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

 

 

Port Meadow

The river keeps its distance from central Oxford, but its course down the western flank of the university city is nonetheless close to its heart, both in the high imagination of its myths and literature and more practically in its daily jogs and strolls. More bucolic than the southward reaches and not so integrated into its suburbs and its rowing, these northward banks draw plenty of locals and their dogs out for morning exercise.

 

The riverside houses of Osney adjoin the water here, with their little gardens’ back doors opening straight onto the towpath. The west bank is occupied by a large set of allotments, which the river’s ducks seem eager to get into.

A reminder of the branching maze of channels into which the river splits around Oxford. This one wasn’t even the main flow, having been cut out by the monks of Osney Abbey to power their mills. The cut under the footbridge at right (east) links to the Castle Mill Stream and the start of the surviving part of the Oxford Canal, which runs all the way up to Warwick Province. To the left (west) the river’s old main course – now the Bulstake Stream – heads off down a weir-controlled open-air swimming pool that was closed in the 1990s. The water level gauge is a reminder that these flows are at times far more dangerous than they look here.

The link to the Castle Mill Stream is known locally as the Sheepwash Channel, another echo perhaps of the Oxen-ford’s rustic origins.

Through the foliage to the east is the tower of St. Barnabas’s Church, built in 1869 to cater for what was then growing into the impoverished working-class Jericho district. Its industrial labourers were crammed into poor-quality housing with no effective drainage or sanitation, exposing them to terrible risks from floods and water-borne diseases.

The towpath then crosses to a sliver of an island barely three or four metres in width – essentially a raised track, between the river to the west and the tiny Fiddler’s Stream to the east. This Fiddler’s Island might look a charming place for a stroll, but its severe vulnerability to flooding is obvious immediately.

 

Pretty, isn’t it? But signs warn that deaths have occurred during floods here and strongly advise people not to attempt to walk this path when it’s inundated.

The Fiddler’s Stream is clogged with duckweed, making it popular with hungry waterfowl.

Evidence of rather ferocious tree management across to the west.

Your boat needs a low profile like this to make it up here past Osney Bridge.

The island ends at a large boatyard, right where the river and Castle Mill Stream first diverge. Here too is the bottom corner of the vast Port Meadow, a 400-acre expanse of common grazing land.

 

This rusty footbridge allows Oxford’s escapees to get across to run around on the Port Meadow. But the towpath, which the boatyard reminds us was originally built for hard work on the river, trails on to the tip of Fiddler’s Island.

Here too are flashes of the otherworlds haunting Oxford. From this boat a tiger and unidentified two-headed entity keep a wary watch on wayfarers.

The north end of Fiddler’s Island, where the Medley Footbridge, built in 1865 and also known as the Rainbow Bridge, crosses west. Medley appears to be the name of a small farming hamlet that used to stand on that bank.

Bossoms Boatyard is a significant local institution. Run by the Bossom family from its opening in the 1830s until 1945, it claims to have been a pioneer of fibreglass hulls and still operates one of the few boat-building and repair stations to be found on these far reaches. Next door to it is the Medley Sailing Club, the highest such club on the Thames.

A first sighting of Port Meadow, stretching broad and flat all the way up to Wolvercote in the distance.

Port Meadow is ancient. According to legend (and to at least some extent historical record), this grazing field has remained unploughed, unbuilt on and largely unchanged for more than four thousand years. The archaeological remnants it harbours stretch from recent horse-racing bridges and civil war fortifications right back to Iron Age settlement traces and Bronze Age burial mounds – a record of the many shifts in management and usage systems through which, apparently, the meadow has persisted as a common pasture.

 

It’s the first of many pastures on the menu today.

An alternative approach to grazing? Or a metaphor for this country’s troubled relationship with the truth?

Just up the road to the west is the tiny hamlet of Binsey. Once considerably larger, it is known for its St. Margaret’s Church’s legendary healing well, said to have been called up by Frideswide, Oxford’s patron saint. Long a pilgrimage site, it gained international fame when it inspired Lewis Carroll’s ‘treacle well’ in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ‘Treacle’ was a medicinal term in the day of the Frideswide legend but by Carroll’s time had come to mean the syrupy by-products of sugar refining.

Binsey also used to have a ford in this area, close to its still-active pub, The Perch. It was one of several farming villages that relied on and claimed rights to Port Meadow.

The survival of any common, especially one so large as Port Meadow, is of note in a country thoroughly transformed by its violent Enclosure of them, from which process it has inherited its present abusive land practices. It is tempting to attribute Port Meadow’s survival to the power of the Oxford ‘freemen’ (i.e. that tiny minority of its feudal population who were rich and male), into whose formal ownership it had fallen by the time of the 1086 Domesday survey and under whose gaze the peasant serfs of surrounding villages like Binsey, Medley and Wolvercote grazed their animals here too.

 

Yet we should recall that with the rise of Oxford University, the mere mortals of that city, even the privileged officials among them, were not so powerful. In fact Port Meadow seems to have become a perennial object of contestation between a thousand years of competing interests. These included the ‘freemen’ and city authorities, the village commoners, the Godstow nuns and the rising wool industry, as well as later industrial-age comers such as the railway-builders, allotment-planters and flying clubs.

