THAMES: 19) The Passages

Lechlade and Cricklade. The Thames’s highest towns. Here at last is the river’s cradle, its nest of honey-and-mustard Cotswold limestone.

 

Narrow, shallow and clogged with vegetation, the river from here on up is unnavigable to all but the most tenacious of small craft.

Cricklade, the river’s uppermost town and goal of this the penultimate section.

But the foggy cloak of a hesitant spring sky hangs heavy over a world whose wheels, already juddering when this expedition began some thirty months ago, now appear to be spinning clean off.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing vengeance of twisted authoritarian power fantasies – in Syria, in Yemen, in Myanmar, in Ethiopia, in Afghanistan, and now the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia – have drowned in blood any remaining illusion that humankind, morally and politically, has improved in the course of its own journey of millennia. In England the abuses noted on the way up this river have yet to explode on the sheer scale of those disasters, but easily belong to the same trajectory of arrogance, cruelty, corruption, contempt for the different, and forsaking of reality for a fortress of self-aggrandising lies. The fleeting promise of modernity, of a future for humanity better than its past, lies in tatters; replaced, it seems, by one of fresh atrocities as vile as any in human history.

 

In such a world, disillusionment is rational. Rage; futility; doubts, in all sincerity, about whether humanity is a life-form that can solve its own problems. In such despair, projects like this one come to feel meaningless. After all, with no disrespect to the good natives of Lechlade and Cricklade, are we to expect their hinterland of fields and brooks to hold the remedies to this nightmare?

 

 

Well, their stories do matter. For a start, they too participate in a world where nowhere is truly far anymore.

 

Lechlade’s Thames Street – for now, in honour and solidarity, part of Cotswold Raion, Gloucester Oblast, Ukraine. This must be the first time in this region’s history that the Ukrainian bicolour flutters from its masts and flagpoles, in a startling echo of its blue streams and yellow-gold cottages.

The illusion of these towns’ high remoteness trickles even through the sound of their names. They alone on this river carry the element -lade, an obscure echo of Anglo-Saxon Old English (ge)lād which indicates a passage or crossing of some kind. It’s unclear whether this means a passage across the river, i.e. a ford; or a passage of the water itself, perhaps indicating some of the many little tributaries which merge on these meadows and journey on together as the dark river.

 

Their service to human passage was clear enough. Dwelling on the Thames’s flood-prone headwaters at its furthest point reachable by boat, and so close to where it gives way to its mighty and storied neighbour, the Severn, these two towns’ situations – Lechlade as a trade post, Cricklade as a strategic junction – have been pivotal. On this journey up they are the final threshold, the passages to the Cotswold nurseries, the beginning of the end. But for the water, they lead to everywhere in the world.

 

Upstream from Lechlade’s Halfpenny Bridge. The Thames’s uppermost boatyard can be glimpsed through the trees.

 

Start: Lechlade (no train station; buses from Swindon via Highworth)

End: Cricklade (no train station; buses to Swindon)

Length: 16.8km/10.5 miles

Location: Gloucestershire – Cotswold; Wiltshire – Swindon, Wiltshire

 

Topics: Lechlade, the Thames and Severn Canal and limit of navigation, Inglesham, Kempsford, Castle Eaton, Cricklade

 

 

Lechlade

Close to the confluence with the seasonal River Leach, whence its name, Lechlade is rich in thousands of years of archaeological remnants: a neolithic cursus, Bronze Age barrows, Iron Age grain stores, and a villa in the orbit of the Roman administrative centre of Corinium (now Cirencester). But the current settlement is likely late Anglo-Saxon in origin, and was sufficiently established by the Norman conquest to appear as Lecelade in the 1086 Domesday survey.

 

The Cotswolds are known for their beige Jurassic limestone – rich in fossils, but also resistant to weather, easy to split into blocks, and thus a much-quarried building material which gives this region's towns and villages their distinct visual character.

Typically, William the Conqueror granted the Lechlade manor to one of his minions from the French-speaking Norman nobility. Perched on a major London-to-Gloucester road, it was perhaps to support struggling wayfarers that one of that minion’s descendants, Isabella de Ferrers, set up the St. John the Baptist’s hospital-monastery down by the Leach’s mouth in 1205. The St. John’s Bridge it built there, rebuilt in the 1880s, remains the principal crossing for road traffic today.

