THAMES: 20) It Turns Round in a Circle

Thames Head, they’ve called these meadows since time immemorial. Here, they say, the river is born, in dandelion carpets beneath a broad Cotswold sky.

 

Folk reckoning was buttressed over the centuries by journalists’ and travellers’ articles, scholarly opinion, and eventually by formal recognition from the Ordnance Survey and Thames Conservancy. On account of the last a marker stone now stands in these fields, officially recognising its base as the source of the River Thames.

 

But is it?

One of the river’s many headwater channels runs through the village of Ashton Keynes. It claims this channel as the true river. But who can say for sure?

Cricklade’s North Meadow, putting on its annual display of snake’s head fritillaries.

Above Cricklade the river breaks into a maze of headwaters and ceases to exist in the singular. These waterways’ differences in length, depth and flow are trivial now, and they come and go with the seasons, making any attempt to designate one or another as the true or main Thames arbitrary. However, if you follow one of these channels – officially a tributary, the Churn – you will come to a spot further north called Seven Springs, where a different marker stone, backed up by a notice from the local council, identifies that site, ‘despite the controversy over the years’, as the ultimate source of the river.

 

There’s a problem here. It’s a sensitive one. This is the English’s principal river. It's fed and watered them, inspired them, flooded them, borne them in and out on their migrations, their trades, their wars, their nation-building dreams, their industrial and imperial madnesses – but where, in the first place, does it come from?

 

Clearly this dispute had all the ingredients for violent upheaval across these restive western provinces, and in 1937 it made it into parliament. The representative for Stroud, a Mr. Perkins, whose constituency included Seven Springs, insisted to the Agriculture Minister that Seven Springs was in fact the ‘correct’ source on the grounds that it was fourteen miles further from the estuary than Thames Head, as well as twice its height above sea level. The next Ordnance Survey map, he argued, would do well to mark it accordingly.

 

This would indeed have reflected established geographic practice for reckoning a river’s source, while not incidentally making the Thames longer than the Severn. But the pertinent fact wasn’t one of distances or elevations. Rather it was that Mr. Morrison, the Agriculture Minister, just happened to be the MP for Cirencester whose territory included Thames Head. And so he replied: ‘I understand that it is not an invariable rule...to regard as the source...the source of the tributary most distant from its estuary’. Further challenged, to laughter, that Thames Head also periodically dries up (likewise true), he simply shut the matter down: ‘I am aware of these considerations, but they do not alter my view, as confirmed, that the River Thames rises in my constituency and not in that of my honourable friend.’

 

As so often in this world, it seems the question of the source is a question not of truth, but of power.

 

In that connection, let the statement of this field and sky offer some strength, however small, to whoever needs it right now.

What says the river itself?

 

Well, the reality of rivers is that they don’t gush from a single point. They accumulate, diverse and disparate, all the way down their drainage basins. For a few seconds you are a source too, whenever in the course of a walk like this you spill your flask or pee in the bushes. Then it flows into the sea, rises as cloud, and falls as rain to begin the journey all over again.

 

In which case, perhaps the nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Huxley, in an 1869 geography lecture, put it best:

 

The source of the Thames comes from nowhere; it turns round in a circle.

 

Perhaps much else does too – but not this journey. 250 kilometres and two and a half years from the ‘cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile and death’ of the estuary, as Marlow in Heart of Darkness had it – and finding this still quite a fair description all the way up – we attain the edge-of-the-world sunlit slopes where the water’s trail is lost. And because this expedition (or perhaps thankfully, this text) has to end somewhere, let it take as its destination, arbitrarily of course, the place where centuries’ weight in custom marks, if not the One True Source, then the human commemoration of those water molecules’ reunion, there and everywhere, into that party which, in its journey together, has come to be known as the river – the Dark River – the Thames.

 

The river upstream from Cricklade’s Town Bridge, which helpfully labels it right where the name starts to lose stable meaning.