 

And there it looked like a nice simple field without a trouble in the world.

Far from a pastoral paradise, Port Meadow must at times have been a merciless battle-pit for lawyers, bailiffs and pitchfork-toting peasants as they had it out over rents, fines and licence fees, fought off each other’s Enclosure claims, and seized each other’s horses, geese and cattle. Ironically it seems to have been this perpetual struggle, rather than any semblance of long-term cooperative project they could be congratulated for, that guaranteed Port Meadow’s survival as a common. That is to say, no invested party could make any permanent change to it without incurring the prohibitively expensive wrath of everyone else.

 

The western bank seems less vicious by comparison. Perhaps the Mario and Luigi impression of this pair of trees has helped keep the peace.

Yet no patch of English soil is without a heritage of greedy violence it seems. The Binsey Poplars, a row of poplar trees, stood around here till they were summarily felled in the 1870s to feed the railway boom. Their destruction inspired a poem of lamentation by Gerald Manley Hopkins, and efforts to re-plant them have since drawn a great deal of management work to this bank.

It also has its own bovine population. They graze right up to the river and will stand there exchanging remarks about you as you walk past. Show them lots of respect, especially if you see calves.

On the north side of Port Meadow is Wolvercote. An ancient farming village mentioned in the Domesday survey as Ulfgarcote (‘Woolgar’s cottage’), it fiercely protected its rights to the common against the Oxford heavies, but was eventually absorbed by that city’s growth over the last two centuries and is now part of its inner belt of village-suburbs.

Nowadays Port Meadow is a popular recreational space, especially when it freezes over in winter and gets used for ice skating. Its long absence of building, ploughing, and chemical fertilisers or pesticides has also made it a site of scientific interest given its richness in rare plants and birds.

Meanwhile the ‘freemen’ of Oxford and ‘commoners’ of Wolvercote still graze their horses and cattle on it, and still get involved in disputes when they feel their interests are threatened. One of Port Meadow’s latest dramas concerns a bitter row over the Castle Mill student housing development on its southern rim, which has ruined its view of the Oxford skyline.

 

Godstow

Near the top of the Port Meadow a backwater arrives that was long drawn on by Wolvercote as a mill stream. At this junction the main river flows through Godstow Lock, the first in today’s sequence of upper-river locks and also the highest of all Thames locks to use electro-hydraulic operation. In other words, if you’re travelling up this way by boat, you have to physically open and shut all the locks from here on (or hope there’s a nice lock-keeper on duty to do it for you).

 

If you know anyone in or near Oxford who recently lost their keys, let them know that they’re on this bit of wood somewhere in this random field near Port Meadow.

The approach to Godstow Lock, with the Wolvercote Mill Stream curving away at right past the Hinksey Sculling School.

Godstow Lock was built in 1790, replacing a flash weir, and rebuilt in 1924.

The lock-keeper’s cottage.

Through a gate at the far end of the lock, this corner’s operative structure – or what’s left of it – sits straightforwardly next to the river.

 

 

Godstow was an outlying participant in Oxford’s prospering medieval monastery network. It was a nunnery – an all-female religious community – founded around the 1130s by a woman called Ediva (a.k.a. Edith) from Winchester. The widow of a Norman knight, the story goes that she followed visions in her dreams to nearby Binsey. There instructed by the voices to find a light from the sky, she saw a shaft of sunlight falling on this site, and so, with financial support from king Henry I (always keen to back such projects to build church support for his fragile Plantagenet dynasty), set up this Benedictine convent, whose name means simply ‘God’s place’.

 

Like many other monasteries the Godstow nunnery grew into a large and wealthy complex. It acquired rich landholdings all across the country and drew donations from powerful sponsors, likely connected to the many women from nobility backgrounds who came to study here. This best-preserved part of the main structure appears to have been its chapel.

Clearly the place had clout and profile, but perhaps because the English don’t like it when women have those things, they took to attaching regular scandals to Godstow’s name in the following centuries. Perhaps the most sensational concerned a certain individual among the community (the extent of her membership as either nun or student is unclear) whose name was Rosamund Clifford: a young noble from the Welsh frontiers, best known as king Henry II’s favourite long-term lover.

 

Godstow’s ruined inner court. Rosamund Clifford was buried in the complex when she died around 1176, still only in her twenties. The circumstances of her passing are unknown; the story that she was poisoned out of jealousy by Henry II’s queen, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, is unverifiable, and the embellishments that stuck to that legend over time suggests it owes more to English misogynistic sensationalism than to actual events. Even in death however Clifford’s legend continued, with her grave becoming a pilgrimage site, then getting shunted outside by a disapproving bishop, which gave rise to rumours that her ghost haunted the abbey in objection to this ill-treatment. What’s more reliably on record is that as Clifford’s resting place, Godstow received substantial gifts of money and resources from her beloved Henry II.

