There is no straightforward way to handle this one. Most English people know of Eton College, if more through its mythos than the thing itself. And one does not simply know Eton College. Generally speaking, to know Eton College is to either adore it or to resent it to every monied brick in its crenellations.

Why, indeed, does a School need crenellations?

Perhaps to call it a school is misleading. It is a school, of course – the most infamously exclusive in England (and needless to say, one of the most expensive) – but only in the first instance. In the ways that matter it is so much more.

What we have here is an England. Eton College is an embodiment of this country, or rather of a specific vision of it which, though only a tiny minority of its population ever passes through its doors, wreaks so reekingly powerful an impact on the majority that it needs no introduction. A vision so storied, so intractable, that to its detractors, and there are many, Eton is no less than the principal sausage-factory of England’s white, male, upper-caste forces of destruction and the ultimate locus of fault for the ruin of their land.

Thus while physical Eton nests safe and snug in the Thames Valley, imaginary Eton is a castle under permanent siege. And behind its walls, as much as anywhere else in the world, there is no hard border between reality and imagination. That, perhaps, explains the crenellations.

Is it fair to lay guilt for so supreme a crime at the gates of one mere school? The real significance of the condemnation of Eton in these terms is perhaps less literal, more mythic: a permanent counter-mythology which, in crashing upon the school’s mythology, becomes half the dialectic nest of narrative power which sustains the legend of Eton. But in factual terms the case is not without grounds. To say nothing of its graduates’ perpetual dominance in media, commerce, religion and the military, the twenty prime ministers it has manufactured include both the individual who instigated the Brexit crisis for no reason, David Cameron, and the one who now consummates its descent into the abyss of authoritarian nationalism, Boris Johnson. This entire saga can and has been read as the continuation of a tussle between these two bully-boys which started in Eton’s playgrounds: rollicking, soaked in seven varieties of bodily fluids, now spilt out to nation-wrecking scale. And then, goes this telling, once the country’s breaking is complete, the lives of everyone in it laid waste, and their chisel lodged securely in their mortal wound to the post-World War II European peace settlement, these Etonian man-boys will bear none of the consequences but march away across a burning horizon, underpants overflowing with multiple multimillion-pound incomes for doing nothing while they slap each other’s backs, chortling at what a fun game it all was – and really believing it.

The game. Here and in the wider English public-school universe, this seems to be the operating principle, the nexus to which everything returns. The world is your game, and this is how you play it. If that means the Boris and Dave Show is Eton’s doing, how often has the same been the case for the political currents that shaped England and Britain in the past? Conspiracy theories are dangerous and should not be mistaken for serious consideration. But the distance between reasonable suspicions on the one hand, and the mythic image of this place as the puppeteers’ tower behind so many of England’s imperial misdeeds and perennial structures of oppression on the other, is not great enough to satisfy scrutiny.

What shall we do with it? There is no getting around it, because cross the bridge from Windsorand there it is, lording upon the northern bank where it secretes a power uniquely its own. A power not jewel-studded or glintingly solid like the stone towers of royalty it faces across the river, yet nonetheless every bit its equal and in practical terms quite possibly its superior. Its crown is made of different material: subtler, less tangible, wafting and oozing and sausaging rather than towering, all the more challenging to pin down for how it is in that very swirl of myths and symbols, ever elusive to those they are designed to ward away, that is concealed the source of Eton’s power.

Maybe so. But it so happens we’re playing a larger game here and Eton is in the way. Let’s devour some sausages.

Start:Windsor Bridge (nearest stations: Windsor and Eton Riverside; Windsor and Eton Central)

End:Maidenhead Bridge (nearest station: Maidenhead)

Length: 10.5km/6.5 miles

Location: Berkshire – Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead; Buckinghamshire – South Bucks

Topics: Eton College, Eton’s backyard, Boveney and St. Mary Magdalene’s Church (which is special), vampires (Oakley Court) and cannibals (Monkey Island, Headpile Eyot), Bray, Maidenhead

Though synonymous with the school these days, the actual settlement of Eton pre-dates it by some centuries. Its origins are unclear, but the etymology is as plain as they come – Old English ēa (river) or ēg(island), and tūn (farmstead/estate/settlement), hence ‘town by the river/on an island’ – and its growth, for what there was of it, came for no more glamorous reason than its service to the London-to-Windsor road in an age when most traffic would have gone by river anyway.

Then the school, or rather the phenomenon, materialised. The hamlet of Eton was eaten. It serves the school now.

Penetrate the high street and you come to the school complex proper, which you know at once is more than a school because its ‘chapel’ alone looks like something a cyborg Pope would be happy to sleep in or launch ICBMs out of the ceiling.