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

End: Thames Head (nearest station: Kemble)

Length: 19.7km/12.25 miles

Location: Wiltshire – Wiltshire; Gloucestershire – Cotswold

 

Topics: Cricklade North Meadow, the Cotswold Water Park, Ashton Keynes, Somerford Keynes, Ewen, Kemble, Thames Head and the Source

 

 

 

Cricklade North Meadow

Above the first (or last) town on the Thames (as Cricklade styles itself), the Thames, the Churn, and a network of smaller braids have created a patchwork of seasonal flood meadows. The largest of these is Cricklade’s natural highlight: North Meadow, a common hay meadow whose traditional management practices have made it an extraordinarily diverse national nature reserve.

 

Smaller meadows buffer the main North Meadow as well as the housing along Cricklade’s northern flank.

The houses follow what was originally the north wall of the Cricklade Anglo-Saxon burh. Further west you have these, part of its twentieth-century residential expansion.

As is in evidence here, Cricklade’s fortified settlement has long been surrounded by agriculture.

 

Horses are attended to at this small riverside farm.

The weir on this site apparently used to belong to Cricklade’s West Mill, till it was demolished in the 1920s or 30s by the Thames Conservancy. Its replacement appears to be an Environment Agency gauging weir.

North Meadow.

North Meadow operates under the Lammas land system: hay is planted in February and harvested around Lammas Day (traditionally August 12th), after which the meadow is kept open as a common flood-pasture for grazing animals through the remaining half of the year. Over eight centuries this cycle, still administered by Cricklade’s ancestral manorial court system (the Court Leet) with more recent support from Natural England, has turned this meadow into one of the biologically richest grasslands in the country. Its ecosystem harbours over 250 species of wild plant, but one in particular stands as Cricklade’s special symbol.

 

One with whose peak flowering this walk just happens to coincide, producing a breathtaking final display to see out this journey.

 

The snake’s head fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris, used to grow widespread in this country till centuries of meadow clearances for agriculture and over-collection for markets and flower shows drove its wild population to the brink. Now protected by law, Cricklade’s North Meadow happens to be this flower’s main surviving stronghold; the fritillaries here are thought to make up some 80% of those remaining in England.

 

Most of the fritillary flowers are purple, but white ones are on the increase.

People used to pick these freely, but it’s now prohibited. The meadow has sustained damage from trampling, as well as from dogs disturbing ground-nesting birds and leaving deposits which pollute the soil with phosphorus. There are now severe penalties for even leaving the footpaths.

Hard as it might be to believe, this little stream is the Thames.

Supposedly this bridge used to carry a small canal, a branch of the Thames and Severn Canal now repurposed as a public bridleway.

If you’re here in good season you’ll want to take your time in North Meadow, so make sure to factor it into your walking plans.

 

Don’t forget the plentiful non-fritillary species either. The rich plant life supports thriving communities of insects, reptiles and birds.

You can check this webpage for live updates on the fritillary situation courtesy of Cricklade Court Leet.

Then there’s a little more farmland to cross.

 

Fortunately there are nuuo.

Like this.

This region is not actually quite as remote as the sweeping peripheries from here to the Oxford Basin. The invisible presence here is Cirencester: a market town north up the Churn (whence Ciren) that was the Iron Age capital of the Dobunni people, before their Roman allies fortified and developed it as Corinium Dobunnorum, the second-largest city in Roman Britain. Later re-emerging as a rich Cotswold wool town, it is now the effective capital of the Cotswold Hills and has dragged a constellation of high-prestige agriculture, trade and tourism into an orbital zone which sweeps across the Thames’s springs.

 

This bridge used to carry a railway from Cirencester to Swindon, a large railway junction town down in Wiltshire.

The railway lasted till the 1960s, when it fell victim to the Beeching Axe. Its noticeably straight embankment survives as this riverside footpath.

At length the river curls around the tiny hamlet of Hailstone Hill, an outpost of Cricklade – and then is ambushed by a most audacious geographical rearrangement.

 

This area is home to a large population of great and blue tits. They like to wait till you have your camera exactly ready then fly off at the last second.

