The River Thames above Oxford is mostly a stream running between fields, sometimes acting as the field boundary, often dry (when it's stopped raining for a couple of weeks) and occasionally left to wend across the fields without much interest. There is a body of thought which says that this innocent rippling stream should be called the Isis.

Below Oxford, the river rapidly becomes smooth and broad. Below Reading, once fed by the Kennet's waters from Newbury and Marlborough, it has a stately bulk. This is the Old Father in earnest.

The village of Cookham, twenty-odd miles below Reading and about halfway between Marlow and Maidenhead, is a brick and flint affair - the standard style for communities on the Thames between Reading and Maidenhead. It is centred on the inside of a curve in the river, a sensible distance back from the actual water. It has expanded along two arms - one northwards up the road to the Thames and on to Bourne End and the other westwards up the road to a satellite village, which the map calls Cookham Rise, around the railway station.

It is one of the richest and more expensive places to live in the country, being fairly convenient for London but off the general beaten track of the Great Western Mainline and the M4. The Thames is no longer the transport artery that it once was, so life is able to claim to be peaceful.

It was this length of the Thames, seen here looking east at the A4094 crossing the Thames at the north end of the village, that saw the writer of the Victorian travel novel called Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome, and two of his friends try sailing one summer evening, the wind having unexpectedly come out in their favour. With the river broad, wide and smooth, they sailed up the golden waters into the sunset, skimming across the waters towards Marlow, with ahead of them an old punt containing three fishermen silhouetted against the orange sky.