Returning now to Radcot Bridge, and the boat which is waiting all this while to convey us on our downward voyage, we pass on to Radcot Lock, a mile down, and under “Old Man’s Bridge”; or rather the successor of an old wooden bridge that went by that name, and is now replaced by a smarter, white-painted bridge of like material, of which type there are several others between this and Oxford. The landscape is here very open: the Berkshire hills situated at some considerable distance off, on the right, while the flat Oxfordshire plain, on the left, is lost in infinity. Here, on the way to Rushey Lock, are many backwaters, so screened by the tall growths of midsummer rushes and by the drooping branches of the willows, now made heavy by fully-grown foliage, and further masked by dense masses of water-lilies, that their existence is scarcely suspected. And thus we come to Tadpole Bridge, of which the very best to be said is that it is an eminently useful, and quite inoffensive stone structure of one arch, perhaps nearly a century old. We shall find, proceeding down the Thames, that all too often it is difficult to award even such negative praise as this to the bridges that cross the river. [Illustration: WOODEN BRIDGE ACROSS THE UPPER THAMES.] Here Tadpole Bridge carries an excellent road across to Buckland, two miles on the right, in Berkshire; and two miles to the left, to Bampton, in Oxfordshire. We will first see what Buckland may be like. It is soon obvious that it occupies a site on the ridge of hills running between Oxford and Faringdon; for its square church-tower presently becomes prominent on the skyline. Buckland was for many generations, and until the present time of writing, in possession of the Throckmorton family, but now the extravagances of bygone baroneted Throckmortons, and the mortgage-charges they recklessly heaped up, have overtaken the present generation, and Buckland has at last been sold into other hands. The great church of Buckland, largely Norman and Early English, is neighboured by a modern Roman Catholic church. The old church contains some monuments of these long-descended Throckmortons, and others to their predecessors, the Yate family, among them that of a seventeenth-century baronet and his lady, Sir Edward Yate and Lady Katherine, who would appear, between them, according to their epitaph, to have held all the virtues in fee-simple: