The river rages. It has had enough.

An unsettled winter has broken on England in a sequence of devastating storms. The Severn watershed in the west of the country has borne the worst of it, but the Thames next door is also on the warpath. Even now the rear end of February’s onslaughts rampage down this valley of privilege with no concern for where the humans think its banks should be. The ferryman dares not cross, the trembling resident watches the water lap over his windowsill, the farmer beholds her flooded fields and clutches her face in despair, and the professional dog walker cannot find the way to go.

England is a flood-prone country, and for thousands of years the Thames has made this abundantly clear to anyone who dares settle on its floodplain. Yet this latest round, in the midst of both acute political degeneration and a global climate emergency, has washed down to a graver sense that something is seriously wrong.

Then just in case people weren’t getting the message, along has come COVID-19. This virus has held up a mirror. In it, instead of rigorous, calm and informed international cooperation and care for one’s citizens, we see instead the posturing hollowness of the authoritarian ego-trips which now pass for governance among prejudiced and panicking populations. It has laid bare a world where human beings are not the authors of the social contract, but disposable meat for the macho cannibals, free-market cultists and eugenicists who have overrun their politics.

Modernity, the human future, was never supposed to look like this. After the horrors of the twentieth century there was no excuse. A reckoning is sure to follow.

That said, a reckoning will do no good unless it offers a way to come out on the other side: on a path of healing, of rebuilding the togetherness they should have got right the first time. Humankind, including the English, must build systems that empower their compassionate natures rather than their nasty ones, and become a presence worthier of this world and this universe. If they wish to stick around in it there’s no other choice.

This involves obvious practical measures. For the English, an immediate end to austerity and deportations, and the prosecution of those policies’ architects, would be a good start. But the damage of these depredations goes beyond the physical. It has cut deep into individuals' and societies' souls, so the journey is also a necessarily shamanic one.

The English are not known for their shamans. A shaman bridges the ordinary world with all those other worlds that transcend it – cultural worlds, emotional worlds, spiritual worlds, or worlds further still. Across the shamanic bridge, relationships are built that heal and enrich their participants, and valuable things are exchanged, things unmeasurable and far more meaningful than the narrow range admitted by that fantastical chimera, the economy. On the shamanic journey, prejudice and panic are left far behind as the human consciousness pushes past its perspectives, travelling to the very furthest places it can reach.

In some societies, in particular many indigenous ones, the shaman who opens the way to these places fulfils a formal role. In England, as in many nations which believe their modernity makes these journeys no longer necessary, the office of shaman does not exist.

But that does not mean there is no-one who tries.

It is the river, after all, that must be supreme in any shamanic considerations in reach of it. It shapes and dominates its peoples’ physical reality, yet is constantly on the move between that reality and others. Just as it has carried these people from town to town and spun the wheels of their mills, has it not ferried their consciousnesses to far further destinations? Has it not powered their mills of imagination to create what could not have come from this reality alone? What magic in this water has the English Christians still pouring it on foreheads for their baptismal rituals, or shapes the bridges of their engineer-heroes from mere functional crossing points into artistic masterpieces that bring their pride to tears?

These floods have created many temporary ponds and lakes along this subtler stretch of the Thames. Perhaps they can be windows on some of that magic.

Start:Maidenhead Bridge (nearest station: Maidenhead)

End:Marlow Bridge (nearest station: Marlow)

Length: 11.2km/7 miles

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

Topics: Boulter’s Lock, the Cliveden Set and Profumo Affair, Cookham and Stanley Spencer, Cock Marsh and Winter Hill, Marlow (via Budapest)

The goal of today’s walk is the settlement of Marlow, an old market town at the base of the Chiltern Hills whose drainage into the Thames makes its contribution to the locals’ flood woes. Having penetrated down through those hills, the Thames embarks on a northward detour and it is between Marlow and Maidenhead that it returns, on today’s meandering ninety-degree bend, to continue its march to the sea.

Beyond Maidenhead the river is wrathful and unyielding. On the far bank it menaces the village of Taplow. The name is Anglo-Saxon and refers to Tæppa’s barrow, a burial site whose excavation in the 1880s uncovered the most extravagant set of Anglo-Saxon grave goods yet found in England at the time.

In short order we reach Boulter’s Lock. At first this looks like it could be any of the other forty-five or so locks on this river, but in its day this one had a claim to be most famous of them all. It began innocuously enough: boulteris another word for miller, with the lock accompanying a weir for a long lineage of local flour mills. But in the industrial period this area’s combination of river islands, residences and holiday homes full of rich people, including celebrities on the way to the Royal Ascot horse races, the Cliveden estate and assorted carnivals and regattas, made Boulter’s Lock a magnet for the pleasure-boating craze which crammed its narrow channels to breaking point.

