Walk Three Men in a Boat, up the Thames to Oxford
Three young men convinced they're ill, a fortnight on the river as a cure, and a fox terrier called Montmorency. Your everyday steps follow them up the Thames, and Jerome's words unlock at every lock and pub.
- 108 miles
- 8 stops
- Jerome K. Jerome, 1889
A fortnight on the river
Three young men diagnose themselves with every disease in the medical dictionary except housemaid's knee, and prescribe a fortnight on the Thames. What follows is a hundred and eight miles of tinned pineapple, tow-ropes and misread river maps, and the funniest book in English about very little.
J., George and Harris row up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford: past Hampton Court, where Harris gets them lost in the maze, past Runnymede and Magna Carta Island, through Marlow, Henley and Sonning, to Reading and on up the river. Almost every place in the book is still there, and the towpath follows most of it, so this is a route you could walk for real.
Jerome based the three on himself and two real friends, and the book, published in 1889, set out to be a serious guide to the river. The comedy kept getting in the way, which is why people still read it. It ends as the trip did: rained off, and back to London on the train for a good dinner.
- Distance
- 108 miles (174 km)
- Stops
- 8, each with its own passage and plate
- Map
- The real world, on Apple Maps
- Text
- Jerome K. Jerome; Project Gutenberg ebook #308
Where it starts
It was a glorious morning, late spring or early summer, as you care to take it, when the dainty sheen of grass and leaf is blushing to a deeper green; and the year seems like a fair young maid, trembling with strange, wakening pulses on the brink of womanhood. The quaint back streets of Kingston, where they came down to the water’s edge, looked quite picturesque in the flashing sunlight, the glinting river with its drifting barges, the wooded towpath, the trim-kept villas on the other side, Harris, in a red and orange blazer, grunting away at the sculls.
Three Men in a Boat · Jerome K. Jerome
This is the passage Bematist gives you the moment you set out. The other 7 wait at the places they happened, and the only way to read them is to walk there.
How long would the Thames take you?
Jerome's trio managed about a week upstream. On everyday walks at true scale it's a month or so. Or pick your own finish and Bematist sets the pace from how much you already walk.
A rough guide, at about 0.75 m a step. In the app the pace comes from your own 30-day average in Apple Health, and stays fixed for the whole journey.
On the way
The words, at the places
8 passages, each waiting where it happened. You can see how far away the next one is, but not what it says.
Walk it with friends
Send a link and walk the same road together, each of you on your own streets, wherever you live.
No streak to lose
Steps come straight from Apple Health. A quiet day is just a short one, and your place on the road only moves forward.
More roads like this one
See the whole library, with a new book every month, chosen by walkers' vote.
Set out for Oxford.
108 miles of Three Men in a Boat, on the walks you already take.
- For iPhone
- No account