THAMES: 18) English Migrants

Here are the far heights. Field upon field, sky beyond sky, winter horizons out beyond the back door. Beyond England, even while of it – for this verdant world of their dreams lies far beyond the world where most of them live.

 

 

Here the river falls free of its cradle in the Gloucester Cotswolds, but has yet to attain the Oxford Basin where Englishnesses truly sink their claims into it. What's left is an in-between space of endless farm fields and deserted villages, anachronistic pillboxes and silent memories of goods or blows whose trade across this once-strategic hinterland has long since left it behind. 

Its crossing, the longest slog on this expedition by far, now presents its most arduous challenge. What better then than to trudge in at dawn on the coldest day of the year so far, in the wake of a freezing windstorm, with a meagre eight hours of daylight to make it to Lechlade, the high trading post and gateway to the Cotswold Hills?

 

As the river traverses this back-of-beyond, the final flares of autumn fade in its cool, dark flow.

There’s little else here. It glides on with no end in sight.

This is not where the English come to build futures, to erect towers of pride, to imagine up self-aggrandising histories. Those who set out for these far reaches more often came to escape the violence of those delusions. They were migrants. English refugees, whose movements the river welcomed and enabled as has always been its way.

 

A century and a half ago, as this nation did up its arrogance in iron and steel and stuck on it the label of modernity, it was here to this Desolate South that it drove one of that industrial mis-destiny’s most colourful critics of the time. It was out here, far from its poisonous stories and still more poisonous air, that this big-bearded detractor found the space to turn from its ruthless march and embroider a different path with his own hands. More darkly, it was also here that this country’s bloodiest spasm of neo-colonial foreigner-killing in recent times claimed its own highest-profile victim: a bespectacled, mild-mannered scientist who, one summer afternoon, fled here to take leave of this world altogether.

 

From the riverside, a glimpse of Kelmscott Manor, beloved summer home of William Morris: artist, writer, designer, translator, socialist and a great deal else besides.

Harrowdown Hill, final destination of weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly.

The river here is a winterland of escapes and retreats, deaths and departures, and so too for this long exploration it heralds the beginning of the end. Here are the last Thames locks, the receding of riverside settlement, and at Lechlade, the end of its navigable course. We are almost there.

 

If you would walk this way too, come prepared. At 25 kilometres this is the lengthiest stretch of all, and it takes place entirely across open country. There’s a handful of well-placed pubs but otherwise next to nothing in the way of shops, public transport, or support if you get into trouble. Add to that a tight daylight budget – eight hours at this time of year, and you’ll need every one of them – and you’re looking at serious peril if you overreach or get stuck out here after dark.

 

Upriver from the New Bridge, where all is as cold as frozen glass.

By this point the settlements are smaller than their labels. Most aren’t even villages, merely clusters of houses or farm buildings.

Start: 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)

End: Lechlade (no train station; buses to Swindon via Highworth)

Length: 25.7km/16 miles

Location: Oxfordshire – City of Oxford, Vale of White Horse, West Oxfordshire; Gloucestershire - Cotswold

 

Topics: Harrowdown Hill and the death of Dr. David Kelly, Shifford, the Duxford detour, Tadpole, Radcot, Kelmscott and William Morris, Buscot, St. John’s Lock

 

 

Harrowdown Hill – Dr. Kelly’s End

We begin where we left off: with the River Windrush, which flows into the Thames at Newbridge just as the racist violence which its name now permanently evokes drenches this country in yet another sorry new chapter. For just a few days earlier, thirty-one human beings drowned in their attempt to cross the Channel: that watercourse which connects this island to the mainland, yet which in English imagination has become the most pitiless of imaginary borders.

 

The Windrush, flowing in at right. At left is the New Bridge, with the Maybush pub on the far bank.

Insensitive to the horror of these travellers’ final moments, or to the traumatic lifelong toll left on their loved ones (some of whom they were trying to reach in this country), the prevailing discourse erupted into a feeding frenzy of government-led xenophobic hate-mongering. Yet these late wayfarers were only driven to sail in their precarious dinghy because the present Conservative Party regime, which roots its power in an appeal to popular nationalist bigotry, has long since closed down all safe and legal routes for non-white, non-super-rich foreigners to enter this country.

The English were born of Channel crossings. Their country would literally not exist without them. Even now, huge numbers of them fly across every day. Why not these, then? What could possibly account for this shrieking hostility to human beings doing what humans have always done: moving in search of a better life or an escape from abuse? (Not least when, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, so much of what they flee was wrought by English violence in the first place?)

But no – in England this is no longer an argument anymore, let alone a debate. The order of the day is merely sadistic, dehumanising cruelty for its own sake, or for political advantage therefrom. It is evil.

And there is no escaping its shadow. Not even out in this rural hinterland, where beyond the Windrush the first thing you come to is a landmark of death and dark secrets from the bloodbath which opened the English twenty-first century.

 

A glassy chill permeates the air here.

Even these growths are gnarled, barbed and bleeding, as if sensitive to the stench of injustice in the air.

Winter is here, and its light is cold and bloody.

The English are far from alone in driving the present calamities of humankind. How did it come to this? How do societies never learn? How can mass hatred of refugees and support for abuse exist in this world? Here at bottom-left and top-right are two of the most important characters throughout the human story – but neither have a clue as to the answer.

The towpath runs beneath a slope as it follows the river to Haul Ham. This meadow appears to have been an island, but today any stories in its sodden soil are overshadowed by a wooded hill that stands conspicuously to the south.

 

The morning light has yet to penetrate these thickets.

Haul Ham. There are faint echoes here of milling and fishing interests from the old manor villages of Standlake and Longworth, a way inland north and south respectively.

Turn south, and there a clump of taller trees stands vigil over a site of national notoriety.

Harrowdown Hill is one of numerous locations in this country (of which Harrow in London might be the most famous) whose name derives, evocatively, from hearg: a pre-Christian sacred site or sanctuary. Often these still carry a certain atmosphere – of shapes, of sounds, of light, of prominence in the landscape, of closeness to the other worlds – whose weight on the heart and senses likely helped draw that designation in the first place, and sure enough, this hill strikes a haunting profile. Its ring of trees stand tight on an otherwise open plain, bunched together against the dawning light as though to shield their secrets against it.

