THAMES: 17) The High Pastures

 

Through a haze of cloud, milky sunshine washes the plains of the high Thames. It is an early October morning, and the reason it is early is that from here on, out the back doors of Oxford, the riverlands grow so remote that getting in and out becomes a four- or five-stage operation, of almost as many hours, on increasingly patchy public transport.

 

The ancient common of Port Meadow, stretching far up the west flank of Oxford.

More cows graze by the river close to the northernmost point in its course. If you like cows you’re in the right place with this one.

Gone are the towns and cities, the castles and palaces, the towers of exclusion which lord over the middle Thames. Here there is green as far as the eye can see, with only a smattering of small craft – tugs, canoes, and the iconic narrowboats – puttering from lock to lock. This expedition, having shoved through the English capital with its industrial relics, political struggles and crowded illusions of modernity, then through the long parade of past and present privilege-nests that hold the middle river, has at last broken out to the high countryside, the remnants of the English bush, where the infant river emerges from its cradle.

 

Peace at last then? Not quite. The picture-postcard daydream of the upper Thames, in which it trickles serene through grassy meadows and hamlets of beige Cotswold stone, belies a volatile flow loaded with pent-up grievance. Concertinaed through bunched-up meanders and straining in the fetters of its locks, the young river here is as liable as any reach downstream to drown these low-lying plains in remorseless floods. And as the water, so too the humans who have written their stories in it – for even out here, stories of strife and struggle whisper from the reeds.

 

The ruins of the Godstow nunnery, on the outskirts of Oxford, is one of that city’s more mythically-charged installations.

The goal of this section is the New Bridge, which typical of English naming conventions is the oldest bridge on the Thames. It is there that the river meets a tributary whose name reaches right into this country’s present moral calamity. You’ll have heard of it: the Windrush.

With the end in sight, it’s time to step this expedition up a gear. The remaining sections, starting with this one, are all twenty-kilometre hard slogs over open country. Anyone thinking of tackling this for themselves should plan with full respect for weather and seasonal conditions, in particular rainfall, flooding, and hours of daylight, as well as preparing good footwear, sensible clothing, and well-organised travel and/or local accommodation arrangements. Sufficient food and drink, especially water, are vital; there are occasional pubs on or near the river, but also long stretches in between with absolutely nothing.

 

As we shall see, you’ll also find plenty of large animals in these parts. Be nice to them. Brexit wasn’t their fault.

 

Upstream from Osney Bridge in west Oxford: the upper limit for large watercraft and effective gateway to the Upper Thames.

Notice the increase in scale since the previous section.

Start: Osney Bridge (nearest station: Oxford)

End: Newbridge (no settlement, just a bridge with a pub at each end; about five buses a day stop by the Rose Revived pub on a Witney-Abingdon route)

Length: 21.7km/13.5miles

Location: Oxfordshire – City of Oxford, Vale of White Horse, West Oxfordshire

 

Topics: Port Meadow, Godstow, miles and miles of cow meadows and sheep meadows (Wytham Foothills, Farmoor Reservoir, Bablock Hythe and Northmoor Meadows), Newbridge and the River Windrush

 

THAMES: 16) Nightmares of the Spires

A crossing for oxen, they called it. Good enough, right? Who doesn’t like oxen? They go nuuo. Watch them mooch across the river. Touch them, if you really want. Build your civilisation around all the stuff they do for you. Was that not enough?

 

Apparently not, because then they just had to go and do this.

 

“I have an idea, let’s pack our settlement with as many limestone phalluses sticky-up bits as we possibly can. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

So they did, and now everyone thinks they’re special.

So rose the dreaming spires, as they were so irritatingly immortalised in the poetry of Matthew Arnold, and in their image the oxen-ford – one of so many – became the den of one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions of all humankind. To this day the crackling magnetism of its erudite pinnacles strikes awe into throngs of aspiring participants and visitors from all the inhabited corners of this world...

 

...for most of whom its name, with its scholarly romance, is all but synonymous with that of the settlement which hosts it.

 

Here, then, is Oxford: principal city – only city – of the upper Thames, and capital both of its wealthy shire and of the English literary imagination.

 

Has anyone actually counted the spikes in this place? Is it possible within one lifetime?