The scandalism went on through to the fifteenth century, by when Godstow seems to have swirled with stories of dismayed inspectors, quarrelsome legal proceedings, extravagant lifestyles, and the ever-recurring rumours of ‘ill-discipline’. Most of these seem to have concerned the community’s contact with the secular outside world, especially students coming up from Oxford. The hyperbolic tenor of some of these reports leads one to think the nuns might as well have been abducting and trapping them in their beds, when not overwhelming them with raucous drinking and feasting. Perhaps the accusations really reflected the more common story of powerful men in the church establishment resenting the idea of a community of women making their own decisions, and so doing everything in their power to hobble, constrain or otherwise interfere in the running of their community.

 

There was less ambiguity about the fall of Godstow, which took place, as at most other monasteries, in the late 1530s following sustained pressure from Thomas Cromwell and his commissioners on behalf of Henry VIII. The last abbess, Katherine Bulkeley, surrendered the nunnery after a principled stand in negotiations – and more caustically, a personal stand against the official sent to receive that surrender, the Oxford priest Dr. John London. Each accused the other of threats and assault, and in the end the abbess secured a small victory in persuading Cromwell to remove Dr. London so she could give up Godstow to a more amenable commissioner.

 

After its fall the nuns were pensioned off and much of the complex was destroyed, including Rosamund Clifford’s grave. Henry VIII passed what was left to his physician George Owen, who built a mansion out of the ruins in which his family lived for the next hundred years.

In a further familiar trend, the final end to habitation in Godstow came in the Civil Wars. The house was garrisoned by the Royalists to defend their Oxford headquarters, gunpowered and occupied by the Parliamentary army, and its stones scavenged thereafter for local building projects. What remains is now a scheduled monument under the protection of Oxford University.

 

Across a bridge from the ruins is the nunnery’s former hospice, which found new life after its destruction as the famous The Trout inn. This pub’s physical and cultural proximity to Oxford, Godstow and the Thames have given it a profound and far-reaching mythic profile.

These letters – mostly initials or acronyms by the look of it – have been carved into the ruined walls. Oxford students? Troublemaking tourists? Any ghosts that linger around here can’t be happy with those responsible and probably know where they live.

Beneath the overarching narratives are always lots of smaller-scale personal experiences that equally form part of the story. Usually their profile remains small, but here’s a rare case of one getting publicly commemorated on-site.

Godstow Bridge, which links the ruins and the pub, dates back at least as far as the Civil War when the Royalists attempted to hold it against the Parliamentary army. The appearance of the nearby Oxford Bypass bridge in 1961 has left this protected structure a lot quieter than it used to be.

There is something almost supernaturally daring about how Godstow’s ruins just sit by the river here, with next to no protection or explanation in spite of the hostility it once received or the hard-nosed interests still lurking nearby. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that the nunnery has gone on to lead quite an afterlife in Oxford’s imagination. Both the ruins and The Trout inn featured heavily in the lives of its literary heavyweights such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien; in that of Lewis Carroll before them, whose river trip that spawned Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is said to have come here; and also in the Inspector Morse series of novels and TV dramas. One of Godstow’s most fully-defined mythic outings, as well as one of its most recent, is in Philip Pullman’s ongoing The Book of Dust trilogy, the sequel to His Dark Materials, in whose parallel-universe Oxford the monastery with its industrious and strong-willed nuns still exists (known there as the Priory of St. Rosamund – now who might that be?); while The Trout, where one of the main characters works, plays host to shady political intrigues prior to (what else?) a great flood and darkly mythic river journey.

 

If not for Henry VIII there might have been teas and cakes on offer to walkers here today. He should feel bad about what he did.

 

 

 

King’s Lock

Godstow is where the Oxford conurbation ends. From here we’re into the hinterland. The casual pedestrians and dog-walkers fall off, leaving the green swathes devoid of human presence save for the occasional narrowboat or more committed hiker.

 

Just past Godstow is the 1961 bridge for the Oxford Ring Road, here part of the A34. In keeping with the otherworldly resonances of this place, it was given the breathtakingly imaginative name of Thames Bridge. The old City of Oxford boundary marker in the foreground indicates that travellers venture beyond at their own risk.

A lost piece of either the agricultural revolution or World War I has fallen through a time-rift and landed under the bridge.

Floofs.

And from here on the river is basically like this.

And this.

The river’s headwaters fall from the west, but immediately above Oxford it swings into its first great loop which constitutes most of this section. Looking west from here, you can see the probable reason.

 

Wytham Hill, rising in the near distance.

The heavily-wooded Wytham Hill is the northwestern-most piece of raised ground in the central Oxford Plain, and forms a part of that cluster which breaks the young river into a web of marshy, flood-prone channels as it wrestles its way through. It circumvents this limestone lump by circling north round its base, where those thick woods come right up to the waterside.

 

After negotiating the hill, the river arrives here at King’s Lock. This is the northernmost point in its entire course.

 

The builders of King’s Lock cut through this corner of the river, creating a triangular island. The Wolvercote Mill Stream diverges here too, on its northern side past this weir. An artificial cut along that stream connects it – and thus the river – to the Oxford Canal, and seems to be the preferred link for boaters moving between them.