 

And well they might. Because at around three in the afternoon on 17th July 2003, another walker approached Harrowdown Hill. This one came from the south, from his house in Southmoor. He did, in fact, cross the worlds here. The next morning his body was found here by a volunteer search team, his left wrist slashed, his head and shoulders slumped against one of those trees.

 

Dr. David Kelly was a man who kept his secrets. A veteran weapons inspector and bio-warfare specialist internationally renowned in his field, his work was steeped in the murky world of military intelligence. He was discomforted by the public spotlight and rarely let its glare come near him. Nonetheless, suddenly and instantly, his bespectacled and bearded profile became one of the most recognisable in the country when, a couple of days before his death, he appeared on live TV to face questioning from the House of Commons Defence Affairs Select Committee.

 

Dr. Kelly’s now-infamous parliamentary cross-examination – a spectacle that would be seared into English memory as a defining image of their Iraq War debacle. Kelly afterwards reportedly told his daughter it was a ‘real ordeal’, and described one of the questioning MPs as an ‘utter bastard’. Photo: PA, in the Irish Independent

Dr. Kelly’s name had been exposed in the media as the source for a BBC report alleging that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour Party government had exaggerated its claims about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (which was true – the WMDs didn’t exist), as a pretext for invading that country earlier in the year. The government response was to launch its own furious war-within-a-war against the BBC, to the centre of which it happily allowed Dr. Kelly’s name to surface then left him stranded. This was in spite of his long and dedicated professional service, his deep personal upset at the attention (a week before the Select Committee he’d been forced to flee to Cornwall at short notice on learning that the media were about to descend on his house), and the resultant public trashing of his painstakingly-cultivated reputation.

 

It is generally believed that, shocked and devastated at being set up in this manner, and facing the demolition of his career and upending of his private life by investigations and media intrusions, Dr. Kelly walked out to these woods, ingested Coproxamol tablets, and severed his ulnar artery with a pruning knife.

 

Harrowdown Hill is neither large nor steep, yet an otherworldly exhaustion seems to weigh on one’s footsteps on the approach. This hearg, perhaps sacred to those who lived here in ancient times, is where Dr. David Kelly left this world. There’s no marker or memorial, and a small barbed-wire fence wards against entry.

The scene which established Harrowdown Hill in national memory: police and forensics teams close to the same spot after the discovery of Dr. Kelly’s body. Photo: PA, in The Guardian

In the polarised climate of the Iraq invasion, a cookie-cutter narrative took shape: the innocent, soft-spoken whistleblower-scientist who spoke truth to power and so was hounded to death by the war criminal Blair and his gang of villains, above all his ruthless communications director and dark-arts chief Alistair Campbell. Over-simplistic as this storyline is, what is not in doubt is that Dr. Kelly's televised humiliation became a defining image of the storm of duplicity through which the English plunged into Iraq, and of the mendacity of the regime that dragged them there. The stench grew rottener still when the judicial investigation into Dr. Kelly’s death, under the government-appointed Lord Hutton, turned out an obvious set-up: it dramatically cleared the Blair regime of all wrongdoing, and so utterly lambasted the BBC as to force its leaders to resign and castrate its readiness to put critical questions to power ever since.

 

There are those who do not believe Dr. Kelly’s death was suicide. The suggestion that he was murdered was swift to emerge and has never gone away. Though no hard evidence has emerged for it, its persistence is not surprising given the sordidness of his treatment, the appalling circumstances of his death, the lack of an inquest, and the shameless whitewash of the Hutton Inquiry. But perhaps that’s not what it really tells us. Like many conspiracy theories, its real message is the implosion of public trust in the politics of callousness, fakery and murderous lies for which the Blair government’s conduct over Iraq was so seminal – a deep cultural malaise which shambles on as a lasting legacy of that entire miserable affair.

 

The Iraq invasion dealt lasting destruction. It caused hundreds of thousands of atrocious deaths, not least by taking pressure off the Afghan Taliban while paving the way for the bloodthirsty rise of Da’esh. Nonetheless, it has virtually vanished from present-day English political discourse. This itself tells us something about them. Yet in yearning for a time before their more recent absurdities, they forget the genuine ugliness that preceded and in many ways prepared them. The Iraq War’s division of the population clean down the middle; the glee with which its supporters shouted down all facts, all warnings, in their unbridled relish at the prospect of slaughtering foreigners into a promised land of democratic deliverance – these arguably prefigured the cultural polarisations and jubilant racist persecutions that would follow in the Brexit years, up to and including the Hostile Environment policy and its latest drownings in the Channel.

 

Likewise, much argument was had back then about the real reasons for destroying Iraq. If it wasn’t WMDs, they said, then perhaps it was geostrategy, or oil, or humanitarian intervention, or a Christian crusade, or a fawning devotion to the US on Blair’s part. But with hindsight the entire discussion rings as disingenuously hollow as the cargo-cultish boasts of the Brexit nationalists today. Rather, the whooping excitement of the war’s proponents suggests a simpler reason: they attacked Iraq because they could. It was little more than a neo-colonial orgy, a renewed outburst of that persistent and implicit English belief in a right, rooted in racial superiority by any other name, to march into other peoples’ homes, stamp on their faces, seize their resources, and ransack their power structures for the sheer self-celebratory heck of it, in the conviction that anything their enlightened hands touched would be so much the better for it – or if not, then that of course would be the natives’ own fault, with no responsibility on or consequences for the empire of good intentions.

 

Except – there were consequences. As we see, the war’s taint still rots the English political subconscious. And though typically nothing so lethal as it was for the Iraqis, for those like Dr. David Kelly it was very much lethal indeed.

 

Is that what accounts, then, for the abiding shadow of his death on the English story? That his horrendous personal tragedy, here on an ancient sacred site in the heart of the green and pleasant land, so starkly gave the lie to that highest of English values, that which drove them into their Iraqi bloodbath and has since sharpened into the defining problem of its present crisis: that responsibility, and consequences, are things that only happen to other people?

 

We get to turn from Harrowdown Hill and journey back to the river. David Kelly did not get to journey back to his Southmoor home. To make this walk is to engage with the historic event of his passing not as one does through textbooks and media headlines, but at a realer level of footsteps, breaths, emotions. Could you imagine this approach as your final walk, and Harrowdown's trees to stand at the end of your journey?

