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THAMES: 17) The High Pastures

 
Through a haze of cloud, milky sunshine washes the plains of the high Thames. It is an early October morning, and the reason it is early is that from here on, out the back doors of Oxford, the riverlands grow so remote that getting in and out becomes a four- or five-stage operation, of almost as many hours, on increasingly patchy public transport.
 
The ancient common of Port Meadow, stretching far up the west flank of Oxford.
More cows graze by the river close to the northernmost point in its course. If you like cows you’re in the right place with this one.
Gone are the towns and cities, the castles and palaces, the towers of exclusion which lord over the middle Thames. Here there is green as far as the eye can see, with only a smattering of small craft – tugs, canoes, and the iconic narrowboats – puttering from lock to lock. This expedition, having shoved through the English capital with its industrial relics, political struggles and crowded illusions of modernity, then through the long parade of past and present privilege-nests that hold the middle river, has at last broken out to the high countryside, the remnants of the English bush, where the infant river emerges from its cradle.
 
Peace at last then? Not quite. The picture-postcard daydream of the upper Thames, in which it trickles serene through grassy meadows and hamlets of beige Cotswold stone, belies a volatile flow loaded with pent-up grievance. Concertinaed through bunched-up meanders and straining in the fetters of its locks, the young river here is as liable as any reach downstream to drown these low-lying plains in remorseless floods. And as the water, so too the humans who have written their stories in it – for even out here, stories of strife and struggle whisper from the reeds.
 
The ruins of the Godstow nunnery, on the outskirts of Oxford, is one of that city’s more mythically-charged installations.
The goal of this section is the New Bridge, which typical of English naming conventions is the oldest bridge on the Thames. It is there that the river meets a tributary whose name reaches right into this country’s present moral calamity. You’ll have heard of it: the Windrush.
With the end in sight, it’s time to step this expedition up a gear. The remaining sections, starting with this one, are all twenty-kilometre hard slogs over open country. Anyone thinking of tackling this for themselves should plan with full respect for weather and seasonal conditions, in particular rainfall, flooding, and hours of daylight, as well as preparing good footwear, sensible clothing, and well-organised travel and/or local accommodation arrangements. Sufficient food and drink, especially water, are vital; there are occasional pubs on or near the river, but also long stretches in between with absolutely nothing.
 
As we shall see, you’ll also find plenty of large animals in these parts. Be nice to them. Brexit wasn’t their fault.
 
Upstream from Osney Bridge in west Oxford: the upper limit for large watercraft and effective gateway to the Upper Thames.
Notice the increase in scale since the previous section.

Start: Osney Bridge (nearest station: Oxford)
End: Newbridge (no settlement, just a bridge with a pub at each end; about five buses a day stop by the Rose Revived pub on a Witney-Abingdon route)
Length: 21.7km/13.5miles
Location: Oxfordshire – City of Oxford, Vale of White Horse, West Oxfordshire
 
Topics: Port Meadow, Godstow, miles and miles of cow meadows and sheep meadows (Wytham Foothills, Farmoor Reservoir, Bablock Hythe and Northmoor Meadows), Newbridge and the River Windrush
 

 
Port Meadow
The river keeps its distance from central Oxford, but its course down the western flank of the university city is nonetheless close to its heart, both in the high imagination of its myths and literature and more practically in its daily jogs and strolls. More bucolic than the southward reaches and not so integrated into its suburbs and its rowing, these northward banks draw plenty of locals and their dogs out for morning exercise.
 
The riverside houses of Osney adjoin the water here, with their little gardens’ back doors opening straight onto the towpath. The west bank is occupied by a large set of allotments, which the river’s ducks seem eager to get into.
A reminder of the branching maze of channels into which the river splits around Oxford. This one wasn’t even the main flow, having been cut out by the monks of Osney Abbey to power their mills. The cut under the footbridge at right (east) links to the Castle Mill Stream and the start of the surviving part of the Oxford Canal, which runs all the way up to Warwick Province. To the left (west) the river’s old main course – now the Bulstake Stream – heads off down a weir-controlled open-air swimming pool that was closed in the 1990s. The water level gauge is a reminder that these flows are at times far more dangerous than they look here.
The link to the Castle Mill Stream is known locally as the Sheepwash Channel, another echo perhaps of the Oxen-ford’s rustic origins.
Through the foliage to the east is the tower of St. Barnabas’s Church, built in 1869 to cater for what was then growing into the impoverished working-class Jericho district. Its industrial labourers were crammed into poor-quality housing with no effective drainage or sanitation, exposing them to terrible risks from floods and water-borne diseases.
The towpath then crosses to a sliver of an island barely three or four metres in width – essentially a raised track, between the river to the west and the tiny Fiddler’s Stream to the east. This Fiddler’s Island might look a charming place for a stroll, but its severe vulnerability to flooding is obvious immediately.
 
