The Goring Gap is one of the best bits of geography in southern England. Here the Thames, after wandering across the Oxfordshire plain, cuts straight through the chalk hills, with the Chilterns on one side and the North Wessex Downs on the other, and the valley narrows into a steep, wooded passage that feels almost Alpine by English standards. Goring is the village on the east bank, Streatley faces it on the west, and a bridge and a lock tie them together.
It is a place of old routes. The Ridgeway, a track used for thousands of years and often called Britain's oldest road, crosses the Thames here, and so does the Thames Path. The village has quietly gathered famous residents: Oscar Wilde spent a summer here in the 1890s and borrowed the name Goring for a character in An Ideal Husband, and George Michael lived in the village and died here in 2016, after which fans left flowers by his house for months.
The river is the reason for the stop. People do swim in the Thames around Goring and Streatley, mostly in the reaches upstream, where the water is slow and the banks are open, and on summer evenings you will see a few heads bobbing. Keep well away from the lock and weir, watch for boats, and know that after heavy rain the water can be fast and dirty. If you would rather stay dry, the riverside path between the bridge and the meadows is a lovely short walk.
The roads around here are good and varied. Streatley Hill climbs steeply west out of the valley onto the downs with a fine view back over the river, and the roads beyond run across rolling open chalk country with long views and few hedges. On the Chiltern side, the lanes are narrower and twistier, sunk between banks under beech woods, with blind corners and the odd tractor. Weekends bring cyclists and walkers, and the village itself gets busy on fine Sundays.
Goring has pubs, cafés and shops, and Pangbourne, a few kilometres downstream, is where Kenneth Grahame spent his last years, the author of The Wind in the Willows, a book that feels right on these banks. For bigger services, Wallingford is about eight kilometres north, a pleasant market town with fuel and supermarkets.