Is time like the river? There are places where it feels less like a flow, with one age succeeding another, than an accumulation of all ages together.
Witness the Oxford Plain. Through an agrarian spread of yellows and greens the river ribbons blue. Here upstream of Wallingford it bends, and in that bend is a tiny village which, at first glance, might as well be any other.
Dorchester-on-Thames, not to be confused with its better-known namesake the provincial capital of Dorset, is a tiny settlement of 1,000 people. Little houses. Sheep in fields. Aside from a peculiarly large church, what is there to set it out in the shadows of the vast structures of power and privilege that line this valley?
Look closer.
| Are those not some noteworthy earthworks (at right)? And where are these views coming from on the flat Oxford Plain? |
| Hill forts. How about it then. |
In fact this subtle riverbend is one of the richest historical treasure-troves in the Thames valley. Six millennia of continuous human habitation are written in the shape of its landscape, from the ramparts and ditches everywhere you look to the coins, bones and grave goods that practically erupt from its gravel. It took the English some time to realise it. They’d wrecked much of it through gravel quarrying by the time that they did. But once they did, the Dorchester bend became one of the most prized archaeological zones in the country.
These are deep memories it harbours. Most of them long precede the English nation. They precede even its precursors. They go all the way back to a time when far, far away, Gilgamesh and the Egyptian pyramids were happening; and when here on the very fringes of the story of humanity, the migrants who wandered out this way got out their flint hand-axes and, for the first time, whacked down the stakes of this island-peninsula’s earliest permanent settlements.
| A landscape in time, not just in space. The shape of this land is the product – and continuation – of the stories of about six settlements that succeeded each other on and around the Dorchester bend. |
Doubtless life in these earliest societies to put down roots here would have been full of struggles. But had it yet gone so fundamentally wrong as we find it today? Was this then, as it is now, a land of abuse? Had the masculine power fantasy, which should never have existed, been invented yet? Whatever diseases afflicted them, was it in them yet to come up with such staggering political and cultural mis-reactions as they have for COVID-19 today?
| Regrettably that’s not a theoretical question. |
And because this is the middle Thames, we have to ask: what of their forts? The Iron Age fort on the hill, and fort in the bend; the Roman fort just beneath where the village is now: were these, already, Privilege Forts? Or were these forts for everyone?
There’s simply too much in the way to answer these questions now. Nonetheless, let’s take a few steps into a landscape where perhaps there’s less to impede those ancestors’ touch on your skin than anywhere else in this part of the country.
Start: Wallingford Bridge (nearest station: Cholsey – ten minutes by bus, or take the X39 or X40 from Reading for approx. thirty minutes)
End: Confluence with River Thame, near Dorchester-on-Thames (nearest station: miles away, take the X39 or X40 bus to Reading or Oxford instead)
Length: 8km/5 miles
Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire
Topics: Wallingford Castle Meadows, Benson, Shillingford, and thousands of years of settlement at Dorchester-on-Thames
Wallingford Castle Meadows
Dorchester is only a couple of hours’ walking upstream of Wallingford, beginning with what was formerly the grassy envelope of Wallingford castle.
| The river from Wallingford Bridge, with The Boat House pub and boat rental at left. |
| Wallingford natives take their morning coffees and relaxations by the river. |
| Almost immediately the riverbank greens, with open fields appearing inland. |
| The fields are Wallingford Castle Meadows – a wide strip of pastures between the river and the embankment where once towered the castle’s outer wall. |
These fields were likely an integrated part of the castle complex, so have inherited the names King’s Meadows and Queen’s Arbour. It is thought they grew hay to feed its animals while offering an extra layer of wet and marshy defence. Recent archaeology has unearthed a chalk foundation for a stone outbuilding here, perhaps a dock or a quay.
| After the castle’s demolition the hay meadows were reseeded and chemically treated to suit commercial dairy cows. This ruined their biodiversity, so now they are trying to bring it back through better management. These fellows’ summer grazing appears part of that plan. |
| Nuuo. |
| A related congregation takes its ease on the opposite bank. Formerly the Howbery Park manor grounds, those fields now host a sprawling complex of environmental science organisations such as the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a large solar power station. |
| The meadows stretch on past the northern limit of the castle ruins. |
From here farmland takes over for the short stretch to the commuter village of Benson.
