Tuesday 24 August 2021

THAMES: 14) Settling Point

Is time like the river? There are places where it feels less like a flow, with one age succeeding another, than an accumulation of all ages together.
 
 
Witness the Oxford Plain. Through an agrarian spread of yellows and greens the river ribbons blue. Here upstream of Wallingford it bends, and in that bend is a tiny village which, at first glance, might as well be any other.
 

Dorchester-on-Thames, not to be confused with its better-known namesake the provincial capital of Dorset, is a tiny settlement of 1,000 people. Little houses. Sheep in fields. Aside from a peculiarly large church, what is there to set it out in the shadows of the vast structures of power and privilege that line this valley?
 
Look closer.
 
Are those not some noteworthy earthworks (at right)? And where are these views coming from on the flat Oxford Plain?
Hill forts. How about it then.
In fact this subtle riverbend is one of the richest historical treasure-troves in the Thames valley. Six millennia of continuous human habitation are written in the shape of its landscape, from the ramparts and ditches everywhere you look to the coins, bones and grave goods that practically erupt from its gravel. It took the English some time to realise it. They’d wrecked much of it through gravel quarrying by the time that they did. But once they did, the Dorchester bend became one of the most prized archaeological zones in the country.
 
These are deep memories it harbours. Most of them long precede the English nation. They precede even its precursors. They go all the way back to a time when far, far away, Gilgamesh and the Egyptian pyramids were happening; and when here on the very fringes of the story of humanity, the migrants who wandered out this way got out their flint hand-axes and, for the first time, whacked down the stakes of this island-peninsula’s earliest permanent settlements.
 
A landscape in time, not just in space. The shape of this land is the product – and continuation – of the stories of about six settlements that succeeded each other on and around the Dorchester bend.

Doubtless life in these earliest societies to put down roots here would have been full of struggles. But had it yet gone so fundamentally wrong as we find it today? Was this then, as it is now, a land of abuse? Had the masculine power fantasy, which should never have existed, been invented yet? Whatever diseases afflicted them, was it in them yet to come up with such staggering political and cultural mis-reactions as they have for COVID-19 today?
 
Regrettably that’s not a theoretical question.
 
And because this is the middle Thames, we have to ask: what of their forts? The Iron Age fort on the hill, and fort in the bend; the Roman fort just beneath where the village is now: were these, already, Privilege Forts? Or were these forts for everyone?
 
There’s simply too much in the way to answer these questions now. Nonetheless, let’s take a few steps into a landscape where perhaps there’s less to impede those ancestors’ touch on your skin than anywhere else in this part of the country.
 

Start: Wallingford Bridge (nearest station: Cholsey – ten minutes by bus, or take the X39 or X40 from Reading for approx. thirty minutes)
End: Confluence with River Thame, near Dorchester-on-Thames (nearest station: miles away, take the X39 or X40 bus to Reading or Oxford instead)
Length: 8km/5 miles
Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire
 
Topics: Wallingford Castle Meadows, Benson, Shillingford, and thousands of years of settlement at Dorchester-on-Thames
 

Saturday 7 August 2021

THAMES: 13) The Castle Vanishes

Privilege Forts like to appear immortal. That after all is how privilege protects itself: by seeding the belief that it’s innate, essential, morally ordained, rather than a violent seizure of power within history.
 
Can you look on a Tower of London or a Windsor Castle, and dare imagine the scene without them there?
 
How about the Thames’s other great castle?
 
Yes. There was a third. It was every bit as mighty, massive and politically consequential as the other two. Unlike them it actually had to fight off siege after siege after siege. And it did. It capped the entire set of core English strongholds; only those two were a match for its power and prestige.
 
Ever heard of Wallingford? Thought not.
 

Today the river brings us to a Privilege Fort of yesterday, although its retirement appears more comfortable than most. Nestled at the bottom of the Oxford Plain where once it guarded the Goring Gap, the little town of Wallingford potters quietly about in the rustic margins between Oxford and Reading. But get up close and poke it, and you might just get it to tell you the story of its days as the capital of the royal centre, the unbreakable shield of dynasties, and the pivot of those conquests, rebellions and civil wars in whose bloody crucible a shape was first carved for the English nation.
 
Which begs the question: What happened to it?
 
The castle once filled this entire plateau. Does something like that simply disappear? From memory as much as from landscape?
Perhaps it was murdered. Wallingford was also the later-life home of the detective-novel writer Agatha Christie – recognised by Guinness as the best-selling fiction writer of all time – as well as a principal filming site for the TV drama Midsomer Murders. One is advised to stay alert to suspicious middle-class people with knives and poisons leaping out from its innumerable little corners like this one.
This mystery awaits in a straight strike north from the Goring Gap. This is more or less a two-phase walk: there is the spruced-up high-bourgeois white fantasyland beyond Goring and Streatley, followed by a wilder push through Berkshire bush the rest of the way. All in all it’s very green, and if you can bear the typical all-pervading English structural injustice then it actually offers some really nice walking on a warm summer’s day like this one.
 
The river north of Streatley. There’s plenty of space to walk around people on this one, but be considerate on occasional narrower passages through foliage.

Among those injustices, do not forget, of course, that this country’s self-inflicted COVID-19 disaster goes on. While most of this route is out in the open, social distancing, face masks, and general hygiene considerateness are strongly advised in the built-up settlements and on public transport.
 
North from Goring Bridge, with the Swan Hotel of Streatley at left.
 
Start: Goring Bridge (nearest station: Goring and Streatley)
End: Wallingford Bridge (nearest station: Cholsey – 10 minutes by Bus 136 from Wallingford Market Place)
Length: 11.2km/7 miles
Location: Berkshire – West Berkshire; Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire
 
Topics: Streatley, Moulsford, Wallingford: Saxon fort, Norman castle, English ruin