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