THAMES: 19) The Passages

Lechlade and Cricklade. The Thames’s highest towns. Here at last is the river’s cradle, its nest of honey-and-mustard Cotswold limestone.

 

Narrow, shallow and clogged with vegetation, the river from here on up is unnavigable to all but the most tenacious of small craft.

Cricklade, the river’s uppermost town and goal of this the penultimate section.

But the foggy cloak of a hesitant spring sky hangs heavy over a world whose wheels, already juddering when this expedition began some thirty months ago, now appear to be spinning clean off.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing vengeance of twisted authoritarian power fantasies – in Syria, in Yemen, in Myanmar, in Ethiopia, in Afghanistan, and now the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia – have drowned in blood any remaining illusion that humankind, morally and politically, has improved in the course of its own journey of millennia. In England the abuses noted on the way up this river have yet to explode on the sheer scale of those disasters, but easily belong to the same trajectory of arrogance, cruelty, corruption, contempt for the different, and forsaking of reality for a fortress of self-aggrandising lies. The fleeting promise of modernity, of a future for humanity better than its past, lies in tatters; replaced, it seems, by one of fresh atrocities as vile as any in human history.

 

In such a world, disillusionment is rational. Rage; futility; doubts, in all sincerity, about whether humanity is a life-form that can solve its own problems. In such despair, projects like this one come to feel meaningless. After all, with no disrespect to the good natives of Lechlade and Cricklade, are we to expect their hinterland of fields and brooks to hold the remedies to this nightmare?

 

 

Well, their stories do matter. For a start, they too participate in a world where nowhere is truly far anymore.

 

Lechlade’s Thames Street – for now, in honour and solidarity, part of Cotswold Raion, Gloucester Oblast, Ukraine. This must be the first time in this region’s history that the Ukrainian bicolour flutters from its masts and flagpoles, in a startling echo of its blue streams and yellow-gold cottages.

The illusion of these towns’ high remoteness trickles even through the sound of their names. They alone on this river carry the element -lade, an obscure echo of Anglo-Saxon Old English (ge)lād which indicates a passage or crossing of some kind. It’s unclear whether this means a passage across the river, i.e. a ford; or a passage of the water itself, perhaps indicating some of the many little tributaries which merge on these meadows and journey on together as the dark river.

 

Their service to human passage was clear enough. Dwelling on the Thames’s flood-prone headwaters at its furthest point reachable by boat, and so close to where it gives way to its mighty and storied neighbour, the Severn, these two towns’ situations – Lechlade as a trade post, Cricklade as a strategic junction – have been pivotal. On this journey up they are the final threshold, the passages to the Cotswold nurseries, the beginning of the end. But for the water, they lead to everywhere in the world.

 

Upstream from Lechlade’s Halfpenny Bridge. The Thames’s uppermost boatyard can be glimpsed through the trees.

 

Start: Lechlade (no train station; buses from Swindon via Highworth)

End: Cricklade (no train station; buses to Swindon)

Length: 16.8km/10.5 miles

Location: Gloucestershire – Cotswold; Wiltshire – Swindon, Wiltshire

 

Topics: Lechlade, the Thames and Severn Canal and limit of navigation, Inglesham, Kempsford, Castle Eaton, Cricklade