Lechlade and Cricklade. The Thames’s highest towns. Here at last is the river’s cradle, its nest of honey-and-mustard Cotswold limestone.
| Narrow, shallow and clogged with vegetation, the river from here on up is unnavigable to all but the most tenacious of small craft. |
| Cricklade, the river’s uppermost town and goal of this the penultimate section. |
But the foggy cloak of a hesitant spring sky hangs heavy over a world whose wheels, already juddering when this expedition began some thirty months ago, now appear to be spinning clean off.
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing vengeance of twisted authoritarian power fantasies – in Syria, in Yemen, in Myanmar, in Ethiopia, in Afghanistan, and now the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia – have drowned in blood any remaining illusion that humankind, morally and politically, has improved in the course of its own journey of millennia. In England the abuses noted on the way up this river have yet to explode on the sheer scale of those disasters, but easily belong to the same trajectory of arrogance, cruelty, corruption, contempt for the different, and forsaking of reality for a fortress of self-aggrandising lies. The fleeting promise of modernity, of a future for humanity better than its past, lies in tatters; replaced, it seems, by one of fresh atrocities as vile as any in human history.
In such a world, disillusionment is rational. Rage; futility; doubts, in all sincerity, about whether humanity is a life-form that can solve its own problems. In such despair, projects like this one come to feel meaningless. After all, with no disrespect to the good natives of Lechlade and Cricklade, are we to expect their hinterland of fields and brooks to hold the remedies to this nightmare?
Well, their stories do matter. For a start, they too participate in a world where nowhere is truly far anymore.
| Lechlade’s Thames Street – for now, in honour and solidarity, part of Cotswold Raion, Gloucester Oblast, Ukraine. This must be the first time in this region’s history that the Ukrainian bicolour flutters from its masts and flagpoles, in a startling echo of its blue streams and yellow-gold cottages. |
Their service to human passage was clear enough. Dwelling on the Thames’s flood-prone headwaters at its furthest point reachable by boat, and so close to where it gives way to its mighty and storied neighbour, the Severn, these two towns’ situations – Lechlade as a trade post, Cricklade as a strategic junction – have been pivotal. On this journey up they are the final threshold, the passages to the Cotswold nurseries, the beginning of the end. But for the water, they lead to everywhere in the world.
| Upstream from Lechlade’s Halfpenny Bridge. The Thames’s uppermost boatyard can be glimpsed through the trees. |
Start: Lechlade (no train station; buses from Swindon via Highworth)
End: Cricklade (no train station; buses to Swindon)
Length: 16.8km/10.5 miles
Location: Gloucestershire – Cotswold; Wiltshire – Swindon, Wiltshire
Topics: Lechlade, the Thames and Severn Canal and limit of navigation, Inglesham, Kempsford, Castle Eaton, Cricklade
Lechlade
Close to the confluence with the seasonal River Leach, whence its name, Lechlade is rich in thousands of years of archaeological remnants: a neolithic cursus, Bronze Age barrows, Iron Age grain stores, and a villa in the orbit of the Roman administrative centre of Corinium (now Cirencester). But the current settlement is likely late Anglo-Saxon in origin, and was sufficiently established by the Norman conquest to appear as Leceladein the 1086 Domesday survey.
| The Cotswolds are known for their beige Jurassic limestone – rich in fossils, but also resistant to weather, easy to split into blocks, and thus a much-quarried building material which gives this region's towns and villages their distinct visual character. |
Typically, William the Conqueror granted the Lechlade manor to one of his minions from the French-speaking Norman nobility. Perched on a major London-to-Gloucester road, it was perhaps to support struggling wayfarers that one of that minion’s descendants, Isabella de Ferrers, set up the St. John the Baptist’s hospital-monastery down by the Leach’s mouth in 1205. The St. John’s Bridge it built there, rebuilt in the 1880s, remains the principal crossing for road traffic today.
