A chalk stream at work
The Letcombe Brook rises from springs at Letcombe Bassett, where water stored in the chalk of the downs comes to the surface. It runs for about twelve kilometres through Letcombe Regis, Wantage and Grove to East Hanney, where it joins the Childrey Brook and flows on into the Ock and the Thames. Chalk streams like this are rare worldwide, and most of them are in England. Their steady, clear, spring-fed flow made them valuable to people long before anyone thought about wildlife: the brook was probably one reason Wantage grew up where it did.
Mills from Domesday onwards
Domesday Book in 1086 recorded two mills at Letcombe Bassett, worth £3 a year, five mills worth £4 in the parish of Letcombe Regis, and a mill worth 100 pence that formed part of the endowment of Wantage church. The Letcombe Brook Project puts the total along the whole brook at ten. The two Letcombe Bassett mills were still working in 1402; by 1924 only one was left, a little over a quarter of a mile north of the village. At Letcombe Regis a mill called Hodammes Mill is mentioned in the 15th century, and in 1924 the village mill stood north of the village with a fulling mill, for finishing woollen cloth, close by.
In Wantage the Victoria County History recorded a corn mill on the stream just above the town and the Town Mill on the south side of Mill Street. The mill at The Ham, the Georgian house of the Priors Hold manor in the meadows south-west of the town, was already there in 1650. Another mill stood at Lock’s Lane, just above the ford. Tanners, hemp and sacking works and other trades in the town also depended on the water.
The last working mill in the town was the flour mill in Mill Street. It had been Clark’s biscuit flour mill until 1948, when the Munsey family, millers from Osney in Oxford whose own mill had burned down in 1946, bought it. As Wessex Mill it became known as one of the smallest commercial roller mills in the country, producing flour from local wheat. Its owners later stopped milling on the site, blaming electricity costs, and the Wessex Mill brand passed to another family miller.
Bassett cress
The same clean, cool spring water was ideal for watercress. In 1924 the Victoria County History noted that cress was grown in the brook at Letcombe Regis, and at Letcombe Bassett beds along the stream supplied London, where ‘Bassett cress’ was a known cry in Covent Garden market. Thomas Hardy borrowed the trade for the name of his fictional Cresscombe in Jude the Obscure.
The brook today
The mills and their weirs have left their mark: raised banks, diverted channels and barriers that fish struggle to pass. Until April 2020 the brook’s source also supplied public drinking water, before Thames Water switched the supply to water piped from the Thames. The Letcombe Brook Project, working with the Environment Agency and volunteers, now looks after the stream and is removing obstacles where it can. Water voles, brown trout and kingfishers are all found along it, even in the middle of Wantage.