--- title: The River Thames and the Sea Rat's voyage: from Constantinople to the English Channel — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The River Thames and the Sea Rat's voyage: from Constantinople to the English Channel», a lesson of the geography course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: The River in «The Wind in the Willows» never gets a name, but it is really the Tha --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/) / The River Thames and the Sea Rat's voy… # The River Thames and the Sea Rat's voyage: from Constantinople to the English Channel Lesson 62 of the geography course of Mova's primary school: 15 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/0/) — The River in «The Wind in the Willows» never gets a name, but it is really the Thames, where Kenneth Grahame grew up and walked all his life: willows, water-meadows, weirs, locks and big houses on the banks. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/1/) — The Rat has never been further than the ring of Downs he can see to the south, until a travelling Sea Rat sits down by the road and tells him about his voyages round the Mediterranean Sea: Constantinople, the Greek islands, Venice, Sicily, Corsica, Marseilles and Lisbon. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/2/) — All of those places are real and you can follow the Sea Rat's voyage on a map, port by port, ending in the harbours of Cornwall and Devon and up the English Channel. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/4/) — So a story about a river bank can also be a geography lesson about the whole of Europe. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/5/) — The Thames is about 346 km long; it rises in the Cotswold hills near Kemble, flows through Oxford, Reading and Windsor, and reaches the North Sea through London and a wide estuary. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/6/) — A river starts at its source, is joined by smaller streams called tributaries, and ends at its mouth; where a river meets the sea and the tide comes in, the wide part is called an estuary. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/8/) — The Downs, like the ones the Rat looks at, are rounded hills of chalk in southern England, covered in short grass. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/9/) — Several big houses on the Thames are said to have inspired Toad Hall, but nobody knows for sure which one Grahame had in mind. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/10/) — Constantinople is the old name of Istanbul in Turkey; the city stands on both sides of the Bosphorus strait, so part of it is in Europe and part in Asia. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/11/) — Venice in Italy is built on more than a hundred small islands in a lagoon, so it has canals instead of many of its streets, and people travel by boat, including the long black gondolas. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/12/) — Sicily is the biggest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and Palermo is its main city; Sardinia belongs to Italy and Corsica, just north of it, belongs to France. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/13/) — Marseilles, in the south of France, was founded by Greek sailors about 2,600 years ago, which makes it one of the oldest cities in France; today it is a busy port. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/14/) — To sail from the Mediterranean to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, a ship passes through the Strait of Gibraltar, where Europe and Africa are only about 14 km apart. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/15/) — The city of Porto, which the Sea Rat calls Oporto, gave its name to the whole country of Portugal; Bordeaux is a port on a river in south-west France. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/62-the-river-thames-and-the-sea-rat-s-voyage-from-constantinople-to-the-english-channel/16/) — The Mediterranean has hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters, which suits olive trees, grapes and lemons, so the Sea Rat could rest in «the great olive-woods» on the hills. - ← previous: [The map of the Just So Stories: from the North Atlantic to the Limpopo, the Amazon and Surrey](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/61-the-map-of-the-just-so-stories-from-the-north-atlantic-to-the-limpopo-and-surrey/) - next →: [Olympiad: maps, directions and clocks ★★★](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/63-olympiad-maps-directions-and-clocks/) - ↑ back to [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/)