 

 

Shifford

We speak of departures. Let us consider in that same vein the vestiges of settlement on the north bank. From Oxford (a ford for oxen), to Swinford (a ford for swine), to Shifford (a ford for sheep): the largest and tiniest settlements on this plain are held together by their origins in shared service to creatures crossing the river.

 

In the distance Shifford’s chapel stands atmospherically alone. It’s an 1863 Gothic Revival job, but its predecessors have stood there since at least the thirteenth century.

Shifford’s site has a long record of pastoral activity, as evidenced by finds of Iron Age weights and cooking equipment, Roman coins, and a range of farm animal bone fragments. Its name first appears in a charter from 1005, recording its granting to Eynsham Abbey. Soon afterwards a medieval poem, The Proverbs of Alfred, appeared to suggest that Alfred the Great held a Witenagemot here – that is, one of the earliest meetings of what the English Parliament likes to see as its ancestor. This local legend was sadly punctured when later research found it highly unlikely, not least because Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex did not control this area till some decades after his death.

 

Haul Ham stretches on up the south side. You can still see the outline of the island it once formed.

The Thames’s thistles, now in winter’s red rage, maintain their sturdy vigil.

Generations of Enclosure and agricultural depression have since taken their toll on Shifford. In spite of its chapel’s fancy do-over it has steadily haemorrhaged its population – that is to say, generated English migrants, travelling away in search of a better life. Today all that remains of Shifford beside the chapel is a single farm, which as late as the 1990s had yet to receive mains water and gas.

 

These hauntingly pollarded willow trees have assembled on the bank across from Shifford. You have to move through them to pass, but unlike the Home Office they won’t torture you or drive you to suicide in immigrant detention centres.

The remains of a stone structure – possibly from an old weir? Or an incarnation of Shifford’s ford?

And there’s Shifford itself. ‘This country is full’, they insist. Could not a few immigrant families revive a nice little community here?

Shifford’s fate is typical of many of the medieval villages along the river ahead. The creatures who gave it its name have stuck around though.

 

Neeh.

Wonder if there’s a Dogford somewhere too.

 

 

The Duxford Detour

Oh look.

 

Well it probably wasn’t Dogford, or even Ducksford. Duxford appears as Dudochesford in the Domesday Book and probably came from someone’s name, although goodness knows what. It too is a tiny farming hamlet, standing outside a significant southward meander.

 

The standard path avoids it entirely. In the late 1890s the Thames Conservancy installed one of the river’s final locks, Shifford Lock, on a side-stream across the neck of the bend which it widened into the Shifford Lock Cut. This became the main channel, while the bend itself, long a shallow and treacherous navigational headache, fell into disuse.

 

Nowadays walkers too cross a footbridge and pass along the cut. But today, there’s a problem.

 

 

The bridge is closed. Little indication is given as to why, or of suggested alternative routes to take. The only alternative is to follow the old towpath down the riverbend to Duxford, whose ford, one is warned, is too treacherous to cross in winter conditions.

 

The natural riverbend. Long a popular stretch for local weirs, mills and ferries; less so for barge captains whose frustration is easy to imagine.

The old towpath is overgrown but just about passable.

On Duxford’s outskirts the chubby sheep will stare at you, wondering what in the world drove you to venture out here.

 

At the bottom of the bend is the actual Dux-ford. Its function in this season does not live up to its foundational importance in getting this area its name. Indeed, a ford you cannot cross seems scarcely a ford at all.

 

The path opposite leads back to Shifford Cut, but the river’s fierce flow rules out any safe attempt to cross.

Here then fell this journey’s most serious obstacle so far. The old towpath does not loop back up the riverbend, rather it peters out into the Duxford fields which have all been fenced into private farmland. With no straightforward route back to the river, the next best option appeared to be to proceed inland to a footbridge further along. But said private farmland occupies all the intervening terrain, with no signposts or markers to guide you through an environment laid out with all the passive-aggressive hostility to wayfarers that is the signature of the English propertied classes.

 

On top of that, I then encountered a small party of walkers coming back from the Duxford farm. They were in the same position as I, attempting to find a way back to the river, only to have been turned back off the farm’s lanes by a squad of rude and unsympathetic tree surgeons.

 

Only a single recourse remained: to make our own path. And so unfolded a microcosm of the bitter English land struggle: the settler versus the migrant, the proprietor versus the wayfarer, the land-grabber versus the land-roamer. Today the latter must fight for their right to travel the Earth that all people naturally share, in the face of the violence of those who would draw imaginary lines across it, ring it in ditches and barbed-wire fences, and claim it as theirs alone while dehumanising those they throw off it as trespassers, vagabonds and economic migrants.

 

Well barbed wire was crossed and privatised tracks followed on this day, because no other option was left to us. The river as a right of way for all people precedes the notion of England and its every invention. On this occasion it offered no further resistance. But what, then, of the countless human beings, often fleeing poverty or persecution, who are killed or abused by this country and so many others for doing the same? What conceptual distance is there from the brutal heritage of Enclosure to the present-day Hostile Environment policy – both designed to heap suffering on real people for crossing imaginary borders?

 

After half an hour of determined pathfinding we finally made it back to the river at Tenfoot Bridge, where we congratulated each other before going our separate ways. The bridge’s name appears to come from a ten-foot-wide flash lock and weir that used to stand on this site. By the 1860s its poor condition had brought complaints, so the Thames Conservancy replaced it with this footbridge.

The main drawback of this detour was to miss out on the Chimney Meadows, an ancient and attractive wetland nature reserve spread across the banks north of Shifford Lock Cut. At their centre is Chimney itself, a tiny farming hamlet whose name, meaning ‘Ceomma’s island’, reflects its marshy surroundings. It’s also the discovery site of a very large late Anglo-Saxon burial ground.

 

 

Tadpole

They’re going all out on the names here. Still, much about Tadpole’s downstream approach suggests a realm where, as far as the river is concerned, names are of receding significance.

The water’s thin wooded sleeves here afford it wild insulation. The boughs are rich in birdsong, but the birds themselves are skittish and disinclined to sit around for cameras.

Look what’s back with a vengeance.