 

Cotswold Water Park (East)

The Cotswold Hills are renowned for their yellow mid-Jurassic limestone, about 150 million years old and much in favour as a local building material. But in low-lying valleys like the Thames’s, a more recent half-million years of Ice Age glacial melts have carpeted this rock in huge deposits of gravelly debris. Over a still more recent fifty years, industrial-scale quarrying for this gravel to make concrete has carved this landscape to pieces: gouging out pits, ripping apart hedgerows and waterways, and throwing the water table into upheaval right here amidst the river’s ancestral springs.

 

As they deplete the old pits and move on to new ones, they leave the river’s channels to fill them in. The outcome is a sprawling mosaic of some 150 artificial lakes, and increasing – which, as though it makes it all okay, have together been re-imagined into the Cotswold Water Park.

 

The first glimpse of this handiwork is the Cleveland Lakes, which make up the southeastern-most marl lake cluster. They encompass one of the Water Park’s several waterfowl-rich nature reserves.

This atmospheric old farm bridge retires on the lakes’ southern perimeter.

The Cotswold Water Park now sprawls over a hundred square kilometres and incorporates a matching sprawl of human activity. Large swathes have emerged as thriving wildlife sites and received protection as nature reserves or Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), but the smiling face of the thing is recreational: a middle-class wonderland of sailing, fishing, birdwatching, watersports and holiday cottage retreats.

 

Camping and boating on the Cleveland Lakes. The Water Park was previously run by a company, but it went defunct in 2012 when its chief executive was imprisoned for massive fraud after pocketing some £700,000 at the Water Park’s expense. It’s now overseen by a coalition of registered charity trusts.

Water-skating in action, complete with ramp for high-decibel somersaulting. Precious contact point between humans and nature? Or shocking desecration of the Thames’s hallowed spawning grounds? The debate goes on.

Across the lake, a gravel-hungry yellow monster prowls through the trees.

The river somehow keeps its identity as it threads between the lakes, many of which it feeds through underground culverts.

One great crested grebe at the very beginning of this journey, and another here at its end.

Eventually the river breaks from this latter-day lakeland, and trickles round its southern rim to skirt the largely vanished hamlet of Waterhay.

 

Further ahead the river joins the Swill Brook, which comes in from the west. Officially a tributary, the Swill Brook is actually larger than the designated Thames, most likely a result of the gravel mining. It’s a reminder of the river’s distributed sources and how they change over time.

Nuuo.

This too might have been a headwater channel till the quarrying ruined its flow.

From here the trail leaves the river to cut between two more lakes, before rejoining it in the village of Ashton Keynes.

 

Even where they haven’t quarried, the gravelly terrain is in evidence.

This lake and its partner appear to be part of the nature reserve, hence the absence of touristy troublemaking.

A fairly uncommon orange tip butterfly.

 

Ashton Keynes

This village is the last to make immediate contact with the river. Ashton Keynes sits on two main channels and multiple smaller ones, of which the one that runs through its middle, it claims, is the main Thames. If we accept that, it gives the village a surprising distinction: the only settlement, barring London (too wrong to count), to stand astride the Thames on both banks.

 

Young woods and sports fields on Ashton Keynes’s southern approach.

The sports fields are lively on this warm spring weekend.

For a small Cotswold village it has a fearsome militia that will visit you at night if you dispute the matter of which channel is the proper Thames.

The bluebells are out in force today.

Settlement at Ashton Keynes is ancient, with much archaeological evidence uncovered by the gravel digging. Ashton is thought to have indicated a place where ash trees grew, and is the more ancestral part of the village’s double-barrelled name. It gained the other when following the Norman conquest its manor fell under the control of the de Cahaignes family: a powerful dynasty which built a castle on the village’s north flank (whose earthworks remain), acquired widespread lands, and whose best-known output was a certain John Maynard Keynes, the characterful twentieth-century economist.

 

This channel that flows along Ashton Keynes’s high street is officially considered the main Thames. It’s probably safest not to challenge that claim too loud here.

They’ve even wheeled out the old man of the river to cement that claim, probably paying him to hit those who contest it with his shovel.

