THAMES: 20) It Turns Round in a Circle

Thames Head, they’ve called these meadows since time immemorial. Here, they say, the river is born, in dandelion carpets beneath a broad Cotswold sky.

 

Folk reckoning was buttressed over the centuries by journalists’ and travellers’ articles, scholarly opinion, and eventually by formal recognition from the Ordnance Survey and Thames Conservancy. On account of the last a marker stone now stands in these fields, officially recognising its base as the source of the River Thames.

 

But is it?

One of the river’s many headwater channels runs through the village of Ashton Keynes. It claims this channel as the true river. But who can say for sure?

Cricklade’s North Meadow, putting on its annual display of snake’s head fritillaries.

Above Cricklade the river breaks into a maze of headwaters and ceases to exist in the singular. These waterways’ differences in length, depth and flow are trivial now, and they come and go with the seasons, making any attempt to designate one or another as the true or main Thames arbitrary. However, if you follow one of these channels – officially a tributary, the Churn – you will come to a spot further north called Seven Springs, where a different marker stone, backed up by a notice from the local council, identifies that site, ‘despite the controversy over the years’, as the ultimate source of the river.

 

There’s a problem here. It’s a sensitive one. This is the English’s principal river. It's fed and watered them, inspired them, flooded them, borne them in and out on their migrations, their trades, their wars, their nation-building dreams, their industrial and imperial madnesses – but where, in the first place, does it come from?

 

Clearly this dispute had all the ingredients for violent upheaval across these restive western provinces, and in 1937 it made it into parliament. The representative for Stroud, a Mr. Perkins, whose constituency included Seven Springs, insisted to the Agriculture Minister that Seven Springs was in fact the ‘correct’ source on the grounds that it was fourteen miles further from the estuary than Thames Head, as well as twice its height above sea level. The next Ordnance Survey map, he argued, would do well to mark it accordingly.

 

This would indeed have reflected established geographic practice for reckoning a river’s source, while not incidentally making the Thames longer than the Severn. But the pertinent fact wasn’t one of distances or elevations. Rather it was that Mr. Morrison, the Agriculture Minister, just happened to be the MP for Cirencester whose territory included Thames Head. And so he replied: ‘I understand that it is not an invariable rule...to regard as the source...the source of the tributary most distant from its estuary’. Further challenged, to laughter, that Thames Head also periodically dries up (likewise true), he simply shut the matter down: ‘I am aware of these considerations, but they do not alter my view, as confirmed, that the River Thames rises in my constituency and not in that of my honourable friend.’

 

As so often in this world, it seems the question of the source is a question not of truth, but of power.

 

In that connection, let the statement of this field and sky offer some strength, however small, to whoever needs it right now.

What says the river itself?

 

Well, the reality of rivers is that they don’t gush from a single point. They accumulate, diverse and disparate, all the way down their drainage basins. For a few seconds you are a source too, whenever in the course of a walk like this you spill your flask or pee in the bushes. Then it flows into the sea, rises as cloud, and falls as rain to begin the journey all over again.

 

In which case, perhaps the nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Huxley, in an 1869 geography lecture, put it best:

 

The source of the Thames comes from nowhere; it turns round in a circle.

 

Perhaps much else does too – but not this journey. 250 kilometres and two and a half years from the ‘cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile and death’ of the estuary, as Marlow in Heart of Darkness had it – and finding this still quite a fair description all the way up – we attain the edge-of-the-world sunlit slopes where the water’s trail is lost. And because this expedition (or perhaps thankfully, this text) has to end somewhere, let it take as its destination, arbitrarily of course, the place where centuries’ weight in custom marks, if not the One True Source, then the human commemoration of those water molecules’ reunion, there and everywhere, into that party which, in its journey together, has come to be known as the river – the Dark River – the Thames.

 

The river upstream from Cricklade’s Town Bridge, which helpfully labels it right where the name starts to lose stable meaning.

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

End: Thames Head (nearest station: Kemble)

Length: 19.7km/12.25 miles

Location: Wiltshire – Wiltshire; Gloucestershire – Cotswold

 

Topics: Cricklade North Meadow, the Cotswold Water Park, Ashton Keynes, Somerford Keynes, Ewen, Kemble, Thames Head and the Source