But it was in trade that this town would build its future. In 1210 it was granted a market charter by King John (of Magna Carta confrontation fame five years later, with Isabella’s second husband one of the barons who forced him to the table). So began Lechlade’s rise as an inland port, feeding downriver the lucrative goods for which it grew to serve as a waystation: Cotswold wool, Worcester salt, Taynton stone, and of course, Gloucester cheese.
| Lechlade town centre, with St. Lawrence’s Church as its focal point. The town’s famous marketplace made use of this space till its final closure in 1928. |
Lechlade’s sizeable church suggests how lucrative. St. Lawrence’s is one of the Cotswold ‘wool churches’, larger-than-life piles of prestige built on huge donations from local wool farmers and merchants as a statement of their sway. It grew up in the 1470s, partly out of materials from Isabella’s priory which shut down in financial difficulties a few years earlier. Decked in elaborate stonework with plentiful carvings of the woolmongers and their clout-bearing emblems, the church’s tall spire soars above the surrounding landscape, thus doing long practical service too as a landmark for river or road travellers straggling through these rural reaches.
| The spire was added around 1510 by Katherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife, who came into control of the Lechlade manor at that time. She also appears to have got its dedication changed to St. Lawrence, who was Spanish like her. |
| Apparently they’re very proud of their brass chandelier. Later this place’s atmospheric churchyard would inspire a poem by Percy Shelley, for which in turn they named its path after him – likely making this one of this country’s few churches to name part of its premises after an atheist. |
Lechlade attained its heyday on the approach to industrialisation, as its trade grew increasingly commercialised on the development of the turnpike, coaching and river transport systems. Wharves, inns and alehouses flourished in support of this traffic, which exploded onto a whole new order of magnitude with the completion of the Thames and Severn Canal a kilometre upstream in 1789. With the navigable Thames, London and all, now linked to the Severn – Britain’s largest river, with its major western ports – Lechlade became a junction not only for wool, salt and cheese but also enormous quantities of coal, iron, copper, tin, and assorted textiles and foodstuffs travelling down to the capital from England’s western provinces, while up the other way came timber and gunpowder, much destined no doubt for the slave-trading atrocities of Bristol.
| The Riverside Inn, by Lechlade’s Halfpenny Bridge, was formerly a warehouse on one of Lechlade’s bustling wharves from this period. A shade of the wharf itself lives on as the boat hire at right. |
| The Halfpenny Bridge dates from 1792, three years after the Thames and Severn Canal, when it replaced a ferry as business grew crowded. Supposedly pronounced heypenny, it refers to the toll (in the old English currency) that it charged pedestrians to cross till 1839, when they angrily got it abolished. |
As elsewhere, this prosperity receded in the nineteenth century as railways replaced rivers and canals as the favoured industrial transport network. This relieved Lechlade of its function as a key junction, but it did get a railway station of its own in 1873, only to lose it in 1962 to the Beeching Axe. By the late 1920s the Thames and Severn Canal was a dilapidated wreck. Though no longer the flourishing trade post of old, Lechlade took advantage of new forms of road, rail and river transport to revive itself as a low-key recreational oasis, turning its traditional agriculture to feed a new influx of rowers, cruisers and tourists. Its most recent transformation came on account of the world wars, which saw the Cotswolds sprout a smattering of RAF airbases. Two of these, RAF Brize Nortonand RAF Fairford, remain operational as major employers in these parts, driving some late-day population growth and residential sprawl out along Lechlade’s north and west roads.
| So persists Lechlade – much quieter than it used to be, and known mainly for its status as a picturesque Ultima Thule for the recreational boaters of today’s Thames. |
The Thames and Severn Canal, and Limit of Navigation
Setting off upstream, we approach a momentous threshold.
| Through the trees is Lechlade Marina, the river’s final boatyard. Note the Ukrainian flag on the second-last boat upstream. |
| Human activity swiftly gives way to the open fields that constitute most of what remains. |
| Some gabions they’ve placed to combat heavy erosion along the riverbank here. This approach to the Thames and Severn Canal was a critical connection in industrial times and would have likely experienced much engineering for ease of traffic. |
| But today, this footbridge is as far as they go. Virtually all watercraft are advised to turn back here. |
Here the Thames and Severn Canal joined the river, alongside the mouth of a tributary called the Coln. Ostensibly an idyllic Cotswold limestone stream, the Coln is in fact one of many English rivers now made filthy through the illegal dumping of sewage by unaccountable water companies.