It’s a picturesque place, but its intercourse with the river’s web of channels makes it highly susceptible to flooding.

In recent decades the village has served as a node for both the gravel quarrying and Cotswold Water Park tourism. At right is what used to be one of its four market crosses; all four were smashed by the parliamentary Puritans during the civil wars.

By another ruined cross the river flows in from the northwest.

 

 

Cotswold Water Park (West)

Above Ashton Keynes, the infant river braves another cluster of Cotswold Water Park pit-lakes. This western zone is centred around a chunk of holiday homes, with its lakeshores comfortably done up for paid leisure-class recreations.

 

The river enters Ashton Keynes beneath this little mill sluice...

...behind which the blossoms from that tree there have backed up with extreme pinkness. Also, if you like fluffy pink things, click here to read a book about one.

It briefly takes on a canal-like appearance here, perhaps having been worked for the manor’s milling.

The next round of lakes begins.

If everything suddenly falls down, it’s because this fellow has pulled out the bit that kept it standing.

This side of the Water Park is jarring. The river threads between its lakes as before, but the sense is of a constant effort to segregate their worlds, as geographically nonsensical as that may seem. Wicker and wire fences, code-locked gates and private property signs abound, altogether suggesting that the capitalist classes begrudge the public right of way along the river and would like to make it absolutely clear that everything else in this landscape is for paying customers only.

They’ve even assembled wooden llama golems that will headbutt you if you cross into their lakeside amenities.

The gated entrance to what used to be the Lower Mill Farm, which fed the local animals when this area was still agricultural. It’s now the Lower Mill Estate of posh holiday accommodation.

Now pay up.

 

Somerford Keynes

Another ancient settlement stretches out along the Water Park’s northwest escape road. Somerford Keynes eventually became an appendage of the local Keynes domain. The more important part of its name, Somerford, suggests it was a summer fording point, back when the river was still consistently too high to wade across.

 

Somerford Keynes is small and largely residential.

It’s a bit of a diversion from the river, but well-positioned for a rest stop and some lunch at the friendly and recommendable The Bakers Arms pub.

Victorian “restoration” swept away much of the village’s All Saints Church’s historic features, but its oldest elements go back to the seventh century. Somerford Keynes first appears in writing at that time, as a land grant to the monastery at Malmesbury.

An extremely Cotswold structure.

Once an English national icon, red telephone boxes have gone into drastic decline with the rise of the mobile phone, and now only about 10,000 remain. Many have been repurposed as art installations, mini-libraries, or defibrillator boxes like this one.

The river glides down in parallel with Somerford Keynes to the west, through the suggestively-named Neigh Bridge Country Park.

 

Neigh Bridge Lake is the last of the Cotswold Water Park gravel-lakes. The name appears to indicate a bridge that was used in winter when the ‘summer ford’ was impassable.

The river is very shallow here, and regularly splashed in by dogs and small children.

Again, you are challenged to imagine that this is the same water that carved through the Chiltern chalk, drenched the southern marshlands, and still courses in raging bulk through both the reality and imagination of English metropolitan power.

Another glimpse of Somerford Keynes’s church, from across the farm fields of its former manor.

At last we are clear of the gravel-mining legacy. We are more or less there now. From here a soft stretch of farms and hamlets ease the Thames from its springs, whose aquifer spreads wide beneath this soil. As for where exactly it breaks the surface – well, that depends.

 

In dry periods it’s been known to trickle out around here near Neigh Bridge, leaving its upper course dry. On this particular day there’s mileage in it yet.

The water is not the only thing that’s recently emerged on these farms.

 

Old Mill Farm is part working sheep farm, part rental holiday cottages which offer interaction with the lambs as part of their charm.

There are definite advantages to doing this walk in spring.

A strange tranquility descends on these fields now. Amidst birdsong and the whoosh of a cool north wind, animals and structures alike line up to let you know you approach significant ground.

 

Ever narrower, ever shallower.

These are special calves – the final nuuo of the journey.