Paradoxically, Eton College is unique because it is one of a set: an elite club of independent schools, originally seven in total, known to the English as public schools. The name is confusing because they are not public but as private as a school can possibly be, perched at the pinnacle of the English school system and traditionally only opening their gates for male children from the richest, most landed and/or politically-connected families in the country (indeed, till 1990 Eton graduates could register their sons at birth). The reason for the misleading name is a very English historical irony which should become clear in a minute.

Eton and the other public schools have shared histories. Typically these are imagined as fierce rivalries, especially on the sports fields, but in fact have more of a basis in cooperative action to secure their shared interest in a permanent hold on the apex of the English social pyramid. At the same time, each school has grown into a world of its own with a culture, set of linguistic dialects and legend whose nuances are distinct from the others. Eton is therefore not Winchester, Harrow or Westminster, to name a few of its accomplices-disguised-as-rivals, yet the path its story has carved through England’s parallels and regularly intersects theirs.

To really sense their impact on the English story, and indeed the world’s, we must draw back further still till we can to take in the whole new mythic archetype their tradition produced, first in English literature, and now in a worldwide cultural consciousness. The genre of the special school, to call it no more than that, broke into popularity with Thomas Hughes’s semi-autobiographical Tom Brown’s School Days in 1857, set at another of the original seven, Rugby. A century and a half’s development expanded it into English literary settings like Greyfriars, Brookfield, St. Trinian’s, and the Assassins’ Guild of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, each fictional but drawing heavily on the public schools’ idiosyncrasies, particularly the violent ones – authoritarian teachers who beat pupils with canes, entitled children smashing and rioting out of control, the cult of sports, the normalised physical and sexual abuse – and by drinking from the legends of the real public schools, so fed those legends in turn.

From there it was only a short stretch till the imaginary schools got literal worlds of their own, set apart from the ordinary population no longer by mere social barriers but magical or metaphysical ones too. The example to end all examples is of course the Hogwarts wizarding school of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, but as is often the case, what the Japanese have done with the tradition is particularly instructive. Tom Brown’s School Days was astonishingly popular during the reforms of the Meiji period (1868-1912), when it was translated and edited as an English textbook. A century later Japanese video games have produced one of the special school’s most masterful expressions of all: the significance of the Garreg Mach Officers’ Academy in Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) will be viscerally known to anyone familiar with this masterpiece in which you play as a professor instructing the children of the nobilities of that world’s three great powers in the magical and military arts, only to later get caught up in their brutal world war against one another in which that learning ends up tragically applied. By participating in this same tradition – an exclusive school that only takes rich and connected people (perhaps with a few token commoners), but disgorges its calamitous political consequences onto everybody – Garreg Mach is linked by a long and crooked but unbroken line across space and time to Eton and the English political breakdown.

Where did it come from? To answer that requires a trip back a few hundred years to when England could barely be called a nation. An overwhelmingly agricultural country in which most people were feudally-impoverished serfs, it had little in the way of shared identity, mass literacy or media, and so no formal public(note the word) education system for the Muggles. Centres of learning were typically private, controlled by elite bodies which trained selected children in knowledge and skills specific to their interests. That meant the Church above all, but also nobles and powerful merchant guilds like the City of London livery companies.

It was to counteract this that the public schools emerged. They were typically founded by charities to offer education to poor and underprivileged local children, regardless of socio-economic status or religious background. They were often the personal projects of philanthropists who were either deeply devout or minded to leave the world a constructive legacy – Lawrence Sheriff at Rugby, John Lyon at Harrow – and so were motivated not by profit but the moral and civic betterment of society. Hence public schools, open to anyone, in contrast to the gated private establishments of the church and guilds.

And there is their existential irony. Between then and now, they flipped one hundred and eighty degrees. Now the public schools are this nation’s most fortified engines of the very inheritance of privilege, writ so much vaster by industrial capitalism, that they were birthed to challenge in the first place.

Their successful take-off owed much to the support of England’s kings and queens, especially after this country’s excruciating Reformation experience when the Protestant monarchs saw in these schools a means to rebuild a stable religious framework. They funded them, took active roles in setting them up, and in some cases founded them themselves. That was the case at Eton, but with a certain difference: it was the pet project not of a king trying to put his country back together, but one watching helplessly as it fell apart.

Henry VI of Lancaster (1421-71), one of the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, was big on education. Thoroughly educated himself and possessing a love of reading, this shy and gentle king was keen to pass on its rewards by building schools and universities. Sadly history – or rather the English – had a different legacy in mind for him. What he didn’t like was the macho physical stuff of knighthood and warmongering, and this left him vulnerable in an age of one of England’s worst constitutional breakdowns: its final defeat in the Hundred Years’ War with the French, and the consequent bloodthirsty power struggle of the Wars of the Roses that finished the Plantagenets for good. This storm of cutthroat nobles and barbarous political designs happened to crash down on perhaps the one English king who was cognitively least suited to deal with it. Wishing only to be left alone with his books, it eventually drove him into a mental breakdown from which he never really recovered, whereupon his enemies imprisoned him in the Tower of London then almost certainly murdered him. Predictably, because of his mental health problems and inability to be a model of toxic masculinity, English culture has not endeared itself in its portrayals of him.