But we aren’t here for the romance. This critical expedition up the Thames (‘or Isis’, as they call it here) has proceeded upon the principle that the more highly a place’s power pierces the sky, the heavier the anvil of scrutiny onto which its ear must be brought down. And here, at the very peak of the procession of the Privilege Forts of the middle Thames, we confront – just look at it – the most practised and proficient sky-shredders of all.

 

What is Oxford, really? Is there not, beneath the glamour and fancy masonry, a Thames town like any other? An Oxford of wars and riots, of massacres and plagues, of industrial hope and ruination, of brutal exclusion and injustice? The people of this city would be the first to tell you that the university is not all that Oxford is, and has in fact been an almighty pain in the arse for its mere mortal populace at times. And as for that university, for all its polished dialects and lengthy bibliographies, should we not expect that it is but one more creation of the English, with all the dreadful tendencies they have displayed when they get their hands on power?

 

As the palaces and castles on the way up here have well demonstrated, you don’t typically make it this big in this country without perpetrating some awful level of colonial, gendered and/or class-based violence. Do the spires stand shameless in that pattern? Or dare they claim exemption from it?

The river downstream near Abingdon. A world away from the spires, yet ever in their shadow.

With its enormous weight in books, films and other popular media, Oxford projects the expectation of its atmosphere of enchantment across its surrounding countryside. But the length of river that links it to Abingdon, though never far on the map from the grand city or its satellites, feels like the remotest reach so far on this journey. Perhaps its magic has deteriorated along with its country? Or was it always more illusion than reality? Either way it is time to traverse it, and so complete the middle Thames passage.

 

Upstream from Abingdon Bridge, the start of today’s section, on a fog-filled late summer’s morning. At right is the Nag’s Head pub on its namesake river island.

Start: Abingdon Bridge (nearest station: miles away, take the bus to Stratton Way from Oxford or Didcot Parkway instead)

End: Osney Bridge (nearest station: Oxford)

Length: 15.2km/9.5 miles

Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse, City of Oxford

 

Topics: Abingdon outskirts, Nuneham Courtenay (with Lewis Carroll, and the forced removal of an entire village), Radley (with Radley College), Sandford-on-Thames (with the ‘Sandford Lasher’), Oxford suburbs, Oxford – City and University

 

THAMES: 15) 'Thames or Isis'

River Thames or Isis, the maps read now. What does it mean? Two names at once? Or are you expected to choose one or the other, like, say, chocolate or pistachio ice cream, or a red suitcase or a blue suitcase?

 

Is it the Isis now? Or still the Thames? Is this still the same river?

 

The river itself is silent on this matter. What the names really tell us about are the humans who come up with them, and here they tell us that there is a set of humans who do things differently from the rest. So differently, at that, that even the water, the source of all that they are, takes on an alternate meaning in their presence.

 

River Thames or Isis. They tell us, in other words, that we encroach on the core domains of the Oxford English. And that, the Oxfordese tribes would have us believe, is special.

 

Abingdon. At population 40,000, this largest of Oxford’s moons has achieved stable orbit – for now – by drawing on that city’s economic and intellectual atmosphere while exerting one very much its own.

The river at Clifton Hampden, one of several villages that shelter in the bush along the Thames's-or-Isis's meanders.

Is that difference substantial, as far as the river is concerned? As we draw into Lewis Carroll and Philip Pullman territory, should we expect to find people nosing around in colourful boats that aren’t from around here, no doubt garbed in suspicious hats and coats? Are there glimpses of rabbits darting into holes in the undergrowth, pocket-watch in one paw and bottle of dubious fluids in the other? What is this mystique about the Oxfordshire leisurelands? By what high otherworldly air are they supposedly set apart from the long procession of downstream Privilege Forts which, in flowing through them hereafter, the river must find merely mundane?

 

Or is it all a magic show, a masquerade of dialect and illusion? Might it be mere disguise for what’s really just a continuation of this valley’s nests of wealth and power, here as there seeking creative ways to write the suffering of those they exclude out of the story?

 

How different is it, really?

 

At one level the Oxfordshire Thames would seem to bear much in common with the fare so far. There are lengthening slogs across farm fields; white pleasure-cruisers, lazing past with invariably white passengers; and no fewer than three straight cuts, dug through where they – their monks, their merchants – couldn’t be bothered to put up with the water’s wilful twists and bends.