 

But it was in trade that this town would build its future. In 1210 it was granted a market charter by King John (of Magna Carta confrontation fame five years later, with Isabella’s second husband one of the barons who forced him to the table). So began Lechlade’s rise as an inland port, feeding downriver the lucrative goods for which it grew to serve as a waystation: Cotswold wool, Worcester salt, Taynton stone, and of course, Gloucester cheese.

 

Lechlade town centre, with St. Lawrence’s Church as its focal point. The town’s famous marketplace made use of this space till its final closure in 1928.

Lechlade’s sizeable church suggests how lucrative. St. Lawrence’s is one of the Cotswold ‘wool churches’, larger-than-life piles of prestige built on huge donations from local wool farmers and merchants as a statement of their sway. It grew up in the 1470s, partly out of materials from Isabella’s priory which shut down in financial difficulties a few years earlier. Decked in elaborate stonework with plentiful carvings of the woolmongers and their clout-bearing emblems, the church’s tall spire soars above the surrounding landscape, thus doing long practical service too as a landmark for river or road travellers straggling through these rural reaches.

 

The spire was added around 1510 by Katherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife, who came into control of the Lechlade manor at that time. She also appears to have got its dedication changed to St. Lawrence, who was Spanish like her.

Apparently they’re very proud of their brass chandelier. Later this place’s atmospheric churchyard would inspire a poem by Percy Shelley, for which in turn they named its path after him – likely making this one of this country’s few churches to name part of its premises after an atheist.

Lechlade attained its heyday on the approach to industrialisation, as its trade grew increasingly commercialised on the development of the turnpike, coaching and river transport systems. Wharves, inns and alehouses flourished in support of this traffic, which exploded onto a whole new order of magnitude with the completion of the Thames and Severn Canal a kilometre upstream in 1789. With the navigable Thames, London and all, now linked to the Severn – Britain’s largest river, with its major western ports – Lechlade became a junction not only for wool, salt and cheese but also enormous quantities of coal, iron, copper, tin, and assorted textiles and foodstuffs travelling down to the capital from England’s western provinces, while up the other way came timber and gunpowder, much destined no doubt for the slave-trading atrocities of Bristol.

 

The Riverside Inn, by Lechlade’s Halfpenny Bridge, was formerly a warehouse on one of Lechlade’s bustling wharves from this period. A shade of the wharf itself lives on as the boat hire at right.

The Halfpenny Bridge dates from 1792, three years after the Thames and Severn Canal, when it replaced a ferry as business grew crowded. Supposedly pronounced heypenny, it refers to the toll (in the old English currency) that it charged pedestrians to cross till 1839, when they angrily got it abolished.

As elsewhere, this prosperity receded in the nineteenth century as railways replaced rivers and canals as the favoured industrial transport network. This relieved Lechlade of its function as a key junction, but it did get a railway station of its own in 1873, only to lose it in 1962 to the Beeching Axe. By the late 1920s the Thames and Severn Canal was a dilapidated wreck. Though no longer the flourishing trade post of old, Lechlade took advantage of new forms of road, rail and river transport to revive itself as a low-key recreational oasis, turning its traditional agriculture to feed a new influx of rowers, cruisers and tourists. Its most recent transformation came on account of the world wars, which saw the Cotswolds sprout a smattering of RAF airbases. Two of these, RAF Brize Norton and RAF Fairford, remain operational as major employers in these parts, driving some late-day population growth and residential sprawl out along Lechlade’s north and west roads.

 

So persists Lechlade – much quieter than it used to be, and known mainly for its status as a picturesque Ultima Thule for the recreational boaters of today’s Thames.

 

 

The Thames and Severn Canal, and Limit of Navigation

Setting off upstream, we approach a momentous threshold.

 

Through the trees is Lechlade Marina, the river’s final boatyard. Note the Ukrainian flag on the second-last boat upstream.

Human activity swiftly gives way to the open fields that constitute most of what remains.

Some gabions they’ve placed to combat heavy erosion along the riverbank here. This approach to the Thames and Severn Canal was a critical connection in industrial times and would have likely experienced much engineering for ease of traffic.

But today, this footbridge is as far as they go. Virtually all watercraft are advised to turn back here.

Here the Thames and Severn Canal joined the river, alongside the mouth of a tributary called the Coln. Ostensibly an idyllic Cotswold limestone stream, the Coln is in fact one of many English rivers now made filthy through the illegal dumping of sewage by unaccountable water companies.

 

The River Coln enters the Thames at right. The debris behind the willow stands on the derelict ruin of Inglesham Lock, at the head of the Thames and Severn Canal.