Having withdrawn for a time, these World War II pillboxes now return in full force. Indeed, the reach from here to Lechlade appears to hold almost as many of these obstinate relics as the entire Thames up to this point. Presumably they were installed to slow the Nazis’ advance on the industrial midlands in the event of a ground invasion. Though it’s unlikely they fired a shot, still they stand, helping to keep alive an England-against-the-world psychology across the countryside today.

 

And this must be the wheel you turn to drain the water, revealing the ancient trap-ridden tomb complex concealed in the riverbed.

Another one.

A peek inside this one reveals a very English sense of looking after history.

On runs the river, with human encounters few and far between. It makes you think. Here above all the stories it goes on to absorb – the punting and rowing and cruising, the privilege-fortresses and middle-class properties, the “sea of masts” and the power-thumping reflections of palaces and embankments – before, beneath, and beyond there is purely this water, in need of no names, notions or nations.

 

An old gate for one of the river's innumerable little side-channels here. Many would have been dug out as irrigation channels to supply the surrounding farms and villages.

 

After a brief spell through this eternity, hints of human activity return. They signal the approach to Tadpole Bridge, which carries the only road across the river for miles around.

 

A study in horizontality.

Electric pylons like these have been ubiquitous all the way up, but suddenly strike a remarkable profile out here.

In winter this plant reveals its true nature as a colony of wiggling spider-crab aliens.

A cluster of little pleasure-boats, moored within easy reach of the road.

The first written reference to Tadpole Bridge appears on a map in 1784, about the time the current structure was built. How it got that name is anyone’s guess, while the only hints of its historic significance point to it being an important waystation for coal transport till at least the late nineteenth century. The former coal storehouse is now a well-reputed inn called The Trout, Tadpole’s only other structure of note.

 

If you take those square elements for its eyes, and the arch for its mouth, then maybe you can just about imagine it’s a tadpole. A hungry one.

The Trout offers one of this broad isolation’s few sources of refreshment (and lavatories).

Speaking of broad isolation, you’ll never guess what follows.

 

The paved road makes a change at least. It’s the access road for another lock ahead.

A lock of pivotal strategic importance, apparently. For now they’ve gone quieter on the Germans to instead scream at the French for not stopping the refugee crossings, so perhaps this one’s here to stop Emmanuel Macron.

Another renowned (and ultimately pointless) wartime tactic of theirs was to rotate signposts so any invading Germans would get confused. Perhaps this bizarre gate is an extension of the same technique.

Hearteningly, the lock’s environs are host to some familiar friends.

 

Nuuo.

I am given to understand that the technical term for this is mlem.

Rushey Lock was one of the earlier Thames Navigation Commission locks, built in 1790 before falling to dilapidation and so benefiting from an 1898 rebuild. One of the river’s remotest locks of all, it likely gets its name from the local rushes traditionally harvested to make furniture.

 

The locks here all have manually-operated gates, but unlike those on the downstream reach they were all deserted. Large signboards make clear that these locks are all self-service, with not an on-duty lock-keeper in sight.

Rushey Lock is also distinguished among river-travellers for the topiary frog in its garden. Here we find it under assault from an army of moles, who have almost completely encircled it with their siegeworks.

The weir appears to have been recently refurbished and carries the towpath onto the south bank.

 

 

Radcot

There follows a prolonged accordion of bumps and bends through some of the most splendid isolation so far. That said, it frames one of the river’s oldest bridging sites, on a position of quite some long-term historic importance.

 

The many meanders here makes this stretch longer than it looks on the map – presuming your steps keep faith with the river rather than cutting provocatively across the bends.

Around these parts an old weir once stood with the name of Old Nan’s Weir, although who or what Old Nan refers to is lost in the mists of time.

Many a fine old willow guards the Radcot reach. Could one of these be Old Nan?

Decades of wind have taken their toll on this one.

It thinks we can’t see it. Emmanuel Macron is in serious trouble the next time he dares come sailing up this way.

Look closely to spot a native on the opposite bank.

This area offers a chance to study the local fishing culture. In spite of the bitter cold, a fisherman (and for some unaccountable reason they do all seem to be men) can be found every few metres up the riverbank here. Each sits in front of a single car that evidences how he got here, and he is always alone, maintaining a respectful if wary distance from his closest fellow in either direction. Perhaps this indicates a fierce territoriality, as though encroachment by any one on another’s claimed fishery would produce a bloody confrontation.

 

Woe too to any boaters foolish enough to navigate through their claims. This one’s rod is likely reinforced with composite metals capable of shearing slices off any civilian vessel.

Makes one wonder why they bothered with these, really.

A swathe of that bank is also under pasture for a very large flock of sheep. Every now and then a fisherman’s car will come growling through, scattering any individuals from its path.

 

There’s a footbridge out here. Old Man’s Bridge, whose name’s resemblance to Old Nan’s Weir raises questions, replaced another old weir around the 1860s. Within a few decades the bridge was deemed unsafe and got replaced in turn by this wooden iteration.

 

Old Man’s Bridge. Once more it’s unknown to whom Old Man refers. It’s suggested a pub once stood here too, but it has since completely disappeared. In the days before railways and motor transport these remote fords and waystations would have been a vital lifeline for connecting the local villages and supporting cargo barges.

It’s a very long trek before signs of more concentrated human involvement return.

 

This field past the footbridge offered a peculiar sight: an organised mass activity involving metal detectors, whose participants combed the ground while spaced out at wide intervals whether as part of the exercise or for COVID-19 distancing. It’s unclear what they were looking for and whether they found it.

Radcot Lock. This is another late one (1891), also replacing an old weir. It recently gained the distinction of a side-passage for fish and canoes.

As at Tadpole, the boats and temporary dwellings of English nomads cluster round the strategic artery of Radcot Bridge. The natural river is at left; the course at right was added in the canal age to improve navigation.

Radcot – supposedly ‘cottage by the road’ – is yet another tiny farming hamlet. This one however sits on what has long been a pivotal node of migration, transport and military strategy. Supporting an old north-south road that once linked the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, Radcot Bridge claims no less than to be the oldest bridge on the Thames. Indeed, it preceded the New Bridge as part of King John’s programme, around the year 1200, to bring in Norman French monks to build and maintain both bridges to facilitate the rising wool trade.

 

Radcot Bridge is the one on the left (south), across the natural river. The wider channel at right was dug out around the 1780s and given a canal bridge of its own. A third bridge off to the north crosses a smaller backwater.

