River Thames or Isis, the maps read now. What does it mean? Two names at once? Or are you expected to choose one or the other, like, say, chocolate or pistachio ice cream, or a red suitcase or a blue suitcase?
Is it the Isis now? Or still the Thames? Is this still the same river?
The river itself is silent on this matter. What the names really tell us about are the humans who come up with them, and here they tell us that there is a set of humans who do things differently from the rest. So differently, at that, that even the water, the source of all that they are, takes on an alternate meaning in their presence.
River Thames or Isis. They tell us, in other words, that we encroach on the core domains of the Oxford English. And that, the Oxfordese tribes would have us believe, is special.
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| Abingdon. At population 40,000, this largest of Oxford’s moons has achieved stable orbit – for now – by drawing on that city’s economic and intellectual atmosphere while exerting one very much its own. |
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| The river at Clifton Hampden, one of several villages that shelter in the bush along the Thames's-or-Isis's meanders. |
Is that difference substantial, as far as the river is concerned? As we draw into Lewis Carroll and Philip Pullman territory, should we expect to find people nosing around in colourful boats that aren’t from around here, no doubt garbed in suspicious hats and coats? Are there glimpses of rabbits darting into holes in the undergrowth, pocket-watch in one paw and bottle of dubious fluids in the other? What is this mystique about the Oxfordshire leisurelands? By what high otherworldly air are they supposedly set apart from the long procession of downstream Privilege Forts which, in flowing through them hereafter, the river must find merely mundane?
Or is it all a magic show, a masquerade of dialect and illusion? Might it be mere disguise for what’s really just a continuation of this valley’s nests of wealth and power, here as there seeking creative ways to write the suffering of those they exclude out of the story?
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| How different is it, really? |
At one level the Oxfordshire Thames would seem to bear much in common with the fare so far. There are lengthening slogs across farm fields; white pleasure-cruisers, lazing past with invariably white passengers; and no fewer than three straight cuts, dug through where they – their monks, their merchants – couldn’t be bothered to put up with the water’s wilful twists and bends.
But at another level, perhaps one does begin to detect a few kinks in the cosmic fabric. The settlements here are secretive, hidden behind farm fields or curtains of bush. As at their Dorchester concentration point, the fields in question have been especially fertile in their yield of clues to thousands of years of habitation gone by. The long progress through these agrarian margins is intermittently disturbed by the metallic sheen of cutting-edge science and technology: the satellite belt of research and development installations that swirl in close orbit of Oxford University. And in the spaces in between you stumble through a field of much smaller asteroids, each unique in shape. Those are the bizarre native rituals peculiar to each village or sub-tribe, the likes of Poohsticks and Bun-Throwing and Morris Dancing which, just perhaps, can only be made sense of under a Carrollian suspension of the limits of everyday belief.
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| Little Wittenham Bridge. This unassuming footbridge held international significance as the site of the World Poohsticks Championships until 2015. |
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| A suspicious tree arrangement spotted in the rustic middle distance between the Didcot power station and the Culham nuclear fusion research centre. You can’t be too sure of anything in a landscape like this. |
A world unto itself then? A place where the imaginary is real, and the real – that is, COVID-19 failure, Brexit-induced food shortages, and most lately this country’s monstrous and agonising betrayal of the Afghans – is all consigned to rude imagination?
At times like these regular attention is drawn to the warnings of one who offered some of the clearest visions on how truth and reality wither in the authoritarian shadow. It so happens that this bit of floodplain is also where George Orwell – who it might be noted, took a river’s name as his own – at last had his bones laid to rest. It’s doubtful his less corporeal parts get much rest these days, whatever the enchantments called up by such nomemancy as Thames or Isis.
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| The confluence with the River Thame is the start of today’s progress, and the lower extent of the River Thames or Isis naming convention. |
Start: Confluence with the River Thame, near Dorchester-on-Thames (nearest station: miles away, take the X39 or X40 bus from Reading or Oxford instead and walk in from the stop on the Dorchester Bypass)
End: Abingdon Bridge (nearest station: miles away, take the X3 or X13 bus from Stratton Way to Oxford or Didcot Parkway instead)
Length: 14.5km/9 miles
Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse
Topics: Little Wittenham, Clifton Hampden, Sutton Courtney and Culham, and Abingdon. Is it special?