King’s Lock was one of the Thames’ final pound locks, built only in 1928, but it was preceded here by at least seven hundred years of flash locks, weirs, and fishing traps. It has the shortest fall of any lock on the river, and is the first, heading upstream, that must be operated manually – that is, by heaving your body against those wooden bars.

The lock-keeper’s cottages begin to exhibit the colourations of Cotswold limestone.

King’s Lock is also unusual in having this little low-carbon visitor centre attached. Its information boards describe its experiments in environmentally-sustainable, energy-efficient construction techniques to meet the challenges of a busy lock service in the cold and remote open countryside.

 

 

Wytham Foothills

If you were wondering which king this lock was named for, it in fact has nothing to do with kings. The name comes from Middle English kine, meaning cattle (as seen earlier in Wallingford’s kinecroft) – an animal whose ancestral importance in this area, as reflected too in Ox-ford’s name, has not entirely departed it yet.

 

West past King’s Lock – really the Cattle Lock, then – Wytham Hill slopes down to the river.

Across the river this distant church spire offers the only glimpse of Cassington. It’s a small village with a familiar story of Norman manor lords, a period under the influence of the Godstow abbey, eventual Enclosure, and brief connection to the canals and railways.

The only settlement in the top of this bend is this farm compound. It appears to house the John Krebs Field Station, a research outpost of the Oxford University Department of Zoology.

Even up here it’s still the Dark River.

Before we can meet the true masters of this terrain we must reckon with the Seacourt Stream. This is the western-most of Oxford’s maze of channels, which leaves the main river here and flows south, through the rustic village of Wytham, then Binsey with its ‘treacle well’. After that it joins the Bulstake and Hinksey streams.

 

The confluence with the Seacourt Stream. It gets its name from the lost village of Seacourt, which used to stand near its southern exit. The village of Wytham on the other hand still exists, and offers the main entry to the hill and woods.

This red narrowboat might be familiar from Godstow Lock. In fact we would cross paths all day, with it puttering ahead on the open river only to be caught up with as it waited to get through lock after lock.

Across the Seacourt Stream, a light electric fence separates the field from the riverside. And in that field...

 

Nuuo.

Here they are.

All these fields are flood-meadows that spend a great deal of the year underwater. This poorly suits them to grow crops, so instead they’re mostly used as grazing pastures with a herb-rich fare much enjoyed by these fine fellows.

 

The fence keeps them in, but that doesn’t stop them coming right up to the edge to inspect you.

 

Like this.

And this.

Double trouble.

It is important to show these the proper respect. None of the cows on this section showed the slightest sign of aggression, but occasionally – if, say, they’re protecting small calves, or surprised, or provoked, or aggravated by the English political situation – they are known to attack passers-by and are quite capable of dealing serious injury or death if they feel so inclined.

 

Always observe how an individual or group is behaving and avoid entering a field with them if you feel concerned. If you do find yourself menacingly stalked, charged, or otherwise approached, it’s generally advised to walk away calmly. Never run (they’re faster), or panic (their charges are often warning bluffs that stop before they reach you).

 

Once past the nuuo the thick woods of Wytham Hill loom close.

Here another tributary river, the Evenlode, arrives. Under that mysterious name it flows from the eastern Cotswolds in Gloucester province, from where it passes the remnants of the equally mysterious Wychwood, then the massive Blenheim Palace of Churchill fame, before reaching the Thames here beneath Cassington.

 

The helpfully-labelled confluence with the Evenlode. It is virtually unnavigable and has had serious problems with sewage discharge and agricultural runoff.

It’s plain from this range that the Wytham Woods are not messing around.

This is where the woods of Wytham Hill roll down to the riverbank. By all accounts this is no ordinary woodland. Formerly part of the Abingdon Abbey estate, then held by the powerful German-Jewish Schumacher family, by the time Wytham Great Wood was bequeathed to Oxford University in the 1940s it still harboured an ancient and extraordinary diversity of plant and animal life whose oldest sections are thought to date back to the last ice age. Under the University it has since become one of the most thoroughly-researched woodlands in the world, whose yield of decades of copious data has been instrumental to ecological and climate science.

 

From this side it presents something of a darkly forbidding air. The clouds of cawing ravens circling above its thick tree cover suggest strange rituals as old as some of the ecology in question. Apparently it’s very nice though. You can enter the main woods for free but need to apply for a permit from the University.

Further pastures stretch away on the north bank. They’re not as isolated as they look; beyond those trees is the A40, the traditional trunk road between London and south Wales.

A change of scenery follows as the woods enswathe the riverbank.

 

Wytham Woods also feature in the Inspector Morse series as a convenient place to hide bodies. Watch where you walk in here.

Somewhere around here, easily missable behind the tree cover, is the mouth of an old canal built around 1800 that runs in parallel to the Evenlode up to Cassington. Known as the Cassington Cut, it was added to give better barge access to Cassington’s mill and wharf, but the railways drove it out of use by the 1870s and it was gradually forgotten.