The claim is frustrated by the fact that, unlike the New Bridge, the current Radcot Bridge is a reconstruction. Such was its importance that it got repeatedly damaged or destroyed during the no fewer than four national-scale conflicts which put it in the centre of a battlefield. The first was the twelfth-century power struggle between Matilda and Stephen, in which the former, occupying Oxford, had it fortified with a north-bank castle discovered by a Time Team excavation in 2008. Its second ordeal came in 1387 during a rising of the nobility against the authoritarian king Richard II – infamous for his bloody suppression of the Peasants’ Revolt – when one of those aristocrats, leading a force to intercept an ally of the king bringing reinforcements, broke the bridge to impede them. It was wrecked again during the Wars of the Roses, after which it is thought to have been rebuilt to its present shape. It then somehow survived the cannons and gunpowder of the Civil Wars, through a long and fierce contestation between a Royalist garrison and Parliamentary assaults in the latter’s campaign against Royalist Oxford.

 

The surviving Radcot Bridge, a limestone ashlar structure which on close inspection exhibits evidence of rebuilding, in particular a flattening of its central arch.

Having borne this mistreatment, this bridge and its location grew still more prominent as the monumental building projects of Oxford and London hungered for high-quality Cotswold stone. Radcot developed into a key wharf on the stone supply line, which the barges grew ever larger to service, all the more so when the new canal to the River Severn upstream added coal to the mix. The result was the widening of the northern side-channel in the 1780s during widespread canalisation in this area, and a focal industrial-age function for Radcot till the rise of the railways let it slip back to rustic seclusion.

 

Considering the new channel was added for extra width, one might wonder why, when they built this second bridge to cross it, they gave it about the narrowest arch possible. It is said that many barges got into difficulties with it.

There’s a pub here too. Ye Olde Swan dates back two or three hundred years to the height of Radcot’s commercial service, and lives on to feed and water walkers and recreational boaters.

Its good food and cosy winter fire makes it a recommendable lunch spot. Notice the Civil War commemorative mural. As the period is little taught in English schools, be advised that the visage of Oliver Cromwell is deeply offensive to Irish people, and for good reason.

And beyond Radcot, it’s straight back into the bush.

 

Radcot got one of these too in case a fifth conflict got added to its list.

Already half the day is gone, and now the sky fills up with cloud. Rain and snow of the type never predicted by the weather forecast now threaten.

Some brave souls exhibit the scale of craft that are soon the majority on these narrowing upper reaches.

 

 

 

Kelmscott – William Morris’s ‘Heaven on Earth’

Around the corner, the light and landscape line up to produce what might be a scene from any English rural postcard.

 

Nuuo x2. (Wondering why they go nuuo? Read Paths Across the Sea!)

This journey has oft revealed the gulf between this country’s agrarian idyll – the green and pleasant land, or, if you will, the sunlit uplands of the Brexit reverie – and the dispossession, violence and cruelty that in fact carve through the history of the English countryside. But if the romance retains resonance, perhaps it owes something to its contrast with the equally oppressive, and more saliently ongoing, dark satanic mills: the crowding, exploitative, polluted nightmares of urban industrial capitalism.

 

As the smokestacks rose, it became common for those English with the means (not least those smokestacks’ owners) to escape the cities and seek salvation in greenery like this here (or alternatively, to construct artificial versions closer to home). Most such migrants were of course super-rich landowners from the old nobility or industrial tycoons from the new one: people, that is, who had no real interest in genuine rural life, and who readily turfed out local communities or rearranged ancestral landscapes to preserve a comfortable luxury in what was to them a foreign world of stenches, dialects and hard work.

 

Were they all like that? Is English hostility to migrants rooted in a fear that, because that’s how they so often behave in their own migrations, everyone else must be like that too?

 

Well here, just possibly, we have an exception. A single name (and beard) looms large over the riverbanks ahead, and the escapee it belongs to, so they say, showed an interest and care which was genuine before it was anything else.

 

William Morris (1834-1896), a titan of critical counter-culture in Victorian England. The photo was taken in the 1880s, around the time he came up the river to Kelmscott.

Put the name William Morris into a search engine and your screen will likely erupt in a profusion of vivid leaf and flower patterns. These textile designs might be what Morris is most popularly remembered for, a decorative trail which flourished across wallpapers, windows, furniture, or as often nowadays, mugs or fridge magnets on the shelves of heritage gift shops. In fact William Morris was one of those larger-than-life figures who defies categorisation. We could call him an artist, but that would be to understate a character whose creative passions spanned from textiles to literature, poetry, typology, architecture, mythic translations, and, inseparably, activism within the nascent English socialist movement.

 

If this cascade of commitments had a unifying theme, it was surely this. They were all expressions of his insistent, and highly political, critique of the industrial England of his day, as well as of an effort to usher in a fairer, more authentic, more attractive and responsible alternative social vision. And it was here, around another of this region’s forgotten medieval villages, that that vision would coalesce in the crowning years of Morris’s exertions.

 

You bet that at certain times of the day, in particular light and weather conditions, this waves its branches about to scare walkers and molest people in boats.

One of these verticalities is not like the others.

William Morris would have known something known to very few people today: what the river along here felt like without these pillboxes.

On the approach to Morris’s village sits one of the last in the long sequence of Thames locks. Grafton Lock replaced a flash weir in 1896 and is definitely one of those lonely ones people come to for nature, birdsong and fuzzy animals. Otters are rumoured to frequent the river here, and an adjacent natural meadow has been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its biodiversity.

 

A large pack of cruiseboats appears to be wintering on the bank here, although it lacks the facilities of a proper boatyard.

Grafton Lock. It’s very quiet here.

 

William Morris came from a privileged background: born in Walthamstow in London to a wealthy middle-class family, with a stockbroker father and lucrative shares in copper mining. He studied at Oxford University, where he made many of the friends who were to remain influential throughout a life in which he rarely if ever wanted for money. Nonetheless, he developed a guttural dismay at the Victorian industrialism which passed for the modernity of his day. He loathed its ugliness and unhealthiness, its suffocating smoke, the ruthless divisions it had torn open between social classes, and in particular its miserable consequences for the working poor – that is, both its dehumanising violence towards them, and the way its cold, hard values degraded the very nature of their work.