 

But at another level, perhaps one does begin to detect a few kinks in the cosmic fabric. The settlements here are secretive, hidden behind farm fields or curtains of bush. As at their Dorchester concentration point, the fields in question have been especially fertile in their yield of clues to thousands of years of habitation gone by. The long progress through these agrarian margins is intermittently disturbed by the metallic sheen of cutting-edge science and technology: the satellite belt of research and development installations that swirl in close orbit of Oxford University. And in the spaces in between you stumble through a field of much smaller asteroids, each unique in shape. Those are the bizarre native rituals peculiar to each village or sub-tribe, the likes of Poohsticks and Bun-Throwing and Morris Dancing which, just perhaps, can only be made sense of under a Carrollian suspension of the limits of everyday belief.

 

Little Wittenham Bridge. This unassuming footbridge held international significance as the site of the World Poohsticks Championships until 2015.

A suspicious tree arrangement spotted in the rustic middle distance between the Didcot power station and the Culham nuclear fusion research centre. You can’t be too sure of anything in a landscape like this.

A world unto itself then? A place where the imaginary is real, and the real – that is, COVID-19 failure, Brexit-induced food shortages, and most lately this country’s monstrous and agonising betrayal of the Afghans – is all consigned to rude imagination?

 

At times like these regular attention is drawn to the warnings of one who offered some of the clearest visions on how truth and reality wither in the authoritarian shadow. It so happens that this bit of floodplain is also where George Orwell – who it might be noted, took a river’s name as his own – at last had his bones laid to rest. It’s doubtful his less corporeal parts get much rest these days, whatever the enchantments called up by such nomemancy as Thames or Isis.

 

The confluence with the River Thame is the start of today’s progress, and the lower extent of the River Thames or Isis naming convention.

 

Start: Confluence with the River Thame, near Dorchester-on-Thames (nearest station: miles away, take the X39 or X40 bus from Reading or Oxford instead and walk in from the stop on the Dorchester Bypass)

End: Abingdon Bridge (nearest station: miles away, take the X3 or X13 bus from Stratton Way to Oxford or Didcot Parkway instead)

Length: 14.5km/9 miles

Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse

 

Topics: Little Wittenham, Clifton Hampden, Sutton Courtney and Culham, and Abingdon. Is it special?

 

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

 

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

 

THAMES: 12) The Gap in the Chalk

A hundred million years ago, England didn’t exist.

 

Nor for all but the latest sliver of the ninety-nine million years that followed, for that matter.

 

What about the land they now called England? That existed, in a manner of speaking. But it had no humans yet, and so no names based on imaginary lines on maps or in minds. It also sat about in tropical latitudes some thousand miles from where it is now. It had dinosaurs. When it wasn’t underwater – which much of the time it was.

 

And while it was underwater, it had something else: extremely tiny planktons which, when they died, left behind extremely tiny calcium carbonate shells. There were a lot of them. More than forty million years’ worth in fact. And that’s why these extremely tiny creatures are among the most extremely important things to the people of what is now southern England.

 

They’re standing on them.

  

This stuff. Chalk.

Standing on them physically, but also mentally. The English like standing on these planktons’ contributions. It makes them feel English. Be it rolling downs like the Chiltern Hills or the soaring cliffs of Dover and Beachy Head, chalk is a nigh-obligatory feature in the green-and-pleasant landscapes of their national imagination.

 

The low ridge of the Chilterns, gliding down to the gap where the river runs through the chalk.

The cliffs are ironic. Within that imagination their chalk is a barrier, a natural wall against the inferior barbarian hordes on the European mainland. In reality the chalk does the opposite. Its province of deposits does not separate but connects England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands over a timespan for much of which the island of Britain was no island at all but a European peninsula. The Dover cliffs are not a wall, but a bridge beneath the Channel to the Alabaster Coast of Normandy. It’s the same chalk.

 

Chalk – that is the concern of today’s length of river. It is through the outer arms of this Cretaceous (literally, chalky) realm that the river cuts down to Reading and the comparatively recent sands and clays of the London Basin. And having followed the water up that basin, it is time to cross into a more ancient land: the Jurassic reaches of Oxford, and in their midst, the river’s origins in Cotswold limestone.