The lock continued to receive upgrades and expansions in the face of such hazardous overcrowding; most of its current form dates from 1912.

The length above the lock is reputed as one of the most pleasantly attractive segments of the Thames. Known as Cliveden Reach, what is today a tranquil stretch between woods and fields used to heave with monied persons faffing about in boats, helping account for the pressure that built up at Boulter’s Lock. No surprise therefore that ludicrously fancy houses for people with too much money have colonised its riverbanks.

Built in the 1850s to replace a Restoration-era noble mansion that had burnt down twice, Cliveden was resurrected as an Italianate villa by the architect Charles Barry while working on his more famous project, the Houses of Parliament. Cliveden’s importance was not in its formal status but in its reality as a social reaction chamber where all the big names of English politics and culture would mingle and happen to each other's nine orifices. This ball was set rolling by William Waldorf Astor, an American millionaire who bought the mansion in 1893 and set about annoying the locals into nicknaming him Walled-off Astor for fobbing them off his huge property with high walls and rules against public access. He then passed Cliveden on to his son, setting up the first of its two ignominious political dramas.

The first was the story of the Cliveden Set. This was a clutch of influential individuals in the 1930s who coalesced around the figure of Nancy Astor, William’s daughter-in-law and the first female MP to sit in the House of Commons (though not the first to be elected – that was Constance Markievicz in 1918 who, as a member of Sinn Féin in colonial Ireland, rejected British authority by refusing to take her seat).

Nancy and her husband were in the habit of hosting lavish parties at Cliveden for the giants of the English imperial class structure, attracting everyone from Churchill to Charlie Chaplin – politicians, writers, film stars, sports personalities, the lot. The Cliveden Set emerged from this milieu as a tight-knit intellectual network of high-flying ministers and business leaders. In present-day parlance one might characterise it as a think tank with extraordinary channels of political influence – which was unfortunate, because the main current for which it came to be known was its friendliness to the Nazis and Adolf Hitler.

With hindsight the English have found it easy to demonise the Cliveden Set for this affability towards the epitome of evil in human history. The risk of this is to forget that many English were a lot more ambivalent towards Nazism during its rise in the 1930s than they were during and after World War II. The figurehead of the British fascist movement, Oswald Mosley, was an old supporter of Astor and a familiar face at Cliveden, whose circles were far from alone in sharing in the anti-Semitic and anti-communist bigotries emanating from Germany at this time. Nor were they unique in their sympathy for Hitler’s military aggression in Europe, which they expressed by using their exorbitant political influence to support the efforts of Neville Chamberlain’s government to appease him (including what would come to be seen as the most embarrassing symbol of appeasement’s futility, the 1938 Munich Agreement).

As this futility shattered and dumped the country into war, the full force of odium from Hitler’s enemies in England landed on the Cliveden Set and has tarred their names ever since. Certainly the reputation of Nancy Astor – ‘The Member for Berlin’, as Labour heavyweight Stafford Cripps called her in Parliament – has never recovered, and after the war her status faded to that of some kind of lonely racist anachronism. But the episode refracts into numerous lasting significances. One is its comment on English gender politics: there is no doubt that Astor drew special hostility on account of being a political woman with a forceful personality, making it much harder to sincerely  assess her record. On the other hand, the toxicity of her politics looks impossible to refute, fuelling the question of why, when the English do put women in power, they so often tend to be women of the most obnoxious politics possible (Astor after all served the same party as Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May). A second, broader problem arises from how the Cliveden Set has become a lightning rod of caricaturing hatred for treasonous pro-fascist villainy, obscuring how unexceptional its views were in an England which shared in the manufacture of the colonial racism that produced the Nazis and which at times drew so close to accommodating them (by one vote’s width even during the war itself, in fact, when in the 1940 War Cabinet vote Arthur Greenwood saved Churchill’s decision to fight on rather than approach Hitler for a peace settlement). But of course, since when has historical fact been allowed to discomfort the myth of the English as the free and democratic good guys by racial nature?

And then there is the class tradition embodied by the Cliveden Set: the cliquey bunch of ruling-caste mates, named for the provinces they privately own and who all know each other from schools like Eton, secretly running the show through behind-the-scenes control of politics, business and the media. This dip in Nazi saliva made that practice uglier than ever, but astonishingly, when a second great scandal buried those cliques for a generation it was also from Cliveden’s windows that its bodily fluids came oozing.

This was the Profumo Affair of 1961-3, which sank the Conservative Party government of Harold Macmillan in a public sensation of sex, drugs, guns, espionage and splattering acrimony whose stench has never really faded from the national walls.