 

For inspiration Morris turned instead to medieval history, or rather the movement to revive an artistic ethos out of it as represented in particular by John Ruskin. Morris came to see the Gothic designers, crafters and builders of earlier centuries as operating with a naturalness, freedom, precious imperfection, and – presaging his later Marxist turn – a personal connection to and pleasure in their labour, which together offered an antithesis to the dirty, nasty, soulless Victorian obsession with hard progress.

 

Idealistic as this vision sounds and no doubt was, his point was not to deny the equally dirty and nasty abuses that pack the English feudal heritage, of which he was very much aware. Rather it was about the value of that heritage, as he saw it, in presenting a foil for the England his generation lived in – an England which, as today, was no less nasty, yet had a knack for hiding its nastiness in a wardrobe of hypocrisy and lies.

This magical furnace appears to have fallen through a spacetime rift from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and landed next to the river here. No doubt Morris would have approved of the values expressed in the beauty of Hylian craftsmanship.

Perhaps influenced by Morris’s legacy in the area, another local crowd turns its backs on a poisonous modernity.

Aren’t the barbed wire fences supposed keep the enemies out, rather than your own soldiers in?

On the southern bank stands yet another near-deserted medieval village. The origins of Eaton Hastings are obscure, save that it appeared in the Domesday Book and got reallocated in eleventh-century Norman land-grabs – hence the Hastings, from the Norman family who got it. Both the Black Death and Enclosure smashed its population, and today fewer than a hundred people live there. Its most prominent survival is its eleventh-century church, with restoration work including stained-glass windows by William Morris.

In short, Morris seems to have occupied a precarious and frequently maligned position: that of emerging from, and relying for means on, a privileged culture which nonetheless bitterly alienated him. The ironies of that situation would exasperate him all his life – from the brutal abuses in the Devon copper mines from which his family derived much of its income, to how it was principally the middle and upper classes, in their ‘swinish luxury’ as he snarled at it, who could afford the high-quality crafts and furnishings through which the decorative arts company he founded, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., attempted to put his critical artistic principles into practice.

 

Nonetheless, little doubt seems to have surfaced about the integrity of his commitment to use what resources he had to better the corrupt world around him. His approach to textile design attempted to revive it as a genuine art form, and thereby reform the English approach to production through its concern for sustainable, natural and hand-embroidered beauty. He made no secret of his furious anti-imperialism, and, later, though less overtly combative towards religion, his atheism despite his evangelical Christian upbringing. His will to live in his own natural way even extended into his personal relationships: whether in his marriage to Jane Burden, a working-class muse of his painter friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in the face of the hostile class norms of the time; or, later, his acquiescence to, and supportive behaviour towards, Jane’s intimate relationships with Rossetti and other individuals, notwithstanding the evident mental strain with which these challenged him.

 

A more straightforward presentation of the rural idyll close to Kelmscott.

Nature dislikes this pillbox and has begun to eat it.

Kelmscott village is a short walk up a dirt road from the river here, with the manor house close to adjoining it.

It was around 1871 that Morris, keen on getting himself and his family away from the London pollution, disembarked from the river here at Kelmscott. This is a village like many in this area, with likely origins as an Anglo-Saxon farmstead (the name means ‘Coenhelm’s Cottage’) followed by long depopulation on account of plague and Enclosure. Its manor house, built around 1570 for the Turner family, was a regularly-flooded block of limestone which, its feudal trappings having largely lapsed by Morris’s day, was getting regularly sold or let out to whoever could afford it.

 

Morris fell instantly in love with it. In his eyes, the house, village, and surrounding countryside were so harmonious a manifestation of his medieval visions that it was as though they had sprouted organically from the very soil. He wasted no time in renting the manor house, which from then on served as his countryside retreat and the crucible for the most advanced phase of his works. It was in his Kelmscott period that he consolidated his textiles company and embarked on a frenzied period of design and experimentation, elevating Morris & Co., as it was now known, to national renown. It was at this time too that he travelled to Iceland, having set about learning its language and translating its sagas (his dabbles in translation would go on to encompass Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Odyssey, and attempts at Beowulf and the Persian Shahnameh). And in the 1890s he founded his own publishing company, known for its beautiful decorative engravings, and even designed three typefaces for it. Though based in London’s Hammersmith, Kelmscott’s influence by that point was evident in the name he chose for it: the Kelmscott Press.

 

Kelmscott Manor, up the lane from the river. Significantly, Morris did not turf the locals off their land or stick lawns and fences everywhere as English class tradition expects. Rather he appears to have taken to life in this riverside community, regularly walking along the river to collect reeds and flowers for dyes or design motifs, and boating about the meadows when they flooded. His concern for heritage extended to the local buildings, which he and his daughter May did much to conserve. He and most of his family are buried in Kelmscott’s churchyard and appear to be fondly remembered in this area.

Very much a writer too, Morris’s literature evokes a regular theme of escape from alienation. Frequently this takes the form of migratory journeys into other worlds or timelines, whether in search of meaning, belonging, or critical contrasts with the injustices of the England he knew. The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), which made his literary reputation, for example, is an epic retelling of Greek and Norse myths through a frame story of Scandinavian refugees seeking a better life across the sea. A Dream of John Ball (1888) tells of a time-travel encounter with the eponymous rebel priest from the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt, through which Morris joined his voice to those re-interpreting that uprising, traditionally told in terms heavily disparaging to the peasants, into a struggle for an egalitarian society against the evils of serfdom. And The Wood Beyond the World (1894) features an alienated English everyman who, on setting sail, ends up in a magical otherworld where he gets tangled into the schemes of a reigning lady and her thrall, both complicated women; a story which, for all its relative obscurity, is thought to have heavily influenced writers like Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and laid the foundations for English fantasy literature.

 

The frontispiece to The Wood Beyond the World, exhibiting the lush decorative aesthetic for which the Kelmscott Press came to be known.