Little Wittenham
West of the peninsula between the Thames and the Thame, a sweeping U-shaped loop in the larger river creates an even broader peninsula. This one is spread with farm fields and flood meadows and guarded by sibling hamlets at its neck: Little Wittenham on one side, Long Wittenham on the other.
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| The Wittenham Clumps as seen from the Dorchester outskirts. As the only high ground for miles around, those ancient hills look out over much of today’s section. The Dyke Hills, former rampart of a late Iron Age trading and crafting centre, run across the foreground. |
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| Where once stood that ancient settlement you are now more likely to find these fellows. |
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| What reflection does it make on this country, that so significant a threshold as the confluence with the Thame has been defaced with COVID-19 conspiracy theories? |
A large pasture holds the bottom of the Dorchester peninsula, with woolly inhabitants to offer wholesome company round the first of today’s many riverbends.
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| Much breakfast is had on this field. |
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| The black-fleeced and white-fleeced populations are about fifty-fifty here. |
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| Regrettably they tend to shuffle away in shyness after a few moments, providing no opportunity to touch the fluff about their heads. |
There are impressively large trees to be found here at the foot of the Wittenham Clumps.
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| Watch out – this one’s armed. |
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| These would appear to be horse chestnuts, known colloquially as conkers. In earlier generations when it was still safe for young people to go out in this country without getting stabbed, records speak of a popular competitive pastime by which they would thread string through the smooth, hard seeds in these shells and swing them into each other’s, scoring points if they managed to break their opponents’. At higher degrees of professionalism they were said to harden their own conkers by aging them or soaking them in varnish. |
Round the corner is Day’s Lock, whose lock-keeper’s cottage adjoins the footbridge to Little Wittenham. The bridge might appear a simple white-coated iron and wood affair, but it holds a special place in English sporting consciousness.
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| Little Wittenham Bridge, with the Day’s Lock cottage on the western bank and a rich white moneyboat shaving narrowly beneath the bridge. |
In the much-beloved Winnie-the-Pooh stories of A. A. Milne, the eponymous friendly bear and his companions play a game in which, while stood on a bridge and facing upstream, each simultaneously drops a stick into the river. They then wait to see whose stick emerges first on the downstream side, with that individual considered the winner. Poohsticks, as this game became known, rose to broad popularity with the success of the Pooh books and occasionally attained practice as a professional sport, with detailed stratagems devised around the shape and composition of the stick, the method of its release, and the identification of the fastest channel of river current, along with severe penalties for any participant deemed to have thrown their stick rather than dropped it.
In 1984 the late Lynn David, resident lock-keeper here at Day’s Lock, had the idea to hold a Poohsticks fundraising event on this bridge for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) – a venerable charity devoted to saving lives at sea (and lately vilified by the English nationalists for rescuing refugees rather than letting them drown). The Poohsticks tournament took off as an annual event, attracting ever larger crowds to this spot and eventually reaching a international television audience.
Such was its popularity that by 2015 the crowds had outgrown this little bridge, and the World Poohsticks Championship was moved for safety to a bridge on the River Windrush further up the Thames. It was last held in 2018, with the COVID-19 pandemic regrettably forcing its cancellation for several years running.
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| Day’s Lock in action – notice the two cheerful lock-keepers operating it on behalf of boaters. Built in 1789 by the Thames Navigation Commission, it was apparently named for a family of local Catholic yeomen – though under what circumstances is an interesting question given this country’s violent hostility to Catholics at that time. The lock gradually fell into ruin but was thoroughly rebuilt in the late nineteenth century. |
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| Walking upon the lock’s gates and weir gets you across the river, but if vessels are passing through then you’ll need to wait till they shut the gates after them. |
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| Upstream from atop the weir. |
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| The fourteenth-century bell tower of Little Wittenham’s St. Peter’s Church peeks over the treeline. This tiny village at the foot of the Wittenham Clumps was once held by the abbey up in Abingdon, which surrendered it under suppression by Henry VIII in the 1530s. Little Wittenham ended up in the hands of the powerful Dunch family, with the evidently sizeable hindquarters of one of its female notables – supposedly Oliver Cromwell’s aunt – producing the hills’ local nickname. |
There follows a trek of some four kilometres round the top of this loop. These low-lying flood meadows make for easy walking when dry, but likely grow treacherous, sometimes impassably so, after heavy rains or during the harsh English winter.
