The river has been used for recreational and possibly minor commercial navigation and in drier spells it can be safely canoed in some places.

The main bus station takes up where the wharf stood by what is no longer the Basingstoke Canal, its westernmost three miles having been filled in.

[4] The river then passes through water-meadows where it is joined by small streams from the springs and reduced ponds of the north of Black Dam.

[4] The river curves northward in a series of bends, past north Hampshire farms and a woodland-set golf course on the west bank in the south.

The Loddon then passes: Lilly Mill, Lilly Mill Farm; fields; Broadford Bridge for a lane; rectory gardens/fields; Stratfield Saye church; and the ornamental grounds of Stratfield Saye House, the home of every Duke of Wellington since the first received that highest ennoblement in 1817 for leading in the Battle of Waterloo.

[10] Two-arch, thick-buttressed, Stanfordend Bridge – under which the Loddon enters its second and last county, Berkshire – marks the northern end of the park, against a skirting of woodland and is likewise listed.

By the late 1970s, these were exhausted and left stopped up to flood, so Wokingham Borough Council could take ownership and create the country park.

Northwest is Charvil Country Park, amid the flows is Loddon Nature Reserve and northeast is Twyford, its Flour Mill at Silk Lane replaced by commercial blocks[14] above which it received the Broadwater or Twyford Brook, the outlet of The Cut, until diverted east to Bray Lock around 1820.

The Wokingham area was known for its production of silk stockings, and the turn-of-the 19th century brothers, Thomas and George Billing from Macclesfield sought out a profitable business of processing.

The spun silk was woven on looms set up in cottages, and for a while they were reasonably successful with labour costs kept down, employing children who should have been at Polehampton School.

It used a turbine rather than a water wheel to generate its power, and was owned by the Reading-based Simmonds family, who were involved in banking and brewing.

[24] The Lower Mill at Old Basing is a four-storey building dating from the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is grade II listed.

Reasons for the water quality being less than good include the discharge of sewage effluent, physical barriers to the movement of fish caused by modifications to the channel, and dominant, disease-carrier North American signal crayfish.

Like most rivers in the UK, the chemical status changed from good to fail in 2019, due to the presence of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) and perfluorooctane sulphonate (PFOS), neither of which had previously been included in the assessment.

A bulbous plant, which increases well on heavy clay soils,[38] it is somewhat similar in appearance to a large snowdrop and thrives in wet meadows and willow thickets, being also prolific along the river banks and islands.

In the gloom, not the more usual light of Marsh Marigolds, but white flowers hanging in a severe purity from the end of the long stems.

[41]how so ornamental a plant, growing in so public a place, could have escaped the prying eyes of the many Botanists who have resided in London for such a length of time.

[42]A 2.5-mile (4.0 km) stretch of the Loddon near Stanford End Mill, together with the adjacent hay meadows, which are periodically waterlogged, is a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

[43] The River Loddon has an identifiable array of fish, differing from the mainstream Thames locally including shoals of bream, chub, roach, rudd and large barbel.

[44] To facilitate migrating fish, £485,000 was spent creating a 220-yard (200 m) bypass around weirs at Arborfield in 2010 – a project of the Environment Agency, Thames Water, the University of Reading, Farley Estate and Arborfield Angling Society, meeting the public spending commitment directed by the Water Framework Directive.

This provided: Cain Bio-Engineering carried out the construction work and have claimed that the project constitutes a benchmark for such schemes.

Over the years, dredging of the river led to water flowing slowly through the enlarged channel, particularly in summer so the bed silted.

Other evidence includes postcards in the collection at Reading Local Studies Library, which show a punt at Twyford and rowing boats at Sindlesham Mill and Arborfield Hall.

[47] Further evidence for the use of the river was the death of John Alfred Dymott in 1917, who drowned after falling out of a punt, moving materials.

In his lengthy and politically charged poem Windsor Forest Alexander Pope invents a nymph of the Loddon named Lodona, giving her a form of the name of the river Ládōn in Arcadia where the nymph Syrinx was transformed into a reed, as recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses - from which work he also draws the familiar plot device of the chaste female delivered from the unwelcome attentions of a lustful god by her prayed-for transformation into a plant or watercourse.

The personal, yet classically inspired mythology that Pope creates for his poem fables that Diana and her attendant nymphs once roamed the 'Windsor shade':[51] Here, as old Bards have sung, Diana stray'd Bath'd in the Springs, or sought the cooling Shade; Here arm'd with Silver Bows, in early Dawn, Her buskin'd Virgins trac'd the Dewy Lawn.

Extracts from Windsor Forestby Alexander PopeThe amiable and erudite Thomas Warton, negligent clergyman but diligent poet,[53] spent much of his childhood beside the Loddon, near its sources in Basingstoke, for the infant Loddon then flowed through the grounds of the Parsonage House that belonged the living of the Vicar of Basingstoke, an incumbency filled by his father, Thomas Warton the elder from 1723 until his death in 1745.

[54][55] The 300-line poem The Pleasures of Melancholy, written by the precocious younger Warton at the age of just seventeen, contains the following lines concerning a poet lost in reverie by a shady, wooded stream at eventide that convey the strong impression of inspiration by the slow and drowsy Loddon: ...in embowering woods By darksome brook to muse, and there forget The solemn dulness of the tedious world, While Fancy grasps the visionary fair: And now no more th' abstracted ear attends The water's murmuring lapse, th' entranced eye Pierces no longer through th' extended rows Of thick-ranged trees; till haply from the depth The woodman's stroke, or distant tinkling team Or heifers rustling through the brake, alarms Th' illuded sense, and mars the golden dream.

While pensive Memory traces back the round, Which fills the varied interval between; Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.

Yet still one joy remains, that, not obscure, Nor useless, all my vacant days have flowed, From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime mature; Nor with the muse's laurel unbestowed.