DISCOVER ROYAL THAMES

From its spring in the Cotswolds, a wild river winds past dreaming spires and palaces to the city and the sea. Ben Lerwill marks Her Majesty the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee by exploring the rich, regal heritage of a great river

- Ben Lerwill

The royal swans of the Thames have seen it all. These imposingly elegant - if occasionally headstrong - birds are said to have been introduced to Britain from Cyprus in the late 12th century, brought here by Richard the Lionheart after the Third Crusade. Their snowwhite feathers have now graced the waters of our most famous river for more than 800 years, swimming sinuously through wars, plagues and coronations, graduating in the process from dinner-table delicacy to protected species.

Today, as the legal property of Queen Elizabeth II - who has the right to claim ownership of all unmarked mute swans swimming in open water, though maybe has more pressing tasks - they remain a regal sight. And they find a suitably majestic waterway in the Thames, that noble artery that rises in a puddly field in the Cotswolds and flows for 215 miles to reach the coast, passing palaces, castles and cathedrals on its way. It runs through nine counties, drifts under 134 bridges and spends much of its time carving a scenic, serpentine course through the countryside. In his book Thames: Sacred River, historian Peter Ackroyd calls the vast waterway "a museum of Englishness itself".

Among it all, from the whisper of the upstream reeds to the clatter of central London, the river's links with the monarchy have long been prominent. This year is the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, marking a decade since the huge, 670-boat royal pageant of 2012 and well over a millennium since Alfred the Great held the first English parliament in a riverside meadow in Shifford, Oxfordshire. Today, burnished tales and princely residences still clasp to the Thames like jewels to a necklace.