It drains a rural area to the east of Twyford, starting at the foot of the M4 motorway embankment, and is a tributary of the River Loddon.
Formerly, The Cut, which now makes a sharp turn on the other side of the embankment, flowed to the west along what is now the Twyford Brook.
[5] There was an area of swampy ground between the sharp turn and the Twyford Brook, but the connection was severed by the construction of the motorway embankment.
In 1986, the present owner bought the seven plots of land at Pondwood which had been created when the motorway was built in the 1970s, and opened a fishery using two lakes to the north of the river in 1987.
It runs around the northern and western edge of a large tract of land called Ruscombe Lake, the area that used to flood and caused The Cut to be built.
[11] As it makes a horseshoe turn to run along the northern edge of Stanlake Park, the river is joined by another drain which carries water from an extensive area to the south and east.
Two more drains join from the south before it passes under the A321 Hurst Road, and turns to the north, to run parallel to the River Loddon as it crosses the 115-foot (35 m) contour.
There are two culverts on the final section, which have allowed housing on Weavers Way to be built over it, and then it enters the Loddon just below the site of Twyford flour mill.
[18] By 1899 it was served by a long railway siding which ran alongside the Henley branchline from Twyford station.
By 1969 the railway siding had been lifted, and a distribution warehouse covering 20,000 square feet (1,900 m2) was added,[21] but another fire destroyed the building in 1976, and construction of a new mill was completed in 1979.
There are several components that are used to determine this, including biological status, which looks at the quantity and varieties of invertebrates, angiosperms and fish.
Reasons for the status not being good include sewage discharge, run-off from the M4 motorway, and contamination by fertilisers leeching into the river from agricultural land.