The woods open up toward the northwest corner of the loop, where the river draws closest to the largest settlement in this area: Eynsham. It’s set back about a kilometre from the river, with access not helped by the busy B4044 road onto which the foliage which overhangs its tiny pavement does its best to push you. A visit is therefore a little out of contention given the distance still left to cover today, but Eynsham’s link to the river is well-signified by its lock, pub, and bridge at its connected hamlet of Swinford.

 

The river splits briefly around an island, with Eynsham Lock in the artificial south channel (left) and its weir in the main flow (right). Say hello to ‘Tug No.2’ again, whose captain was here spotted disembarking to resupply.

Eynsham Lock was another latecomer, replacing more rudimentary weirs and flash locks in 1928.

Eynsham is an ancient market village, almost a town, with an astronomical-for-these-parts population of over 5,000. Said to have emerged in Roman or sub-Roman times, it grew up in the Anglo-Saxon period (whence its likely name origin, ‘Ægen’s enclosure’) owing to its control of this important Swine-ford – i.e. a place where it was relatively safe for pigs to cross amidst these unpredictable currents on the Mercia-Wessex frontier.

 

Around 1005 Eynsham got its own Benedictine abbey. It answered initially to Dorchester but flourished in its own right as it grew over the centuries till its eventual demise – yet again – at the hands of Henry VIII in 1538. This one was demolished quickly to stop the monks coming back, and its ruins cannibalised to build new houses; many of its stones can still be found in the village’s cottages today.

 

On the road between the river and village is The Talbot pub, one of a handful that serves walkers and boaters along these reaches.

Swinford Bridge, a Georgian limestone construction from the 1770s.

The Swine-ford itself seems to have taken the form of a ferry for most of this period, but in the eighteenth century this bridge was built to replace it. It is distinct in being the only bridge besides Whitchurch Bridge to charge tolls to vehicle traffic to this day (though pedestrians and cyclists cross for free since 1835). This has apparently caused much contention: its private owners get to enjoy the tax-free fleecing of local motorists, who often find themselves stuck in congestion thanks to its toll queues and potholes. Attempts to get the 5p toll abolished or bring the bridge into public ownership have so far come to nothing.

 

On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have achieved what the English’s long-suffering efforts at democracy could not. At present the toll booth is unoccupied and cars drive across with impunity.

They’ll probably bring the toll back as soon as they get the chance. The bridge was last sold in 2009, at auction for over £1.08 million, and in the best traditions of English transparency the present owners of this key piece of infrastructure have been kept secret. It’d be a shame if anything happened – say, a collapse, or an accident involving a huge lorry, or a brawl over tolls – that required public accountability, no?

Anyway, nice bridge.

And with that we are clear of human society and its instinct to casually oppress everything it touches, and now get to proceed through some attractive landscapes down the west slopes of Wytham Hill.

 

It can look pleasant out here.

So here’s something to ruin it. The west bank here (opposite) falls under the parliamentary constituency of Witney, West Oxfordshire’s largest town. If the name sounds familiar it’s probably because it was the seat of David Cameron, the former Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader who set off the Brexit referendum for no reason, lost it, then walked off into the cover of his super-rich lifestyle to leave everyone else to eat the consequences. (On a related note, those pigs that crossed at Swinford – never mind.)

It’s not these plants’ fault. They wouldn’t have plunged a country into an abuse-pit of division and disintegration while calling it democracy.

Here we are. This is more like it.

Now this time there’s no fence, and the bovine community ranges hungrily right up to the river. Fortunately they’re in peaceful if circumspective mood today, and will stand there watching you as you cross their territory.

 

There’s no going around these ones. You’ll just have to hope they’re not inclined to demand tribute. Especially the chonky one at left.

Wytham Hill is less wooded on this side and looks nice in the afternoon sun. Notice there’s another herd of Holsteins in the hillside field.

The view back towards Swinford Bridge, with one or two other walkers negotiating their way through the sovereign herd.

There’s another large boatyard ahead here to help river-adventurers not get stranded after dark in the bovine kingdoms. Oxford Cruisers Ltd. occupies a meander at the western end of the village of Farmoor – a twentieth-century roadside settlement that takes its name from an old common, now submerged beneath the reservoir ahead.

 

The skies here suffer the occasional rude intrusion of military aircraft, likely flying out of the major Brize Norton RAF airbase upriver.

The family-run Oxford Cruisers appears to specialise in the repair and restoration of narrowboats.

Here the wayfarer faces what at first appears the unwelcome return of a menace that should have stayed behind on the middle river: a string of residential properties which have seized the riverbank for their private gardens, forcing an inland detour. Fortunately however these ones appear forgivable. What actually seems to have happened is that their claims did in fact stop at the towpath, only for it to crumble away over the years due to erosion.

 

The detour is at any rate a short one, up the side of the Oxford-Eynsham road.

In the hatch must be a ladder down to an interdimensional space, from where you can reach a parallel Oxfordshire where the cows are in charge of government. Maybe one of them experienced a political scandal for questionable actions involving its udder and David Cameron.