The Inglesham Round House, one of five that housed the canal’s keepers. The cylindrical design was a Thames and Severn Canal peculiarity; some of them, like this one, also featured an inverted conical roof to catch rainwater. After the canal’s decline it was converted to a private residence. Notice also the ruined footing of a footbridge (at right) which crossed to the canal’s towpath.

This site is quite the paradox. For all practical purposes this is the limit of navigation, the beginning and end of the line. From here on the natural river prevails: wild, swift, shallow, packed with weeds and thorns and rushes and low-hanging branches, with no further locks, weirs, boatyards or other facilities to get anything heavier than a canoe out of trouble. But for the brief century in which the canal was in operation, this beginning and end magically became a middle: a water-bridge, the central passage between the east and west rivers, the North and Celtic Seas. For this most fleeting of moments, this flit of an English attempt at an industrial modernity, the Lades, the passages, consummated their name.

 

Like that modernity, the Thames and Severn Canal has gone. Also like that modernity, there are people attempting to revive it – namely the Cotswold Canals Trust, whose armies of volunteers have since 1972 been pursuing a painstaking multi-phase scheme to restore it as a recreational waterway. Further like English modernity, these efforts have struggled with inadequate funding and greedy private landowners, and so remain, at best, a long-term prospect.

 

 

Inglesham

Here then are the true headwaters, uncontrolled, uncontrollable, above and beyond.

 

And inevitably, lurking thick in its fog, there are nuuo.

They see you.

And so does...whatever chilling manifestation this is. Up here the rules of the human world no longer apply. Be ready to encounter monsters, nightmares or apparitions from any other level.

The floodplain across from Lechlade houses what’s left of Inglesham, one of the many medieval ‘lost villages’ in these parts. Most of its remaining hundred or so residents have long since retreated up the road to the farming hamlet of Upper Inglesham, leaving only a tiny cluster on the riverside meadows...

 

Inglesham.

...and among them, a remarkable surprise.

 

 

Inglesham’s St. John the Baptist Church is redundant – that is, no longer in use by the English religious establishment, and left standing only as a piece of civil heritage. We came across something similar all the way back in Boveney, near Eton: a mysterious little temple whose wood and stone, though assembled in service of English Christianity, seem soaked with whispers of deeper animistic secrets.

 

The church’s exterior. The building dates to around 1205, but has elements that go back to Anglo-Saxon times.

Extraordinarily, it has survived largely unaltered to the present day. This makes it one of the very few churches of such age to withstand successive tides of English religious violence, from Henry VIII’s assault on the monasteries to the iconoclastic sledgehammers of the Puritans. Anything that survived those was then liable to get killed not out of hate by its enemies but, as is so often the case, by supposed friends insisting it was for their own good – that is, the over-enthusiastic Victorian restorers who wrecked the churches’ ancient arts, architectures and atmospheres with flashy and extravagant refurbishments.

 

That this church escaped that fate is principally thanks to our recent acquaintance William Morris, who bristled with resentment at what he saw as the vandalisms and forgeries of these destructive ‘restorations’. His Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings advanced an alternative approach, of repairing and protecting them as treasures of cultural heritage, and in this capacity Morris personally oversaw this church’s sensitive repair in the 1880s.

 

As a result of Morris fending off the ‘restorers’, this church retains rare archaic features and fixtures – an architectural simplicity, carved wooden screens and box pews, wall paintings – that afford it a profoundly different character from most English churches today.

The wall paintings are mostly Biblical texts or illustrations. They span the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, often with paintings from different periods layered on top of each other. Despite Morris’s efforts they remain under grave threat from water ingress, especially after the theft of lead from the roof in 2017. The Churches Conservation Trust is currently trying to raise money to fix it.

One of the building’s most ancient elements: an Anglo-Saxon stone carving of Mary and the baby Jesus. Though a common Christian motif, this is a staggering survival in a spiritually-insecure country which smashed up most of its ancient religious monuments like this one.

And of course it has an armoured phantom who comes out at night.

And now it’s time for a long slog through riverside fields, down which the river comes rolling unimpeded. And straight out of Inglesham, as if to make totally clear that humans don’t make the rules here, the fog produces guardians to whom all who would pass must offer tribute.

 

Nuuo.

Notice how effectively they have aligned themselves so as to bodily block access to the field.

The required tribute differs depending on what they think of you. And once admitted, they will keep their gazes fixed on you so you don’t do wrong things on their terrain.

After that...

 

It’s all like this again.

