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.
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| Are those not some noteworthy earthworks (at right)? And where are these views coming from on the flat Oxford Plain? |
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| 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