 

 

Bablock Hythe and Northmoor

A trail between the houses leads back to the towpath, which comes in short order to Pinkhill Lock. Built by the Thames Navigation Commission in 1791 and named for a local farm, this one is quite a bit older than those immediately downstream and cuts through the neck of a large meander.

 

For all the isolation of these high reaches, or perhaps because of it, a great deal of work seems to have gone into the equipping and presentation of the locks here. Pinkhill Lock was notable on this journey as the first one which gave rise to a spontaneous conversation with a lock-keeper. Help him close the gate and he will offer advice about the Bablock Hythe ferry, whose disappearance presents the defining problem of the reach ahead.

From here the towpath continues some three kilometres down the east bank, past the Farmoor Reservoir, till it reaches Bablock Hythe, where travellers and barge-workers historically crossed by ferry. So why is it rumoured that the ferry no longer exists? To reach Bablock Hythe to examine this mystery, and furthermore to avoid getting stuck on this side when the towpath switches bank, it is now necessary to cross the lock-gates and take an extended detour through the western pastures.

 

For a little further the river comes and goes as the path cuts across a string of wooded meanders.

If you get a Game Over by being arrested and jailed by the cows then this is where you emerge when you re-load your last save.

The western bank appears to fall under a rather woollier authority.

This detour means we do not get a view of the dominant landscape feature on this reach. Farmoor Reservoir, the largest body of open water in Oxford Province, was dug out in two stages in the 1960s and 70s and provides this region with its primary supply of drinking water. It is also used for sports – fishing, sailing, windsurfing – and is very popular with birdwatchers; its proximity to the Wytham Woods, along with other local woodland and wetland reserves, draws in a wide range of seasonally-migrating bird species.

 

Most of the islands and east-bank peninsulas in the meanders here are nature reserves with bird-watching hides installed.

There used to be a footbridge around here too. Skinner’s Bridge was said to have been attached to a picturesque old weir and inn, likely descended from a mill, run by an old landlord called Joe Skinner. By the twentieth century the buildings had all disappeared, and the bridge appears to have burnt down in the 1940s.

A distant glimpse of the Farmoor Reservoir embankment.

Here we must seek the river’s pardon in leaving it for a time, in order to circumvent the Bablock Hythe Caravan Park which sprawls with grasping incorrectness up the riverbank ahead. The diversion takes us into the sphere of influence of Stanton Harcourt – or specifically, the fields after fields of sheep that together are many times larger than the village itself.

 

Stanton Harcourt itself is a way up the road to the west here; this is the tower of its St. Michael’s Church. Stanton means ‘farmstead by the stones’, and likely refers to a nearby Neolithic stone circle now known as the Devil’s Quoits, sadly too far to reach on this journey. Harcourt is another ownership-tag on the part of the Norman nobility, added by the same family that later produced the Simon Harcourt who forced a whole village to move so he could build his riverside mansion.

The village is too far to visit on foot if we want to safely complete today’s stretch before the sun goes down. So instead we get another bunch of pastures, this time with regular fleecy company.

These fields are full of sheep. They are a lot more skittish than the earlier cattle and tend to scoot away as soon as they notice you coming, although a small minority will stand there staring at you.

 

This individual is the lone exception, and will give you a neeh before taking tentative steps in your direction.

They run off as soon as you touch the gate. It’s best to show them respect too, by treading gently and letting them know in a soft voice that you’re not here to make trouble for them.

It’s chilly out here now, but still gets quite warm when the sun breaks through. Flexible clothing is sensible when walking in this season.

Let’s have a closer look.

 

Neeh.

More rectangularity.

As far as detours go, these fluffy friends make this one not too bad.

Make it across six or seven fields’ worth of sheep territory and you reach a tarmac lane: the main access road to the river at Bablock Hythe.

 

The Bablock Hythe road. Another spontaneous encounter with the locals took place here, this time with an elderly fellow on a mobility scooter. He introduced himself by the nickname everyone around here apparently calls him – ‘Jolly’ – and had apparently lived in these parts since the 1940s, rarely travelling beyond. He too had much to say on the disappearance of the fabled Bablock Hythe ferry.

The most visible manifestation of Bablock Hythe today is this sizeable caravan park.

‘Polite’ in English culture means ‘people at the bottom of power hierarchies are to be punished for each failure to say please or thank you, while people who own property are entitled to speak however the fuck they want’.

Bablock Hythe is a tiny hamlet, composed mainly of The Ferryman Inn and now vastly overshadowed by the holiday caravan park that’s taken up residence along its road and riverside. This place’s importance was in its ferry, both practical and mythic (as of course all ferries are); all the more so for being some thousand years old as well as supposedly the Thames’s first cable ferry, drawn across the water along a large rope or chain.

 

The Bablock Hythe ferry as it appears in an 1859 woodcut. It was a substantial vessel, much relied-upon by these pasturelands’ farmers to take their large animals across. By the late twentieth century it could even take cars, up to three at a time according to Mr. ‘Jolly’.

The Ferryman Inn, known in these parts for its not-at-all-pub-like exterior, replaced an older inn called The Chequers during the twentieth century and is said to have operated the ferry till its disappearance.

So what happened to it?