 

 

 

Ewen

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Ewen heralds the end, given its name supposedly indicates the source of a river. We’re not quite there yet though.

 

On and on and on and on...

This well-disguised gateway to the underworld is where you’ll respawn if you get killed between here and the source.

Ewen appears.

Ewen is another quintessential tiny Cotswold hamlet, almost entirely residential and with typical appeal for holiday getaways. It is significant as the former site of what was probably the highest mill on the Thames, before the gravel-mining drained the water table.

 

Ewen’s central T-junction.

Ewen’s other T-junction. Variety isn’t the main draw here.

Most of it looks rather like this.

This is an Angry Ear Vine, which crunches up its leaves as a sign of exasperation with the poor quality of English political discourse.

 

 

Kemble

From Ewen it’s only a short push on to the river’s highest settlement of all.

 

Yes, that’s the river on the left.

The houses of Kemble manifest across gloriously golden rapeseed fields.

Yellow joins the established greens and blues as the third colour of the Thames’s fountains.

Despite being the river’s highest settlement, Kemble makes trouble by actually being set back from it a kilometre or so, requiring a diversion unless you’re straggling there afterwards to leave via its train station.

Though not particularly large, Kemble punches above its weight by its proximity to both Cirencester, to the northeast up the Roman Fosse Way, and the Cotswold Airport to its west. Formerly a WWII-era RAF base, the latter was indeed known as Kemble Airport till they changed its name in 2009, no doubt in a deliberate assault on the village’s pride.

 

Kemble is predominantly residential, and bears a quiet history that goes back through Anglo-Saxon settlement to service to Roman traffic.

Kemble also breaks the pattern of these interior settlements by holding on to a working train station – on the London-Cheltenham main line at that, with regular services to Paddington within an hour. It was a key regional junction till its other lines fell to Beeching in the 1960s. The station is an original Brunel creation from 1845, complete with a little internal garden area.

The waiting room for the station’s invisible sky-platform, whose services connect the source of the Thames to other worlds.

Thames Head

Well, let’s suppose there is no “true” source; that the source is everywhere some of the time and nowhere all at once.

 

Let us say that this channel, which they’ve (mostly) decided is the “actual” Thames, is just one of many where its water begins (or repeats) that new (or old) stage of its journey as a liquid surface flow.

 

Is there at least a spot, then, where it emerges from the ground?

 

Even this is not so simple.

 

The first of three or four fields north of Kemble, any of which, on a given day, might be the active springs. The dry stream beneath this bridge is itself another tributary in wetter periods.

Into the next field, and here is its emergence: the source – or a source – for the moment, if not yesterday or tomorrow.

A helpful indicator of the water’s shallowness: approximately 0.1 Woofs.

In one sense – the immediate, the particular – this is the end. The water recedes to nothing here: goes to nowhere, comes from nowhere. This is the source.

 

Final sight of the water. Here it ends; here it begins; here it carries on.

On the other side of the trees, the channel is dry. But notice the stones that people have piled up here, as though to mark this spot as another regular source when wetter weather raises the groundwater.

Given this variability, it might be more fitting to consider all of these fields the source. And perhaps we have it easy; imagine how still more confounding the question is for rivers that come from marshes, lakes, or glaciers. Nonetheless, humans seem to enjoy reducing complex, chaotic realities to over-simplified imaginary absolute truths, so inevitably they’d put down an officious marker on a single spot as though to declare it The Source in all times and conditions.

 

By its arbitrary nature you might expect such a thing to be anticlimactic, if not some downright tacky tourist trap. But having come this far we might as well find it, at the highest place on these springs to be found frequently wet. It awaits in the next field, across one last major piece of history.

 

The A433, once upon a time known as the Fosse Way.

The Fosse Way is thought to have originated as a boundary: the outer frontier of the first phase of Roman rule following the emperor Claudius’s conquest of this island in 43 CE. It most likely started as a defensive ditch, or fossa in Latin. Then Roman-controlled territory expanded and the ditch turned into a road, connecting two key forts – Lincoln (then Lindum Colonia) in the northeast, and Exeter (then Isca Dumnoniorum) in the southwest – in a long diagonal all the way across the island.