| The River Coln enters the Thames at right. The debris behind the willow stands on the derelict ruin of Inglesham Lock, at the head of the Thames and Severn Canal. |
| The Inglesham Round House, one of five that housed the canal’s keepers. The cylindrical design was a Thames and Severn Canal peculiarity; some of them, like this one, also featured an inverted conical roof to catch rainwater. After the canal’s decline it was converted to a private residence. Notice also the ruined footing of a footbridge (at right) which crossed to the canal’s towpath. |
This site is quite the paradox. For all practical purposes this is the limit of navigation, the beginning and end of the line. From here on the natural river prevails: wild, swift, shallow, packed with weeds and thorns and rushes and low-hanging branches, with no further locks, weirs, boatyards or other facilities to get anything heavier than a canoe out of trouble. But for the brief century in which the canal was in operation, this beginning and end magically became a middle: a water-bridge, the central passage between the east and west rivers, the North and Celtic Seas. For this most fleeting of moments, this flit of an English attempt at an industrial modernity, the Lades, the passages, consummated their name.
Like that modernity, the Thames and Severn Canal has gone. Also like that modernity, there are people attempting to revive it – namely the Cotswold Canals Trust, whose armies of volunteers have since 1972 been pursuing a painstaking multi-phase scheme to restore it as a recreational waterway. Further like English modernity, these efforts have struggled with inadequate funding and greedy private landowners, and so remain, at best, a long-term prospect.
Inglesham
Here then are the true headwaters, uncontrolled, uncontrollable, above and beyond.
| And inevitably, lurking thick in its fog, there are nuuo. |
| They see you. |
| And so does...whatever chilling manifestation this is. Up here the rules of the human world no longer apply. Be ready to encounter monsters, nightmares or apparitions from any other level. |
The floodplain across from Lechlade houses what’s left of Inglesham, one of the many medieval ‘lost villages’ in these parts. Most of its remaining hundred or so residents have long since retreated up the road to the farming hamlet of Upper Inglesham, leaving only a tiny cluster on the riverside meadows...
| Inglesham. |
...and among them, a remarkable surprise.
Inglesham’s St. John the Baptist Church is redundant – that is, no longer in use by the English religious establishment, and left standing only as a piece of civil heritage. We came across something similar all the way back in Boveney, near Eton: a mysterious little temple whose wood and stone, though assembled in service of English Christianity, seem soaked with whispers of deeper animistic secrets.
| The church’s exterior. The building dates to around 1205, but has elements that go back to Anglo-Saxon times. |
Extraordinarily, it has survived largely unaltered to the present day. This makes it one of the very few churches of such age to withstand successive tides of English religious violence, from Henry VIII’s assault on the monasteries to the iconoclastic sledgehammers of the Puritans. Anything that survived those was then liable to get killed not out of hate by its enemies but, as is so often the case, by supposed friends insisting it was for their own good – that is, the over-enthusiastic Victorian restorers who wrecked the churches’ ancient arts, architectures and atmospheres with flashy and extravagant refurbishments.
That this church escaped that fate is principally thanks to our recent acquaintance William Morris, who bristled with resentment at what he saw as the vandalisms and forgeries of these destructive ‘restorations’. His Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings advanced an alternative approach, of repairing and protecting them as treasures of cultural heritage, and in this capacity Morris personally oversaw this church’s sensitive repair in the 1880s.
| As a result of Morris fending off the ‘restorers’, this church retains rare archaic features and fixtures – an architectural simplicity, carved wooden screens and box pews, wall paintings – that afford it a profoundly different character from most English churches today. |
| The wall paintings are mostly Biblical texts or illustrations. They span the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, often with paintings from different periods layered on top of each other. Despite Morris’s efforts they remain under grave threat from water ingress, especially after the theft of lead from the roof in 2017. The Churches Conservation Trust is currently trying to raise money to fix it. |
| One of the building’s most ancient elements: an Anglo-Saxon stone carving of Mary and the baby Jesus. Though a common Christian motif, this is a staggering survival in a spiritually-insecure country which smashed up most of its ancient religious monuments like this one. |
| And of course it has an armoured phantom who comes out at night. |
