we've decided as a family to walk the thames path and yesterday we went in search of the source. The walk is 184 miles long and starts here:

we're following the walk using this book, although there are other books too:

the girls sang a song at the start to mark the beginning of our trail

you'd expect there to be some water whizzing out of this spring at this time of year, but there was no sign of water here, or across the field where the thames sometimes flows

however, once we were over a main road we started to see the path the Thames sometimes takes

actual water started flowing in to the Thames from this ancient spring called Lyd Well. So here we see the watery start of the Thames

and then we were walking along an actual, wet, river Thames

and an attractive little stream it looked too

we planned to walk for 12 miles along the river, but we only managed a couple as it was too cold for little Kezia who was frozen like a lolly. so we went back to the car which we'd parked at Kemble station.

to be continued ...