 

The view upstream from the Pangbourne-Whitchurch toll bridge, from where we set out today.

The river created this passage itself. Later it would prove important to the human immigrants by funnelling their boats, roads and railways through its narrow corridor. And so the corridor sprouted a pair of villages: Goring on one side, Streatley on the other. From the former comes their present name for this gap in the chalk: the Goring Gap.

 

The river a little downstream of the Goring Gap. For all the chalk’s geological significance you can only draw it out so far for dramatic effect because its hills aren’t actually all that high. There’ll be no breathtaking scenes of the Thames gushing through precipitous canyons. There’ll be plenty of grass though. And cows.

 

Start: Whitchurch Bridge (nearest station: Pangbourne)

End: Goring Bridge (nearest station: Goring and Streatley)

Length: 6.4km/4 miles

Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire

 

Topics: Whitchurch, Hartslock Wood, Gatehampton, Goring, and the geology of the Thames

 

THAMES: 11) Middle Margins

Today is more or less this.

 

After the town at the centre of things, we come to an in-betweeny space where not much seems to happen. There are fields. Ducks. Overhead cables. It’s quiet back here.

 

Geese on the banks of Rivermead Park, West Reading.

The river near Pangbourne. Railways, pylons and other infrastructure crisscross this backstage space for Reading and its surrounding settlements.

And yet, Reading’s upstream outskirts herald a significant transition in the course of the river.

 

The central Thames thus far has been a procession of castles and palaces, mansions and monasteries, elite schools and sports facilities and sprawling land-grabs by the monied obscene. The Privilege Forts of the English south line up along their valley of imagination: a furnace-belt of willows and glistening water, insulated from its country’s sordid realities by its fortress-walls of inherited wealth as it roars in the manufacture of narratives of high-caste white Englishness.

 

As we have seen, the hammering from these foundries is loud and relentless. Theirs are the stories they want the whole nation to hear.

 

And then, on the far side of Reading – they fade.

 

The upper-middle Thames dispenses with the battlements, searchlights and megaphones. In their place unfurl rolling lowlands, spread with farms and dotted with small villages through which the river comes gliding. Some of these settlements are historic, ancient even, while their surroundings continue to supply the green-and-pleasant backdrop to the English national reverie. Yet now the volume is dialled right down. These settlements merely speak their stories, rather than shout them – except, of course, for one of the loftiest Privilege Forts of all, which waits at the end of this sequence in a certain city known as Oxford.

 

But there is a more important transition beneath that. Literally.

Oxford sits in a basin whose clay is geologically distinct from that of the lower valley. To push north on this island is as to delve deeper in time. Where London’s surface clay is young – that is, Cenozoic, about 50 million years old – Oxford’s goes back some 100 million years further to the Late Jurassic period. And through the space and time in between runs an outer arm of the great network of Late Cretaceous chalk deposits (from c.65-95 million years ago) which stretch across southern England and northwest Europe – and whose separation, of course, is wholly imaginary.

 

One segment of that arm is well familiar by now. The chalk ridge of the Chiltern Hills has overlooked the north bank all the way from Marlow.

This chalk has dramatically reshaped both the landscape itself and its imagery in English culture, and among those effects have been significant changes to the river’s course. There was a time the Thames pushed straight east into the North Sea. But finding its way blocked during the glaciations of the most recent ice age, it cut a gap through the relatively permeable chalk and has since skewed down through the London Basin instead.

 

It is through this gap that we now pursue it, with a better look at this realest of deep-history in the next section. For today the goal is the foot of that gap, where the river emerges between the villages of Pangbourne and Whitchurch.

 

Thames Water HQ, with its sinister spiral stairs in transparent tubes, hulks over the river at Reading Bridge where today’s progress begins.

 

Start: Reading Bridge (nearest station: Reading)

End: Whitchurch Bridge (nearest station: Pangbourne)

Length: 11.2km/7 miles

Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire; Berkshire – Borough of Reading, West Berkshire District

 

Topics: West Reading suburbs, Purley, Pangbourne – shifting satellite settlements on the edge-of-centre