But it is in probably Morris’s best-known text, News from Nowhere (1890), that the late-life sharpening of his critical edge is most apparent. This is another time-travel tale, in which a London socialist falls asleep and wakes up in a far future in which his city has become an agrarian paradise with no private property, no government, no money, no social classes, and no repressive relationship norms like marriage or the nuclear family. Having come increasingly into contact with the English working poor through his explorations in the dyeing industry, Morris’s disgust at the poverty and pollution his country inflicted on them now spurred him fast to a sort of political epiphany. He discovered himself to be a committed socialist, and from the late 1870s became tirelessly involved with organisations like the Social Democratic Federation – England’s first socialist political party – and the Socialist League, of which he was a founding member. Soon he was regularly booming the case for socialism to the shock of bourgeois society, unleashing his lectures on humiliated top-hatted audiences and making big bearded appearances at strikes and street protests. He was even arrested at these a couple of times, but never prosecuted, likely because his name had grown too big for them to dare risk it. Yet his socialism was as thorough and critical as the rest of him, and he seems to have spent as much of his political energy fighting ideological quarrels and negotiating the vicious splits which, then as now, have ever characterised the English critical reaction.

 

A peek over the gates of the Kelmscott Manor compound. After William Morris’s death the house passed to his widow Jane, then his daughter May, who carried on the Morris legacy in Kelmscott till her own death in 1938. Bequeathed then to Oxford University, it has since landed in the hands of the London Society of Antiquaries, who preserve it much as it was when William Morris lived here. Typically open to the public, it is currently closed for COVID-19-delayed conservation work.

It’s difficult to conclusively assess a character like William Morris, if for no greater reason than his natural, if nonetheless steamrolling, insistence on living as a real human being. Rather than slot himself into neat categories, he insisted on abiding by his own values and principles, his own habits and flaws, rather than adopting the incorrigibly deep flaws of the society around him. His foundational legacies are widespread, from architecture and the Arts and Crafts Movement, through otherworldly and science-fiction writing, to the emergence of socialism as a serious force in twentieth-century English politics. Even the 1960s hippy counter-culture and the urgent environmental movement of the present day can be said to echo with his contributions. They might not be so visibly-defined as to raise him among the most prominent titans of one field or another. Yet, once detected, they are profound enough to leave you wondering where any given strain of English critical counter-culture might have washed up without them.

 

England never did resolve into something akin to the prophesised paradise of his News from Nowhere. It is the horrors of English feudalism, rather than the blessings he saw in it, that are now revived and moreover blended into the horrors of its industrial scene to create a truthless and unrelentingly abusive modernity as far removed from his visions as at any point during his lifetime. How desperately painful, then, must the corporate serfs of today find Morris’s vision of a world in which all work is creative and pleasurable? How critically relevant is it still as the beacon for a future the priests of modernity insist comes ever closer, yet which ever remains so heartbreakingly out of reach?

 

Kelmscott Manor: still a long, long way from England.

 

 

Buscot

All trace of blue is gone from the sky now, and the air is cold with moisture. Today’s goal of Lechlade is close but, like the better future dreamed of by Morris, still feels lost in the darkening gloom.

 

The residues of William Morris’s otherworld crossings have lingered. This bunker for instance is haunted by something not from this dimension.

‘Heaven on Earth’: a place with no humans in it? One can relate.

Here another matchstick footbridge marks the site of the last of the river’s old flash locks. For the remote countryside, Hart’s Weir, as it was known, was supposedly a lively spot with a campsite and pub called the Anchor Inn on its island.

 

Eaton Footbridge, with the old lock island visible. William Morris, who used to swim here with his friends, writes in The Earthly Paradise: ‘What better place than this, then, could we find,/By this sweet stream that knows not of the sea,/That guesses not the city's misery,/This little stream whose hamlets scarce have names,/This far-off, lonely mother of the Thames.’

The weir and lock were notoriously difficult for watercraft to navigate and in 1936 they were removed, with this footbridge built in their place. The pub lived on, only to burn down in mysterious circumstances in 1980.

 

The former weir keeper’s house, now the Anchor Boat Club according to its sign, is the only surviving building. It’s another sight that suggests some well-managed immigration could really breathe life back into this area.

Oh look – another imaginary border.

If you believe in borders, this ditch, gate and fence are more significant than most. It is here that the wayfarer finally leaves the Oxford sphere of influence, and in crossing this line, takes first steps into the strange green heights of Gloucestershire Province. It is this ancient land whose limestone heart gives birth to the river, and whose old, old ways are said to whisper still.

Naturally Gloucestershire too has nuuo.

The remains of a ritual pyre suggests regional variations in how their pillboxes operated.

This one looks unusually elevated. Perhaps it’s calculated to play on French invaders’ postulated sensitivity about their heights.

Buscot Lock is the penultimate lock on this journey. It’s unusual for being just one part of a more involved heritage complex on this site, which connects to the nearby country mansion of Buscot Park and its associated Buscot village.

 

Goodness knows what William Morris made of this place when he looked across the river. The grand house, a Neoclassical-Palladian hybrid, was built in the 1780s for a local magnate and Whig politician with the curious name of Edward Loveden Loveden. Heir to a massive landed fortune, this individual’s further wealth and status came from driving the canalisation of the river in these parts as a member of the Thames Navigation Commission. This included the canal to the Severn just upstream of Lechlade, but also Buscot Lock which, in a set with several others we have passed, was built in 1790 to smooth barge passage at the top of the navigable Thames.

 

Buscot Lock, whose subtly storied landscape is ruined by the metal fence.

The following century the Buscot estate took a more peculiar turn when it was sold to another rich white man, Robert Tertius Campbell. This one was of Australian colonial extraction, from an obscenely wealthy landowning family with an (almost certainly dodgy) killing in farming and the gold trade.

 

Around the 1850s, Campbell got it into his head to transform Buscot Park into some kind of model agro-industrial scheme. In perhaps a weird mirror image to William Morris’s unblemished paradise across the water, this was to be a systemically irrigated, railway-supported working compound reliant on state-of-the-art technology. At it heart was a commercial-scale distillery where French labourers processed sugar beet – over 10,000 tonnes of it per year – to produce alcohol for export.

 

The local talk was that Campbell was producing brandy here. He wasn’t, but the rumour stuck, so the island created by the channels dug for its water wheels became known as Brandy Island. None of the buildings lasted long after the scheme’s collapse, with Thames Water later building this pumping station where the distillery used to be. Another wharf nearby shipped out Gloucestershire cheese to the lands below.