 

In what seems a sadly typical reflection of English modernity, after a millennium of service the ferry closed down in hazy circumstances during the post-World War II decades. Efforts were apparently made to revive it, with The Ferryman Inn running a new passenger boat towards the close of the century, but that too has now vanished. Some say it was washed ashore by floods and too damaged to resume service; others suggest that someone stole it. Signs persist of strong local interest in getting the ferry restored, but obtaining the funding to do so looks ever less likely in the shadows of violent austerity and COVID-19.

 

Till they do so, the weighty whispers of Bablock Hythe are left largely to a fading imagination. It’s an annoyance for walkers, cyclists and local residents, who are forced to go all the way down to Swinford or just as far up to Newbridge in order to cross. But perhaps its real casualty is the centuries of cultural heritage invested in this site, as another repository of Thames memories sinks into the mire of an age that seems to regard such things as expendable.

 

The site of the Bablock Hythe ferry. It would surely cost no more than a few thousand pounds to get it back up and running, no? Would that not be a drop in the ocean for this country’s multi-millionaire landowners, such as, say, a certain former MP for the constituency this riverbank is in?

The next meadow along appears to have been privatised by the caravan park for the leisure of its customers.

They’re quite a long way out here, still reliant on instruments you’d usually have to go to a museum to see.

 

 

Northmoor Meadows

The last four or so kilometres for today cross the pastures of Northmoor, another tiny farming village whose name means what it sounds (in reference to Southmoor on the other side). These fields occupy this final corner of the great Wytham bend, beyond which sits the historic Newbridge crossing.

 

Look who’s reappeared.

It’s narrow enough to swim across now. Still, don’t underestimate it. You’d see its true character if the locks in these parts stopped working.

Some thick woods known as the Eaton Plantation coat the east bank on the approach to the final curve. Eaton is a tiny hamlet beyond them whose manor has traditionally been held by Oxford’s St. John’s College, which used it as a refuge in times of plague.

Possibly the wood’s tallest resident.

These fields too are sheep pastures. These ones’ inhabitants appear recently sheared.

 

These sheep look considerably more naked than their fellows in the fields downstream.

The riverside fence here is poorly-maintained, and one sheep got into a bit of a panic as it got its leg stuck in the fallen string while trying to run off. Fortunately it got free. In case the responsible farmer is wondering, I kicked the loose fencing into the bush to stop it happening again.

The sun sets over Northmoor Lock after a long day of trekking through the pasturelands.

Northmoor Lock was built in 1896 by the Thames Conservancy, successor to the Thames Navigation Commission. One of the river’s remotest locks of all, it is distinguished by its weir, thought to be one of the last paddle-and-rymer weirs (requiring manual operation using paddles) in the world. These are considered dangerous under present-day legislation, with most surviving examples on the Thames removed in recent years.

 

Northmoor Lock. It was here that the crew of ‘Tug No.2’ finally realised with great mirth that we’d been inadvertently following each other all day.

The lock-keeper’s cottage, largely unchanged since it was built.

On the final stretch a short sequence of residences take their late-day revenge with private-property claims to the riverbank opposite. But they’re considerably humbler than those we put up with in the middle river, and wisely do nothing to obstruct this final progress up the north side.

The typical character of the last length of river to Newbridge.

Less unaffordably ostentatious mansion, more holiday cottage, one might think.

The most showy of those houses...

...and its boathouse, whose slanted posture suggests it’s trying to exist in mismatching timelines simultaneously.

Northmoor Lock replaced a set of flash locks and weirs nearby. One of them stood here by the name of Hart’s Weir, hence this Hart’s Weir Footbridge. The bridge was built in 1879, a year before the weir was removed.

And at last, the fences and thickets close in on the approach to a key strategic crossing.

 

Look at that. Just when we’d thought they’d stopped. Newbridge is strategic, yes, but steady on.

The New Bridge appears, by whose pubs the river-travellers have pulled in their boats for the night.

The final approach passes through the gardens of The Rose Revived, one of the two pubs that face each other across the bridge.

 

 

Newbridge

This doesn’t really qualify as a settlement. Newbridge is literally a bridge with a pub at each end – The Rose Revived on the north side, The Maybush on the south – standing together out in the open countryside. That said, it’s a hearty sight at the end of eight hours’ slogging through said countryside, and does moreover hold a few features of great significance.

 

The most obvious is the bridge itself. Despite its name, the New Bridge, which carries the A415 Abingdon-Witney road, is the oldest surviving bridge on the Thames. (It competes for this status with Radcot Bridge upriver, which pre-dates it but got wrecked in multiple conflicts and required extensive rebuilding). This bridge has stood continuously since the early thirteenth century, when it is thought to have been one of a set of bridges in this area built by Norman monks on the orders of King John. The likely context was the growth of the Cotswold wool trade at that time, with its rising demand for access to southern markets.

 

Supposedly it was a new bridge in that context, i.e. built after the others in that set. Its distinct honey-grey stone (on which more in a moment), pointy archways, and projecting piers offering both structural strength and shelter for crossers, make it a highly treasured piece of local heritage.