And this. There really isn’t that much else out here.

Occasionally this, perhaps.

At this point historic sites and narrative landmarks are few and far between, rarely marked on the maps, and easy to miss when they come.

 

The tiny stream beneath this footbridge is in fact the River Cole. It’s more significant than it looks, with a very long record of human modification for milling, agriculture, flood protection, and, since 1995, a major project to restore its natural water profile and ecology. Much of it runs across protected National Trust land and marks the provincial border between Oxfordshire and Wiltshire.

The river says: “I did tell them it was unnavigable. They could have listened.”

And this must be where the cows put people who refuse to proffer tribute.

 

Through a riverside thicket, another surprise awaits.

 

Spring has yet to reach this part.

The trees here are equipped with ancient laser cannons; be careful not to wake them.

Evidence of preparations underway for the worsening consequences of Brexit.

At first sight, the field beyond the woods might be any other.

 

One of the extremely few watercraft of notable size to be found this far up. It’s unlikely to go anywhere soon.

Closer inspection of this field reveals a not-especially-agricultural instrument.

This is apparently an active airstrip – most likely a private one, with a very long taxiway off to a hangar amidst the farms of Upper Inglesham. Another expression perhaps of the strong imprint of twentieth-century military aviation in this region.

 

From this snarl of thorns the Bydemill Brook trickles into the Thames.

If you approach the tree barrier, the fog thickens to zero visibility till you stumble into an invisible wall, and the message appears: “You cannot go further.”

 

 

Kempsford

At this point some thicker strips of bush occupy the riverbank, forcing a two-kilometre detour over farm fields.

 

Red on the left, silver on the right.

English paddy fields? Who would have thought.

The river is momentarily rejoined at Hannington Bridge – which is in fact two bridges, carrying a minor road across the main river and a side-channel.

 

Again, in this high-level close-to-the-end fog be prepared to encounter creatures from any other zone.

These may look like their cousins from previous areas, but don’t be fooled: their HP and DPS are extremely high.

The river at Hannington Bridge, dense with vegetation. For those rash enough to take their boats beyond Lechlade, this is typically about as far as they get before the machetes fall from their trembling arms and the chains snap off their chainsaws.

Again the riverside becomes inaccessible, with wayfarers diverted along side-channels. The south bank here is a broad web of farm fields, but over to the north the village of Kempsford sits on the river and the ruined Thames and Severn Canal.

 

 

Small and isolated as it is, Kempsford – whose Anglo-Saxon name, Kynemereforde, is commonly translated as ‘Ford of the Great Marsh’ – bears some weight in military heritage. It first appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the entry for the year 800, which tells of an army of the Hwicce, a Gloucestershire people who by then were clients of Mercia, riding out from this village to do battle with a Kingdom of Wessex force coming across from the Wiltshire side. Wessex won, but both sides’ commanders were killed. Then after the Norman invasion Kempsford’s manor passed through a long succession of fighting nobles – most famously John of Gaunt, first Duke of Lancaster and progenitor of many English monarchs in the late Plantagenet violence-pit.

 

The tower of Kempsford’s St. Mary’s church overlooks the riverside fields, long in use for archery training.

The church is twelfth-century, but its tower was added by John of Gaunt in the 1390s and acquired a heap of dynastic emblems. Unlike the little church in Inglesford this one did get a thorough Victorian ‘restoration’ in the 1850s, so most of its present interior is recent.

Today Kempsford’s military story continues on account of the large RAF Fairford airbase to its north. Built in 1944 to provide air support for the Normandy landings, it remained in use during and after the Cold War as a base for United States Air Force heavy bombers, including for the 2003 war of aggression in Iraq. Exercises have continued there since, with four B-52s arriving just this February amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine.

 

On the south bank the detour continues to Castle Eaton, past this hostel for extremely small people.

 

 

Castle Eaton

Access to the river is properly regained at another ford village, Castle Eaton. No-one seems to know if the castle actually existed or where it was if it did, but there was supposedly a Norman fortified manor house near the site of the village’s present church.

 

Today this village joins the moral fortification of the human race against Vladimir Putin.

Castle Eaton has its own St. Mary’s church. It has Norman origins (if likewise ‘restored’ by the Victorians), but most of the village’s Cotswold-stone core seems to be eighteenth-century or so.

Castle Eaton’s Red Lion pub asserts to be the first (i.e. most upstream) pub on the Thames.

And from there, it is all open countryside as far as Cricklade.