Here was another drama that grew out of Cliveden’s magnetism for rich and irresponsible party people, a role to which the next generation of Astors returned it. At issue were the relationships between a group of individuals, in particular War Minister John Profumo and 19-year-old aspiring showgirl Christine Keeler, who fell into a secret love affair having been brought together at that cottage by Stephen Ward, an osteopath and the sort of all-around high-flyer who knew everybody and had his hand in innumerable dodgy activities. The Profumo-Keeler involvement did not last long, but a chain of events involving Keeler’s and Ward’s misadventures with violent Jamaican jazz singer Aloysius Gordon, which led to a gun being fired outside Ward’s flat, set off rumours in the media which duly landed Profumo in front of Conservative Party interrogators to whom he of course denied everything. But by then the rumours had crackled into every corner of that era’s superconductive celebrity grapevine, in which all these people were naturally bound up. To make matters worse, it then emerged that Ward had also got Keeler socially and carnally involved with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché and spy who had also become acquainted with War Minister Profumo at this cottage’s swimming pool, thereby layering upon the scandal a thick new icing of potential Cold War security breaches and leaks of nuclear secrets.

By 1963 these people were hurling angry accusations and denials on each other in broad daylight, to the outraged delight of the media in general and Private Eye in particular. The matter came to a head that summer when Ward was put on trial on vice charges. Faced with (questionable) conviction, he killed himself with an overdose. Profumo’s career imploded overnight, and his name has been synonymous with this shambles ever since; the damage to his government almost certainly tipped the balance that pushed it from power in the following year’s general election. Naturally however most of the sensationalism then and since has focused on Christine Keeler due to the English press’s lurid obsession, when faced with powerful and abusive men, to tear down women instead. As usual this has been at the expense of her own side of the story, whose recent BBC dramatisation in The Trial of Christine Keeler (2019) exhibits how this controversy’s afterlife shambles on more than fifty years later.

The conventional view is that the Profumo Affair was a death blow to the culture which had also produced the Cliveden Set: the closed in-groups of unsavoury rich and powerful people who ran the country as their playground, all knowing each other far too well and sharing the impunity of getting away with whatever they wanted. That the English had had enough of this is often refracted through the statement of Keeler’s friend Mandy Rice-Davies at Ward’s trial, who when it was put to her that Lord Astor (Nancy Astor’s son) was denying sexual involvement with her, replied: ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’ – the implication being all these powerful men, fundamentally and obviously, were liars and cheats. For a time this culture would submerge under the new strain of no-nonsense public managerialism associated with the Labour government of Harold Wilson and his successors, in whose wreckage in turn Thatcher would build her free market revolution in the 1980s.

But have the sparks in the Cliveden circuit ever truly gone out? From Boris Johnson spaffing (to use his term) out unknowable numbers of forgotten children, to Michael Gove happily admitting to taking cocaine in his youth (and getting away with it by being political-caste and white); from the abiding political dominance of chums from the same elite schools, to the recent sequence of female Home Ministers tapping the wells of fascism for their hostile environment ethnic cleansing programme, it might be some time yet before the echoes of Cliveden’s dirty secrets are truly stifled.

As for the house itself, the Astor family moved out in 1968, and within two decades it had consummated its passion for luring the rich and unscrupulously famous by turning into a hotel. If you don’t fancy paying upward of £400 per night, the National Trust now holds its vast gardens and woodlands and will let you explore those for a “mere” £16 instead.

This is one set of heights the river won’t reach. If it’s shamanic healing we’re after we had better look elsewhere.

Though perhaps, not that far after all.

Round the corner from Cliveden the wall between worlds is weak. The farm fields give way to the low-lying chalky grasslands of Cock Marsh (look, I don’t make the names around here), whose frequent flooding nurtures fertile flora and provides a perpetual feast for grazing animals. Towering above them, Winter Hill is one of the highest Thames terraces yet, and is thought to get its name from those animals’ retreat up its slopes when the floods of the cold season chase them off the floodplain.

Humans too have been drawn to this oasis for at least ten thousand years back to the hunter-gatherers of the Old Stone Age. Local archaeology has turned up a wealth of artifacts from every period since, from Neolithic axes to Roman pottery. Pride of place however goes to a set of Bronze Age burial mounds still just visible in the marsh, whose excavation revealed human remains given elaborate burials by a sophisticated prehistoric society.

More recently, it is not clear if the Celtic, Roman and Anglo-Saxon presences here formed one continuous settlement, but this location clearly mattered to all of them. In the journeys of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, for whom this was crucially contested middle ground (particularly between the heavyweights of Mercia and Wessex), it came to feature a monastery, then one of Alfred’s burhs(forts) against the Vikings, then even a palace where in 997 CE the Anglo-Saxon witan (parliament) met under King Æthelred II “Unræd” – the one whose reputation the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tore so savagely to pieces, rightly or wrongly, that one thousand years later his name still has not recovered. (“Unræd”, often incorrectly given as Unready, was a disparaging pun on his name with a meaning closer to ill-advised.)