For all its isolation, Newbridge sits at a strategically important location equidistant from the urban nuclei of Oxford, Abingdon and Witney. This got it threatened during the Civil Wars, in particular in 1644 when the Parliamentary army got into a skirmish with Royalist defenders as they attempted to cross to encircle the king’s Oxford headquarters. They did not succeed – it was too soon – and it was this, supposedly, that put them in such a bad mood as to take it out on Abingdon’s market cross as they retreated there.

 

The bridge itself survived however, and has continued to do so through all the trials of industrialisation, the car and road revolution, and the contempt for heritage of a market fundamentalist age. It has perhaps come closest to trouble in the last couple of decades as its eight-hundred-year-old arches and elm-beam foundations noticeably struggle to cope with present-day traffic loads, regulated as they are by traffic lights and an eighteen-tonne weight limit. A new (that is, Newer) bridge close by looks the likeliest of answers, yet for the moment local opposition and a lack of funds seem to have put the matter on hold.

 

The Rose Revived at the north end of the bridge is possibly about as old as the bridge itself, although its name seems to have changed several times. A legend, likely apocryphal, has Oliver Cromwell drinking here during the Civil War and placing a drooping rose from his attire into his ale tankard, which, it is said, revived and so gave the pub its name. In the centuries since then it’s also been known as the Fayre Inn, The Rose and Crown, and simply The Rose.

At the south end stands The Maybush, rumoured to occupy the house where the hermit charged by the monks to care for the bridge once lived. Both pubs were severely damaged during the devastating floods of summer 2007 but have since been repaired.

Why here then? What was the underlying significance of this site? As always it is the water that must have the final word, and that word is one which as of now should send caterpillars of shame down every English spine.

 

Windrush.

The tranquil Windrush, with a name thought to come from the ancient Celtic for ‘white fen’, rises in the East Gloucestershire Cotswolds and glides a gentle path down through West Oxfordshire, via Witney, to arrive at the Thames here. It is up this waterway that stands the famed ancient quarries of Taynton, whose Cotswold limestone it brought forth to build this New Bridge as well as the grandiose dreamscape of the Oxford colleges.

 

Yet the Windrush is best known for another signature it left in this country’s history. After the German cruise ship MV Monte Rosa was repurposed as a transport and prison ship by the Nazis, it was seized by the British in northern Germany in the closing months of World War II. Following the pattern of giving captured ships the names of rivers, it was this here tributary that rebirthed that vessel under the new name of HMT Empire Windrush. Three years later, in 1948, it would sail into Tilbury harbour on its most famous journey: that which brought several hundred migrants from the then-British colony of Jamaica, who along with other colonial ‘subjects’ had all just been granted British citizenship. Many were responding to British adverts in Jamaican newspapers to come and work in the ‘mother country’ as it staggered from the bombed-out wreckage of the war.

 

These passengers were the first in a generation of Caribbean immigrants who took up the call to come here, helped this country rebuild, made critical contributions from public transport to the fledgling National Health Service (NHS) in a time of labour shortage, and together with those who arrived after them earned an esteemed place in national memory under the name of the ship on which they first arrived, and by extension the river for which it was named: the Windrush Generation.

 

But of course, everyone knows the hellish descent of this story. These people received racist hostility from the start, not least from a government whose extension of citizenship to the colonies had been aimed at light-skinned people from, say, Canada or Australia – and who when they realised also included dark-skinned people, turned heaven and earth upside down to stop more coming. Decades of violence, prejudice and discrimination followed, much of it orchestrated by racist (when not explicitly neo-fascist) politicians and popular movements. And in the 2010s their successors in the Conservative Party government completed a horrific revenge by illegally deporting hundreds of citizens from the Windrush Generation, many of whom had lived and worked in this country for almost their entire lives, as part of the Hostile Environment programme of racial persecution.

 

This Windrush Scandal, as it became known, only broke in 2017 after committed efforts by investigative journalists to expose it. It temporarily unbalanced the government, most notably forcing the resignation of Home Secretary Amber Rudd. But the damage was done: huge numbers of Windrush citizens had had their lives destroyed,  losing their jobs, homes, communities, loved ones, physical and mental health, and in some cases dying in trauma without ever receiving redress. Since then the scandal has largely been overtaken in the news by disasters like Brexit and COVID-19, with the result that its victims continue to suffer the consequences unaided by a risibly ineffective compensation scheme. Moreover, no-one has been criminally charged for the cruelties inflicted upon them, and far from being discouraged, the wanton forced deportations continue to worsen, with total impunity, upon a surging tide of government-led culture-war-infused popular xenophobia.

 

Fitting then that the Windrush river is where we end this day’s journey. Lest the broad expanse of green and blue lead us to believe we can ever escape this country’s descent, we are washed back to reality by this river of tears, which laments into the Thames the atrocities committed unto its name.

 

After the Empire Windrush, the Windrush Generation and the Windrush Scandal, will there be a Windrush Tribunal in which the architects of the racist persecutions of the 2010s, many of whom still occupy the highest offices of English government, are finally held to account for the wrongs they have inflicted?