 

Castle Eaton’s west outskirts. You can just glimpse its bridge, a ‘deplorable iron trough’ in the words of Thames explorer Fred Thacker in 1920, which replaced a locally-beloved timber construction twenty-seven years prior. Another explorer, Charles George Harper, was equally seething in his 1910 Thames Valley Villages: ‘We cannot frame to use language too strong for a crime so heinous against the picturesque’, committed on account of the ‘wicked ways of the Thames Conservancy’, that most ‘diligent destroyer of the beauty of the river’.

A random holiday campsite and bungalow park crops up outside the riverbend here, with a mysterious older chalet in its midst.

A small friend.

One of a cluster of ponds here that are almost certainly filled-in gravel pits – a herald of their vast constellation beyond Cricklade that now constitute the Cotswold Water Park.

If you somehow get a canoe out here, these stretches seem not quite as impenetrable as those down to Lechlade. But you would still have to contend with the thick submerged plants and rumours of monstrous boat-ramming fish.

 

It looks sedate enough, after a good week or two of dry weather. But flood conditions here after heavy rains must be another matter entirely.

Another light thicket.

Fields. Reeds. Swans.

 

There is extremely little settlement in reach of the river here. Most of these fields appear attached to some tiny farm clusters together labelled on the map as Water Eaton – presumably agrarian offshoots of Castle Eaton.

 

This one, for instance.

One runs out of things to say about this terrain. Not much further to go though.

Remember what it was like beyond the Thames Barrier?

The largest bit of Water Eaton. They appear to have electricity, at least.

Not the usual farm field crowd.

 

 

Cricklade

Church towers are about the only landmarks tall enough to alter the skyline up here. No surprise, then, as to the first sign of Cricklade that comes in view.

 

The four-pointed tower of St. Sampson’s Church, Cricklade, announces the final waypoint on this expedition.

Numerous wooden footbridges like this span the river on the Cricklade approach.

What’s in the pipes?

 

Just outside Cricklade, these reaches’ noisiest human intrusion by far comes soaring in. It is the A419 Cricklade Bypass, part of the Swindon-Cirencester dual carriageway put through over this concrete bridge in 1988.

 

An ancient road, here in use by that most modern of tyrannical regimes, Amazon.com.

For all its offence to the eyes and ears, this is only the latest incarnation of a far more ancient road: the Ermin Way, built by the Romans to link their forts in what is now Gloucestershire with their southern centre of Calleva Atrebatum (now Silchester). It is almost certainly to this route, with its crossing of the Thames about this site, that the settlement of Cricklade owes its existence.

 

The outskirts of Cricklade, the ‘first town on the Thames’. Under the bridge at left arrives the River Key, one of the many tiny tributaries that converge around this town.

Here too is Cricklade’s ‘Millennium Wood’, planted by its residents to mark the year 2000.

It is also here that the topmost Thames’s mess of fragmented channels merge into the relative stability of the river we have followed thus far. Cricklade sits on a hill surrounded by the low-lying floodplain meadows where this takes place, whence one theory concerning its name: ‘rocky passage’, from Old Welsh creic for ‘rock’.

 

As with Lechlade, Cricklade has an old core centred around its high street, and a sprawl of newer (post-WWII) residential housing to its east, west and south, likely driven by the nearby airbases and Cotswold tourism.

The river at Cricklade Town Bridge, setting off on its long downstream journey. This limestone bridge at the head of the high street dates only to 1854; the historic and strategic Ermin Way ford would have been closer to the present A419 crossing.

While Lechlade, on the navigable river, built its future in trade and commerce, Cricklade went down a more military path on this Ermin Way crossing of oft-drenched water meadows on the northern Wessex frontier. Established as one of King Alfred’s new burhs or fortified towns in the 880s, it grew to a rectilinear road plan enclosed in a system of defensive ramparts, walls and ditches, much like Wallingford.

 

Cricklade high street. The fortified town’s grid-like layout and square-shaped ramparts are still very apparent on present-day satellite images.

The security concern of the time was the Danish Vikings, who as per their treaty with Alfred had come to control most of what is now eastern England, including the former Mercian kingdom to the north. But with each passing generation Cricklade’s fortifications would be reduced, repurposed or upgraded to ward off a succession of new threats as the messy proto-Englands of this age gave way to each other. The defences were refurbished by Alfred’s successors, kings of a prospective Anglo-Saxon England, but then torn down in the early eleventh century by Cnut, king of a Scandinavian England unified with Denmark and Norway. Then came a Norman England, and by Matilda’s and Stephen’s nasty little twelfth-century conflict Cricklade’s defences were up and running again, with evidence of one of Matilda’s supporters even building a temporary castle here.