What the conditions were like for the people who worked here is anyone’s guess, though it is said Campbell was relatively considerate with wages and working hours (and we know it at least did not so offend William Morris into punting across and knocking it down with his beard). Nonetheless the extensive dredging, digging, planting and construction ate a huge hole in Campell’s finances, and when all his French workers left to fight in the Franco-Prussian war, their English replacements, familiarly, lacked the skill or will for the job. By 1879 the whole thing had collapsed, leaving the house mortgaged and everything else sold off. Campbell died bankrupt eight years later, his misery compounded by watching the ruin of his daughter, almost certainly unfairly, in one of the most sensationalised murder-mystery scandals of that period.

 

Thereafter Buscot Park fell back in the hands of the English nobility, specifically the Barons of Faringdon (a nearby market town, and the main centre of settlement south of the Thames here). There is however a nice sting in this tale, one of which William Morris might have approved. The second Baron Faringdon, Gavin Henderson, was a socialist, a pacifist, and almost certainly gay. In brazen defiance of English class scripts, he used the estate to host meetings for the Fabian Society, the democratic-socialist organisation which helped produce the Labour Party. He went on to sit for that party in the House of Lords – on one occasion attending in a fireman’s uniform while volunteering for the London Fire Brigade, and on another opening a speech with ‘My dears’ – and even went to Spain to provide medical support to the anti-fascist forces fighting Franco.

 

Buscot village can be glimpsed across the river, in particular its thirteenth-century St. Mary’s Church. Many of the village’s historic buildings were commissioned by Alexander Henderson, first Baron Faringdon, when he took over the estate. Buscot Park is still the residence of their line in the form of the third and current Baron, Charles Henderson (nephew of the socialist Gavin).

 

 

St. John’s Lock

Now the day draws shiveringly to its close, and it is of course a dark, cold, and wet one. But the end is in sight, not only for this exhausting eight-hour slog but for some of the river’s own most important capacities.

 

Hopefully these among them.

The final approach to Lechlade features some of the meanest, jerkiest meanders so far. It’s little surprise that this is the uppermost navigable reach.

Trudging on up these twisting bends, we come to Bloomer’s Hole. It’s a wider spot said to be convenient for turning boats, though where it got its name is an utter mystery.

 

Bloomer’s Hole. Its footbridge, apparently another timber piece, in fact breaks the pattern. The wood is just an envelope for a steel structure within, and it’s also distinct for having been installed by Chinook helicopter in 2001.

Lechlade’s eastern flank retains the name of St. John’s, after an Augustinian priory built on the north bank here in the thirteenth century in the name of John the Baptist. Unusually done in not by Henry VIII but by its own financial hardships in the 1470s, its monks’ abiding importance with regards to the river was their construction and maintenance of St. John’s Bridge, which for most generations since has carried the main road between Gloucester and the southeast (now the A417) over the river.

 

This isn’t the main St. John’s Bridge, but an extension built for the later lock cut. The principal bridge, and the Trout Inn which is all that remains of the monastery’s almshouse, are beyond contention in this final push to the end before the clouds burst open.

Likewise invisible hereabouts in the murk and exhaustion is the mouth of the river Leach, the small Cotswold tributary for which Lechlade is named.

Immediately beyond that, we come to the final entry in the long, long sequence of locks which, for this expedition, began two years and two hundred kilometres ago at Richmond Lock. What opened in the world below, St. John’s Lock now closes here on the far heights. Built as one of the Thames Navigation Commission’s 1790 set following the opening of the Thames and Severn Canal, the present structure is a 1905 rebuild which, as per usual today, is totally deserted.

 

St. John’s Lock, the highest on the Thames. And that’s it. No more locks.

The lock island appears to harbour a community of tiny people.

From here it’s a shattered, mind-numbing stagger up the final bends to Lechlade. A look at this trading post and transport junction at the top of the accessible river will have to wait for next time, because we arrive just in time for the storm's return.

 

The spire of Lechlade’s St. Lawrence’s Church materialises on the horizon, no doubt a welcome sight for generations of hard-travelled wayfarers and barge captains.

Don’t be fooled by the camera’s way with light. By this point, gloom enswathes the land.

Just in time for a safe arrival, the still-more-welcome lights of Lechlade itself.

Lechlade’s Halfpenny Bridge, more on which in the next instalment...

...and across it, The Riverside inn, born of tea rooms on a former wharf in the 1950s and well-positioned to restore travellers with pints, teas, coffees and deluxe hot chocolate.

The moment of this threshold is lost in the murk. This river of English migration – this water whose movement enabled their movement in turn, from the Anglo-Saxon small boats crossing the Channel up the full procession of container ships and luxury liners, aggregates dredgers, steamboats, sailboats and tugboats, working barges, punts, skiffs and rowboats, narrowboats and middle-class cruiseboats – this, here, is where it ends that service, to all but those whose craft are small enough to propel with their own limbs.

 

Fitting that its highest lock could also be considered a shrine of sorts, for it heralds a reunion with a figure we last met atop the former headquarters of the Port of London Authority on Tower Hill, all the way back at the start.

 

 

Father Thames, the river’s guardian deity, is obscure in origin but very possibly dates back in some form to prehistoric river-worship. This latter-day interpretation was carved by an Italian sculptor on commission for the Great Exhibition of 1854, that glittering showcase for the Victorian dream of an industrial, scientific and technological future. It then migrated to South London with the Crystal Palace, where it survived that building’s disastrous destruction by fire in 1936 and was thereafter rescued by the Thames Conservancy.

 

Parked for a time at the Thames’s official source, Father Thames moved here in 1974 supposedly in response to vandalism. But perhaps there’s a better reason. Look at him: an itinerant worker, ever on the move with his shovel and packs of cargo. Here by the limit of his river’s navigability, he reminds the English that for the fullness of its history, the entire breadth of its meaning in the hearts of humans for which he stands in embodiment, the river’s greatest importance to them was that it moved them. On its natural freedom of movement they settled this land, imagined up their provinces and their kingdoms, and constituted straw by straw, brick by brick, memory by memory, those things which, over the centuries, they have come to call English. And they did that by bringing in that which was foreign: customs, goods, beliefs, ideas, and most of all their very own bodies.

 

They suffer the delusion, now, that only by ending that movement – violently, and with cruelty – can England survive. The river knows the truth is the opposite. If it flows through multiple realities, it knows there is at least one of them in which the Home Office, transplanted into the past, sank the small boats on which their ancestors first came here and so erased England from the timeline.

 

When the movement stops, England dies.