of gold, copper and rust that flat ground simply cannot produce in the same way. Seen from the river or from the opposite bank, the whole hillside seems to be lit from within for a few weeks, and it is one of the more reliable pieces of seasonal drama within easy reach of the Club.

Cookham Moor, further along the towpath, offers a different version of the same season: wide, flat, and given over almost entirely to sky, with the last of the summer's growth turning brown and gold across the common land Stanley Spencer painted so often. Where Cliveden's autumn is vertical and dramatic, Cookham's is horizontal and quiet, and the walk between the two makes a fair case for autumn being the most varied season this part of the river has to offer.

Shorter days, better reasons to be outside

There is a temptation, as the days shorten, to treat autumn as a season for staying in. On the river the opposite tends to hold. The light in the middle of an autumn day is often better for walking than the flat glare of high summer, and the towpaths are considerably quieter, which suits a slow wander far more than a crowded one. Layers help more than any particular piece of kit: a walk that starts cold in the morning mist can turn warm by midday once the sun is properly up, and cool again by the time the light starts to go in the afternoon.

Boulter's Lock and Ray Mill Island take on a stillness in autumn that the summer crowds do not allow, the willows dropping their leaves steadily onto water that moves just slowly enough to carry them rather than scatter them. It is a good season for noticing detail that a busier month would drown out: the particular sound a lock gate makes in cold air, the way a low sun catches spray off the weir, the smell of woodsmoke reaching the towpath from somewhere in the town well before you can see its source.

Rain, when it comes, tends to be soft rather than heavy on this stretch, more a change in the light than a reason to turn back, and a waterproof layer is generally enough to keep a walk going through all but the wettest afternoons. Autumn asks a little more preparation than summer, and gives back a great deal more atmosphere in return.

Coming inside when the light goes

Where autumn earns its keep most, though, is in the turn from outside to in. A day spent on the towpath in low October light has a way of making a fire and a warm room feel entirely necessary rather than simply pleasant, and the rhythm of a stay at the Club is built with exactly that turn in mind: mornings for the mist and the colour on the bank, evenings for coming back to something warm.

Autumn is short, and this particular version of it, mist on the water, colour on the reach, an early dark that makes the fire worth lighting, does not keep. It is worth building a visit around while it is here.