Pretty, isn’t it? But signs warn that deaths have occurred during floods here and strongly advise people not to attempt to walk this path when it’s inundated.
The Fiddler’s Stream is clogged with duckweed, making it popular with hungry waterfowl.
Evidence of rather ferocious tree management across to the west.
Your boat needs a low profile like this to make it up here past Osney Bridge.
The island ends at a large boatyard, right where the river and Castle Mill Stream first diverge. Here too is the bottom corner of the vast Port Meadow, a 400-acre expanse of common grazing land.
 
This rusty footbridge allows Oxford’s escapees to get across to run around on the Port Meadow. But the towpath, which the boatyard reminds us was originally built for hard work on the river, trails on to the tip of Fiddler’s Island.
Here too are flashes of the otherworlds haunting Oxford. From this boat a tiger and unidentified two-headed entity keep a wary watch on wayfarers.
The north end of Fiddler’s Island, where the Medley Footbridge, built in 1865 and also known as the Rainbow Bridge, crosses west. Medley appears to be the name of a small farming hamlet that used to stand on that bank.
Bossoms Boatyard is a significant local institution. Run by the Bossom family from its opening in the 1830s until 1945, it claims to have been a pioneer of fibreglass hulls and still operates one of the few boat-building and repair stations to be found on these far reaches. Next door to it is the Medley Sailing Club, the highest such club on the Thames.
A first sighting of Port Meadow, stretching broad and flat all the way up to Wolvercote in the distance.
Port Meadow is ancient. According to legend (and to at least some extent historical record), this grazing field has remained unploughed, unbuilt on and largely unchanged for more than four thousand years. The archaeological remnants it harbours stretch from recent horse-racing bridges and civil war fortifications right back to Iron Age settlement traces and Bronze Age burial mounds – a record of the many shifts in management and usage systems through which, apparently, the meadow has persisted as a common pasture.
 
It’s the first of manypastures on the menu today.
An alternative approach to grazing? Or a metaphor for this country’s troubled relationship with the truth?
Just up the road to the west is the tiny hamlet of Binsey. Once considerably larger, it is known for its St. Margaret’s Church’s legendary healing well, said to have been called up by Frideswide, Oxford’s patron saint. Long a pilgrimage site, it gained international fame when it inspired Lewis Carroll’s ‘treacle well’ in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ‘Treacle’ was a medicinal term in the day of the Frideswide legend but by Carroll’s time had come to mean the syrupy by-products of sugar refining.
Binsey also used to have a ford in this area, close to its still-active pub, The Perch. It was one of several farming villages that relied on and claimed rights to Port Meadow.
The survival of any common, especially one so large as Port Meadow, is of note in a country thoroughly transformed by its violent Enclosure of them, from which process it has inherited its present abusive land practices. It is tempting to attribute Port Meadow’s survival to the power of the Oxford ‘freemen’ (i.e. that tiny minority of its feudal population who were rich and male), into whose formal ownership it had fallen by the time of the 1086 Domesday survey and under whose gaze the peasant serfs of surrounding villages like Binsey, Medley and Wolvercote grazed their animals here too.
 
Yet we should recall that with the rise of Oxford University, the mere mortals of that city, even the privileged officials among them, were not so powerful. In fact Port Meadow seems to have become a perennial object of contestation between a thousand years of competing interests. These included the ‘freemen’ and city authorities, the village commoners, the Godstow nuns and the rising wool industry, as well as later industrial-age comers such as the railway-builders, allotment-planters and flying clubs.
 
And there it looked like a nice simple field without a trouble in the world.
Far from a pastoral paradise, Port Meadow must at times have been a merciless battle-pit for lawyers, bailiffs and pitchfork-toting peasants as they had it out over rents, fines and licence fees, fought off each other’s Enclosure claims, and seized each other’s horses, geese and cattle. Ironically it seems to have been this perpetual struggle, rather than any semblance of long-term cooperative project they could be congratulated for, that guaranteed Port Meadow’s survival as a common. That is to say, no invested party could make any permanent change to it without incurring the prohibitively expensive wrath of everyone else.
 
The western bank seems less vicious by comparison. Perhaps the Mario and Luigi impression of this pair of trees has helped keep the peace.
Yet no patch of English soil is without a heritage of greedy violence it seems. The Binsey Poplars, a row of poplar trees, stood around here till they were summarily felled in the 1870s to feed the railway boom. Their destruction inspired a poem of lamentation by Gerald Manley Hopkins, and efforts to re-plant them have since drawn a great deal of management work to this bank.
It also has its own bovine population. They graze right up to the river and will stand there exchanging remarks about you as you walk past. Show them lots of respect, especially if you see calves.
On the north side of Port Meadow is Wolvercote. An ancient farming village mentioned in the Domesday survey as Ulfgarcote (‘Woolgar’s cottage’), it fiercely protected its rights to the common against the Oxford heavies, but was eventually absorbed by that city’s growth over the last two centuries and is now part of its inner belt of village-suburbs.
Nowadays Port Meadow is a popular recreational space, especially when it freezes over in winter and gets used for ice skating. Its long absence of building, ploughing, and chemical fertilisers or pesticides has also made it a site of scientific interest given its richness in rare plants and birds.
Meanwhile the ‘freemen’ of Oxford and ‘commoners’ of Wolvercote still graze their horses and cattle on it, and still get involved in disputes when they feel their interests are threatened. One of Port Meadow’s latest dramas concerns a bitter row over the Castle Mill student housing development on its southern rim, which has ruined its view of the Oxford skyline.