 

Beneath these changes of hands and of Englands, Cricklade emerged as a consistent settlement. Its strategic value gained it royal attention, its own mint for a while, and eventually privileged tax breaks and rights to hold markets and fairs. So despite its militarised condition medieval Cricklade seems to have picked up quite a pleasant reputation, with its contemporary description by William of Dover (Matilda’s friend), ‘In Loco Delicioso’ – Latin for ‘in a delightful place’ – now the town motto.

 

Cricklade’s great landmark is St. Sampson’s church, a monumental Norman heap of stone pinnacles many times more massive than you’d think it has any right to be. The dedication to Sampson – properly Samson of Dol, a Welsh or Cornish priest and founding missionary to Brittany – is extremely rare in England.

The church appeared in the tenth or eleventh centuries, but the not exactly modest tower, which took a century to build, was completed in the 1550s.

And here it is from the inside, with red hatch accessible only to people with the wealth to afford jetpacks.

Cricklade’s town cross is here too, having been moved to the churchyard from the central crossroads in the 1810s when it was deemed a traffic obstruction.

Cricklade’s other church, St. Mary’s, probably originally an offshoot of St. Sampson’s, stands at the north end of the high street beside the river and Anglo-Saxon rampart. In 1981 it was declared redundant by the Protestant Church of England and returned to the Catholics after centuries of persecution.

The loco delicioso did not last long. The bubonic plague did its usual here, as did the civil wars, which, though sparing Cricklade most of the fighting, took a heavy indirect toll through market closures, impoverishment, disease and dislocation. Though it recovered from these hits and gradually grew on, by the nineteenth century its repute had practically inverted. Its most abiding damnation came from the pen of journalist and anti-corruption campaigner William Cobbett, who lambasted Cricklade as a ‘villainous hole...certainly a more rascally place I never set my eyes on.’ Repulsed by the poverty-stricken pile of mud, flies, stenches and political rottenness into which this town had apparently descended, he seems to have run out of words: ‘this Wiltshire is a horrible county’.

 

The Vale Hotel, formerly the White Horse Inn and likely a turnpike posting house before that, stands at Cricklade’s (and the old burh’s) central crossroads. The old town cross in the churchyard used to stand on this site; the current red and black clock thing replaced it in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee.

Some more from Cobbett: ‘The labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig...In my whole life I never saw human wretchedness equal to this’.

Cricklade has since worked hard to restore the cleanliness of its image. This is a glimpse of some of its Snake’s Head Fritillaries (Fritillaria meleagris), a lily with a striking chequered pattern. These are now extremely rare in this country; its vast majority flower on Cricklade’s northern water meadows.

Cricklade appears to have somewhat recovered, and today once more carries a proud aesthetic consciousness: a town of flowers, fresh breezes, architectural heritage, Cotswold tourism, and of course, that singular status of the highest town on the Thames. And yet, like Lechlade and the remotest fields and hamlets in between, it remains connected to the distresses of its wider country and planet. Present-day England sinks deep in a new period of poverty-creation in which years of austerity, destruction to the welfare system, Brexit staff shortages and supply chain disruptions, and the abysmal COVID-19 response, now combine with crises in energy and costs of living to create a perfect storm of hunger, homelessness, cold, disease and mental breakdown – even before the shadow of Russian atrocities in Ukraine and the vengeful return of crazed Cold War geopolitics.

 

Of all the levels of the Thames, one might suppose that this one, here at its height of heights, is as good a place as any to get away from it all. But there is no getting away – no more now, in this globalised age, than in these idyllic-looking headwaters’ turbulent past of battles and sackings, plagues and prejudices, poverty and corruption. No reason, either, that the hells unleashed on Kharkiv or Mariupol could not happen here one day, and soon, whether at foreign hands or English ones. The horror is a horror of all humankind; any emergence from it, the responsibility of humans everywhere.

 

Only one character in this story knows of this world in a state where such things did not have to happen. It is the one we have followed all along – followed all the way up here to where, having assembled its water, it takes this passage, these lades, out to a world gone mad.

 

It might be too much to hope that taking them in the other direction could bring us outside it: to a different time, a different place, a different world.

 

Upstream from Cricklade Town Bridge, towards the Thames’s springs.

But we’ve come this far. Might as well find out.