 

Though now fragmented, most of it survives within the present-day road system, with parts easy to distinguish on maps for their striking straightness. The segment which here follows the A433 across the infant river was important in its own right, linking as it still does the pivotal Roman centres of Corinium Dobunnorum (Cirencester) and Aquae Sulis (Bath).

 

The final field, known as Trewsbury Mead, with the Fosse Way at right. The depression down the middle of the field is the currently-dry riverbed.

 

For an anti-climax this place is atmospheric. The growl of traffic on the A433 recedes beneath an oasis-like solitude of sweeping winds, creaking boughs, and daffodils springing as though from blessed ground.

 

Even without water, the river’s regular route through this grass is conspicuous.

This stone wall is said to have been built for easy passage by the river underneath.

‘It could be interesting to walk all the way along a river like that, couldn’t it?’

This exploration began late in 2019, amidst the still-ongoing turmoil of Brexit. In the course of the journey, England and this world have further staggered from devastating blows which took many by surprise, but were really escalations of the same malaises already dragging humankind back into its own historical river of catastrophes. They included the disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced a year-long interruption at this journey’s halfway point; and now, as another set of violent nativists take out their demented fantasies on the Ukrainians, humanity is left reeling from a new round of bloodthirsty atrocities and promises of nuclear annihilation.

 

It comes from nowhere; it turns round in a circle.

 

Lives, hopes and dreams, mown to oblivion for no reason at all. A love-capable lifeform, with the proven will and capacity to strain its senses to the very limits of time and space – crushed back to a fraction of its potential by the same shameful brutalities and senseless systems of belief and practice, which, though they shouldn't exist, should never have existed, have disembowelled every generation's best efforts to banish them.

 

It comes from nowhere; it turns round in a circle.

 

The final gate – and of course it’d be a gate to nowhere. Goodness knows what it’s doing here.

They probably wanted to put up arches, banners or pillars or something to mark the birth of their great river, but with austerity cutting them to the bone, this had to do.

It’s also been personally tumultuous. My expectation was never to get this far. Rather, while stranded in this country after a near-annihilation of my own in Japan, I got into a daze of wandering that at length, led to this river, this quiet presence in the background of my life since my earliest ill-fated involvements with this country.

 

To setting off up it, and seeing how far I could go.

 

That question, at least, finds its answer here.

 

The “official” source, as the Thames Conservancy and succession of hands that put these stones here would have it.

Want to walk all the way back?

The North Sea is that way.

I can’t pretend things have improved. True, these thirty months brought the completion of my most significant writings so far, as well as some of the most inspiring encounters I have known. But inseparably, they have also been a gauntlet of further traumatic disasters – all embittering, all exhausting, all harrowingly painful, and always, always on account of humans, whose ways I find as impossibly alien and twisted as ever.

 

It's beyond words now; beyond comprehension. This world shall never be my home. I set off up the Dark River in darkness, and now take leave of it in darkness.

 

It comes from nowhere; it turns round in a circle. 

 

But to the river – I pay tribute. It’s been as reliable a friend as any in this beleaguered world. Perhaps I owe my future to it, since, sixteen years ago now, driven into existential crisis by this society, saturated with agony and lost in an infinite desert of care, support or understanding, I could do none other than seek a final way out through its water – perhaps the very water that now cycles back beneath this soil – only to be sent back, through the shock of its cool embrace, with the flicker of a thought that perhaps, just perhaps, there was more I could yet do for this world.

 

If that was the Thames’s doing, then it’s a fitting honour to have got to know it in its entirety. So I part from it with this wish: that one day, it will have the pleasure to flow through a nation free at last from this abyssal cycle of poverty and corruption, lies and abuse; a nation setting off up a newfound path of honesty, responsibility and compassion, as befits the river’s ever-generous gifts to it. Would that these reflections of mine, from estuary to source – however partial, poor-sighted or plain exasperating – provide at least some small contribution to those who would make it so.

 

Chaobang, April 2022