 
Godstow
Near the top of the Port Meadow a backwater arrives that was long drawn on by Wolvercote as a mill stream. At this junction the main river flows through Godstow Lock, the first in today’s sequence of upper-river locks and also the highest of all Thames locks to use electro-hydraulic operation. In other words, if you’re travelling up this way by boat, you have to physically open and shut all the locks from here on (or hope there’s a nice lock-keeper on duty to do it for you).
 
If you know anyone in or near Oxford who recently lost their keys, let them know that they’re on this bit of wood somewhere in this random field near Port Meadow.
The approach to Godstow Lock, with the Wolvercote Mill Stream curving away at right past the Hinksey Sculling School.
Godstow Lock was built in 1790, replacing a flash weir, and rebuilt in 1924.
The lock-keeper’s cottage.
Through a gate at the far end of the lock, this corner’s operative structure – or what’s left of it – sits straightforwardly next to the river.
 
 
Godstow was an outlying participant in Oxford’s prospering medieval monastery network. It was a nunnery – an all-female religious community – founded around the 1130s by a woman called Ediva (a.k.a. Edith) from Winchester. The widow of a Norman knight, the story goes that she followed visions in her dreams to nearby Binsey. There instructed by the voices to find a light from the sky, she saw a shaft of sunlight falling on this site, and so, with financial support from king Henry I (always keen to back such projects to build church support for his fragile Plantagenet dynasty), set up this Benedictine convent, whose name means simply ‘God’s place’.
 
Like many other monasteries the Godstow nunnery grew into a large and wealthy complex. It acquired rich landholdings all across the country and drew donations from powerful sponsors, likely connected to the many women from nobility backgrounds who came to study here. This best-preserved part of the main structure appears to have been its chapel.
Clearly the place had clout and profile, but perhaps because the English don’t like it when women have those things, they took to attaching regular scandals to Godstow’s name in the following centuries. Perhaps the most sensational concerned a certain individual among the community (the extent of her membership as either nun or student is unclear) whose name was Rosamund Clifford: a young noble from the Welsh frontiers, best known as king Henry II’s favourite long-term lover.
 
Godstow’s ruined inner court. Rosamund Clifford was buried in the complex when she died around 1176, still only in her twenties. The circumstances of her passing are unknown; the story that she was poisoned out of jealousy by Henry II’s queen, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, is unverifiable, and the embellishments that stuck to that legend over time suggests it owes more to English misogynistic sensationalism than to actual events. Even in death however Clifford’s legend continued, with her grave becoming a pilgrimage site, then getting shunted outside by a disapproving bishop, which gave rise to rumours that her ghost haunted the abbey in objection to this ill-treatment. What’s more reliably on record is that as Clifford’s resting place, Godstow received substantial gifts of money and resources from her beloved Henry II.
The scandalism went on through to the fifteenth century, by when Godstow seems to have swirled with stories of dismayed inspectors, quarrelsome legal proceedings, extravagant lifestyles, and the ever-recurring rumours of ‘ill-discipline’. Most of these seem to have concerned the community’s contact with the secular outside world, especially students coming up from Oxford. The hyperbolic tenor of some of these reports leads one to think the nuns might as well have been abducting and trapping them in their beds, when not overwhelming them with raucous drinking and feasting. Perhaps the accusations really reflected the more common story of powerful men in the church establishment resenting the idea of a community of women making their own decisions, and so doing everything in their power to hobble, constrain or otherwise interfere in the running of their community.
 
There was less ambiguity about the fall of Godstow, which took place, as at most other monasteries, in the late 1530s following sustained pressure from Thomas Cromwell and his commissioners on behalf of Henry VIII. The last abbess, Katherine Bulkeley, surrendered the nunnery after a principled stand in negotiations – and more caustically, a personal stand against the official sent to receive that surrender, the Oxford priest Dr. John London. Each accused the other of threats and assault, and in the end the abbess secured a small victory in persuading Cromwell to remove Dr. London so she could give up Godstow to a more amenable commissioner.
 
After its fall the nuns were pensioned off and much of the complex was destroyed, including Rosamund Clifford’s grave. Henry VIII passed what was left to his physician George Owen, who built a mansion out of the ruins in which his family lived for the next hundred yea


This post first appeared on Chaobang's Travels, please read the originial post: here

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THAMES: 17) The High Pastures

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