If the English ruling class’s own mental breakdown devoured most of Henry VI’s accomplishments then Eton was the one great exception, a lasting gift they probably ought to have done better with. He founded the college next door to Windsor in the 1440s, with the idea that it would train seventy poor children, for free, before funnelling them on to another new college he created at Cambridge University. To this end he endowed it with lavish funding, extensive land, and even some precious holy relics, a sure sign of his personal investment in this project. Much of this bequest was then taken off it by Henry’s nemesis and deposer, Edward IV of York, and it barely survived with admittedly scaled-down ambitions (which is why it only has half the “chapel”).

In time however the intake was expanded. Alongside those seventy king’s scholars, extra pupils were admitted so long as they paid fees, thus mainly drawing in children of the nobility. They resided in the boarding-houses that began to agglomerate around the school complex in Eton village, hence their name of Oppidans, from the Latin oppidum for ‘town’. Here was the seed whose eventual shoots would twist the nature of the school upside down. The more fees the Oppidans brought in, the greater grew the temptation for profit. By the eighteenth century there were more than a hundred of them. Headmaster after headmaster fertilised this plant with excuses and sophisms to persuade critics – or perhaps themselves – that this did not compromise the original mission. By the time its vines strangled that mission, few remembered it enough to notice.

Additionally, this being an intensely gendered country, all these children – scholars and Oppidans – were boys. This would be true of the intake of the other public schools as they appeared over the following century, and at many of them, including this one, it still is today. It is a good example indeed of the tenacity of inherited structural oppression, because even half a millennium down the line the effect is to still shut girls out of the elite tier of English education while isolating the pubescent boys within from female contact, thus stewing them in a silo of artificial masculinity.

As the Oppidans were questionable to Eton’s mission, much ritual initially distinguished them from the king’s scholars. Though this distinction would fade, the growth of such odd rituals, ceremonies, institutions and linguistic habits went hand in hand with the college’s development as a school, coalescing into the archaic subcultural identity which now endures as the spine of the Etonian mythos. The headmaster of Eton was called the Provost, teachers were beaks, and senior pupils appointed to supervise the others were Preposterous Ones – sorry, praeposters. Life under this regime was harsh. The regimented 5am-to-8pm schedule was strictly enforced, and all teaching and conversation held in Latin lest one be thrashed by the preposterouses. There was only one hour of play per day and two three-week holidays a year. Violent punishment was administered not only by the staff but by selected pupils, and so a hierarchical culture emerged, a kind of class system within a class system for this state-within-a-state under supreme and mystical headmasterly autocracy. From this emerged customs such as the notorious fagging, by which a junior pupil was attached to as senior one as his personal servant and occasional punching bag and/or sex toy – a perfect instruction in English power relationships whether in a feudal, Victorian or Boris flavour. While fagging took place in almost all the public schools till it fell out of fashion in the 1970s, a more uniquely Etonian creation was the Pop society, which was formed in 1811 as a debating club but became a glamorous and extremely selective elite-of-the-elite with sweeping privileges and disciplinary powers (one reading of the Boris and Dave Show is that Boris got in but David did not). The black-and-white-penguin uniform with top hat, on the other hand, only appeared in the late nineteenth century.

Accompanying this grew the cult of sports, whose importance in the public school landscape cannot be overstated. Over the centuries Eton developed vast acres of land here and elsewhere as playing fields, whereupon sports were played for not so much fitness as the nigh-spiritual inculcation of a muscular ruling-class ethos. Whether in cricket, rowing and boxing or more esoteric exercises – Eton fives, the Eton wall game, and its own code of football – it seems the idea was that learning to play the game on the sports field was analogous to then going off to play the game in the ministries, boardrooms, courtrooms, battlefields and colonial administrations. The will to win at all costs on the sports field, no matter how many rules you broke or children you trampled, thus prepared you to champion a triumphant imperial vision of Englishness itself, a rearrangement of the world forged in the sweat and blood of exactly the entitled, ruthless masculinist physicality which drove the school’s founder mad then murdered him (which might explain why Boris did this).

