Introduction
For our second walk of the Christmas/New Year holiday, we continued on the Thames Path from Maidenhead upstream.
Maidenhead
First, of course, we had to walk from the station to the river. Maidenhead's in Berkshire, so you would expect it to be all Waitrose up in there. In fact, it's a hole. I didn't even photograph all the boarded-up or disused or generally scummy buildings we passed. Of course, I grabbed a few...
The river
Once you get onto the river and a little way from the town, it becomes exactly how I had initially expected - huge multimillion-pound riverfront houses, threatening signs on the lawns. (Seriously: one of them claimed to have 'laser security'. I chucked a stick onto their garden, but sadly it didn't get burnt to a crisp, or in fact at all.)
Cookham
We stopped to eat lunch in the churchyard of a twee village.
Back to the river
Our detour through Cookham was required because development (not recent, just more enormous houses) had blocked the old towpath. We were soon back to the river, continuing through common land until we reached a railway bridge carrying the branch line that we'd use to return. The bridge had a footway, which we used to switch riverbank.
Marlow
Our journey ended in Marlow, an old town with an impressive church (not open) and bridge (fixed in place).
Marlow is pretty much everything Maidenhead isn't, although it did lower itself to a Sainsbury's Local where we selected some provisions on our way home (and I shocked my mum by picking a carton of organic orange juice that cost about ten times what she normally pays). The end!