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| Could the transition from stone pillboxes to brick ones be another representation of the Oxford glamour? While the former merely provide a defensible firing position, no doubt these ones work by disgorging otherworldly magical forces out of portals. Alas their cunning plan was not thought through: this one’s been defeated by a single sheep. |
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| From here it’s easy to appreciate the flatness of the river valley in the lower Oxford Plain. The sky is broad and the horizons are far away. |
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| Across to the east on the Dorchester side the meadows and their fleecy inhabitants stretch on. The latter’s bleats provide a chorus along here as they keep up their correspondence over a great distance. No doubt they are exchanging grievances over the filled in-gravel quarries over there, which demolished the remains of one of this country’s most important Neolithic ceremonial sites. |
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| Even in dry conditions these fields retain water, to the advantage of gregarious congregations like these. |
Near the top of the loop the back gardens of affluent houses line up across the water. These are the residences of Burcot, a tiny hamlet traditionally in the orbit of Dorchester.
Despite a present population of only about five hundred people, Burcot carried enormous importance as far as the river is concerned. The hard sandstone river bed and low natural water levels here meant that till the last two hundred years or so, the river became unnavigable to boats here. Travellers heading upstream were thus forced to disembark and continue their journeys by land.
Eventually successive regimes tried to do something about this. Their first effort, the Oxford-Burcot Commissionappointed by James I in 1605, represented this country’s first government commission into the management of the Thames. Nonetheless they struggled, and the problem was really only solved when the Thames Navigation Commission’s locks and weirs raised the water level at the end of the following century.
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| Burcot lost its traditional importance after that, but from the Victorian period on it revived as an attractive place to live for the tiny minority of people who could afford it. Almost all its houses appear to date to within the last hundred and twenty years or so. |
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| The Chinese goddess Nüwā is said to have created humans by scooping earth out of a riverbank and shaping them by hand. This appears a candidate for where she created the English, though one might ought to question her sobriety at the time. |
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| The Wittenham Clumps are in plain sight to the south. You can bet that out here you’re in plain sight of them too. |
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| This looks like a newer creation. If you row across to its lawn in a canoe and place your fingertip on a blade of grass, how many seconds till the alarms go off and automated turrets pop from the ground to kill you? |
In hushed whispers, it’s also suggested that Burcot, along with some of these other villages in the Dorchester cluster, were a hotbed of religious dissidence during the height of repressive English Protestantism in the eighteenth century. There is evidence that adherence to Catholicism or non-conforming Protestant branches bubbled on in these parts, perhaps explaining how a Catholic family could stay prominent enough to got a lock named after them.
Here on the west side meanwhile, human habitation is limited to clumps of farmhouses in the distance. The fields along the river belong to a bulkier populace.
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| Specifically – Nuuo. These don’t care what religion you are. They’ll moo at you regardless. |
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| A certain rectangularity might warrant inquiry here. |
Temporary fences and signs of digging materialise along the northern arc. They are part of a project to transform some of these water meadows into a full-fledged wetland, as organised by an alliance of local trusts under the name River of Life.
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| The goal appears to be to improve flood flows into these meadows, thus creating valuable wildlife habitats – fish, newts, waterfowl and so forth – as well as improving water retention so as to alleviate the risk of downstream flooding. |
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| COVID-19 has slowed the project but it appears to be getting back underway; a couple of surveyors were spotted assessing one of the worksites. Notably it’s funded by a European Union agricultural development grant, making it one of a species of project facing imminent extinction due to Brexit. |
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| Burcot lounges expensively on. |
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| Plenty of dogs come out this way, with much excitement thrown off by their encounters. Here such an encounter is unfortunately deferred by the intervening body of water. |
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Not so much the Cheshire Cat as the Oxfordshire Dog.
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Cross a few more fields from here and you reach another curious little settlement.
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| Look. They’re storing dubious concealed objects in this one. |