Eton reached its zenith in the late eighteenth century under the reign of King George III, who spent a lot of his time at Windsor Castle, regularly crossed the river to talk with its teachers and pupils, and built himself a lasting place of admiration within the annals of the school. But in the following decades it lapsed into a crisis, shared in part with the other public schools, as a new level of scrutiny fell on its indiscipline, crumbling living conditions, narrow classical curriculum, inadequate food, and the general sense that as a phenomenon it was out of control. Eventually the complaints gathered enough momentum for the government to set up the Clarendon Commission of 1861, a seminal moment in the story of the public schools. The short of it is that a panel composed entirely of those schools’ former pupils was sent to pretend to investigate them, which after a show of smug headmasters lying and dissembling their way through its interrogations, produced a 2,000-page report praising these schools to the heavens for their service to the English class system. The upshot was the 1868 Public Schools Act, a formal and legal guarantee of these schools’ permanent independence outside royal, church or government control. Born as a bunch of charity organisations set up to offer knowledge and skills to the children of poor families, some long course of cultural and institutional apoptosis had corroded those functions away. What remained performed better as their very opposite: exquisitively-shaped incubators of white male ruling-class English meat, now invincibly installed at the top of the education system to funnel those sausages, generation after generation, into dominant positions in every national power structure.

With this formal celebration of its privileged position, the shackles were off – Eton and the other schools could practically do whatever they wanted. It improved its teaching standards and student accommodation and drastically widened its curriculum. By the 1890s it was taking over one thousand pupils, not much less than the number today. In the century that followed it was forced to adapt to profounder challenges as the English imperial dream, and with it the prestige of pompous authoritarian class structures, collapsed in the bloodbaths of two world wars, colonial struggles for independence and the feats of English socialism, altogether threatening the archaic Eton chimera with a new vision, a world of sense and equality, in which it looked nervously out of place. And yet, the deeper authoritarian hierarchicalism and violent prejudices of English society never truly went away and today have re-asserted themselves with a vengeance, and somewhere in the midst of the storm of flying fluids that generates them is Eton College, which may or may not be as responsible as the mythology suggests but certainly has questions to answer for the proverbial food poisoning its chunkiest and most dubiously-composed meat products have inflicted on its nation.

Is that fair? In honesty I cannot state with confidence how much of this is a proper reflection of Eton’s history and how much is myth, whether woven by the school itself or those attempting to peer over its battlements. Every person whose journey has passed through this school, be they its triumphs or its casualties, will have their own version to tell. But in the special school, to fully disentangle fact from fiction is impossible – not only because the physical and cultural walls it puts up by nature are impenetrable to strangers, but because that inscrutable mystique is so essential to what it is. A vision of the English nation is crystallised in this one, and it is an open question whether Eton has re-moulded the real England to serve that vision, or whether Eton itself, founded by a most un-Etonian king to offer free education to poor people, was eaten by the real England.

Let’s move on on a final critical note: that not everyone in such a world of privilege benefits from it. Just as many people might feel it’d be great to be king, there are many others who don't. But the “privilege” of hereditary monarchy doesn’t care who it lands on. It has made horrible casualties out of people like Henry VI for whom its gift was a curse, and likewise Homo etonis is not a model of the human being that tastes good to everybody. For every strutting Boris and Dave, how many gentler, humaner little boys have been traumatised for life by the crueller customs and noxious competitive masculinities of Eton and the other public schools? It is true that the scholarly standards and opportunities of these schools can fantastically equip your mind, but they also leave a permanent mark on you which changes your interactions with others, not least in an austerity-shattered age of corporate serfdom in which people are punished for thinking. This can be refreshing for a Boris who considers ordinary people beneath him anyway, but like Harry Potter's scar or Fire Emblem's Crests, it can just as easily be a burden, an alienation from the rest of the world too vast and intangible to be bridged by mutual understanding. Perhaps the number of old Etonians who find themselves hesitant, almost embarrassed, to reveal what school they went to when asked is no surprise.

Yes – I went to one of these schools too. Obviously not this one. The feelings are complex, the pain deep and sharp. The gifts have been great (perhaps to some extent set me up for writings like these) but emotionally and relationally the curse has cut unbearably deep. Had I a clue about all this back then, would I have gone there? In honesty, I don’t know. Too soon to say.

Enough. We press on.

Beyond, the Thames begins to sustain a sense of rurality. But this is still Etonian territory, so face does not necessarily reflect character. The north bank is studded with the college’s satellite hamlets, commons and farms, interposed by the odd old manor house here and there. By far the boldest stamp of the school’s supremacy is obvious on the map: the two-kilometre-long artificial lake which it has carved out of the land for its watersports.

This hinterland of the school’s state-within-a-state starts right outside the Eton settlement with the Brocas meadow. The name is Norman, from the aristocratic family who held this land in the shadow of Windsor Castle in thirteenth-century pre-college days. Nowadays the castle serves as a piece of romantic backdrop for the picnics and funfairs the locals perpetrate here.