The Kennet is a tributary of the River Thames in Southern England. Most of the river is straddled by the North Wessex Downs AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). The lower reaches have been made navigable as the Kennet Navigation, which – together with the Avon Navigation, the Kennet and Avon Canal and the Thames – links the cities of Bristol and London.
The length from near its sources west of Marlborough, Wiltshire down to Woolhampton, Berkshire is a 111.1-hectare (275-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).[1][2] This is primarily from an array of rare plants and animals completely endemic to chalky watercourses.[3]
When Wiltshire had second-tier local authorities, one, Kennet District, took the name of the river.
One of the Kennet’s sources is Swallowhead Spring near Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, and others are springs north of Avebury near the small villages of Uffcott and Broad Hinton. These then converge. In these early stages it passes close by many prehistoric sites including Avebury Henge, West Kennet Long Barrow and Silbury Hill. The land drained by the headwaters normally has a deep water table (being in the North Wessex Downs which is mostly chalk as the upper subsoil), thus many stretches are winterbournes when and where precipitation is low and surrounding soils are not so dense with impermeables as to form a surface spring.
The river flows through the towns of Marlborough, Hungerford and Newbury before flowing into the Thames on the reach above Sonning Lock in central Reading, Berkshire.
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