The rain set in during the afternoon and the fourth day's play in The Oval Test was abandoned at 4.40 p.m., with England 40 for one in their second innings after following on.

With one day of the Ashes series remaining, England are 169 runs behind with Australia cut to 90 overs in their bid to improve their winning margin to 4-1.

Only 21.3 overs of cricket was possible and, with less than 25 overs played, the capacity crowd will be entitled to a 50 per cent cash refund.

Earlier, Michael Atherton had been caught at first slip by Shane Warne for nine off Glenn McGrath and the crowd rose in appreciation of one of England cricket's outstanding figures of the last decade-plus.

Atherton waved his bat in acknowledgement as he neared the pavilion, the crowd saluting the Lancashire player they are likely to be seeing in Test action for the last time.

And the Australian players joined the applause for a man who captained his country a record 54 times. He is the highest scoring batsman in world cricket since 1990, after making his debut against Australia at Trent Bridge the previous year.

Twenty-six minutes after Atherton had left the scene the gloom worsened, five bulbs glowed on the scoreboard and bad light stopped play.

As the skies filled in, rain arrived after three days of hot sunshine and lunch was taken 10 minutes early.

England were an agonising 10 runs short of their target of 442 and Australian captain Steve Waugh asked opposite number Nasser Hussain to bat again.

Overnight centurion Mark Ramprakash moved from 124 to 133 from 232 balls (18 fours) before being caught behind cutting at McGrath, and the innings was wrapped up by Warne.

Darren Gough was stumped by Adam Gilchrist - his 100th Test victim and 25th of the series - to give Warne figures of seven for 166 in 44.2 overs, his best Test analysis in England.