Thames Head, they’ve called these meadows since time immemorial. Here, they say, the river is born, in dandelion carpets beneath a broad Cotswold sky.
Folk reckoning was buttressed over the centuries by journalists’ and travellers’ articles, scholarly opinion, and eventually by formal recognition from the Ordnance Survey and Thames Conservancy. On account of the last a marker stone now stands in these fields, officially recognising its base as the source of the River Thames.
But is it?
| One of the river’s many headwater channels runs through the village of Ashton Keynes. It claims this channel as the true river. But who can say for sure? |
| Cricklade’s North Meadow, putting on its annual display of snake’s head fritillaries. |
Above Cricklade the river breaks into a maze of headwaters and ceases to exist in the singular. These waterways’ differences in length, depth and flow are trivial now, and they come and go with the seasons, making any attempt to designate one or another as the true or mainThames arbitrary. However, if you follow one of these channels – officially a tributary, the Churn – you will come to a spot further north called Seven Springs, where a different marker stone, backed up by a notice from the local council, identifies that site, ‘despite the controversy over the years’, as the ultimate source of the river.
There’s a problem here. It’s a sensitive one. This is the English’s principal river. It's fed and watered them, inspired them, flooded them, borne them in and out on their migrations, their trades, their wars, their nation-building dreams, their industrial and imperial madnesses – but where, in the first place, does it come from?
Clearly this dispute had all the ingredients for violent upheaval across these restive western provinces, and in 1937 it made it into parliament. The representative for Stroud, a Mr. Perkins, whose constituency included Seven Springs, insisted to the Agriculture Minister that Seven Springs was in fact the ‘correct’ source on the grounds that it was fourteen miles further from the estuary than Thames Head, as well as twice its height above sea level. The next Ordnance Survey map, he argued, would do well to mark it accordingly.
This would indeed have reflected established geographic practice for reckoning a river’s source, while not incidentally making the Thames longer than the Severn. But the pertinent fact wasn’t one of distances or elevations. Rather it was that Mr. Morrison, the Agriculture Minister, just happened to be the MP for Cirencester whose territory included Thames Head. And so he replied: ‘I understand that it is not an invariable rule...to regard as the source...the source of the tributary most distant from its estuary’. Further challenged, to laughter, that Thames Head also periodically dries up (likewise true), he simply shut the matter down: ‘I am aware of these considerations, but they do not alter my view, as confirmed, that the River Thames rises in my constituency and not in that of my honourable friend.’
As so often in this world, it seems the question of the source is a question not of truth, but of power.
| In that connection, let the statement of this field and sky offer some strength, however small, to whoever needs it right now. |
What says the river itself?
Well, the reality of rivers is that they don’t gush from a single point. They accumulate, diverse and disparate, all the way down their drainage basins. For a few seconds youare a source too, whenever in the course of a walk like this you spill your flask or pee in the bushes. Then it flows into the sea, rises as cloud, and falls as rain to begin the journey all over again.
In which case, perhaps the nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Huxley, in an 1869 geography lecture, put it best:
The source of the Thames comes from nowhere; it turns round in a circle.
Perhaps much else does too – but not this journey. 250 kilometres and two and a half years from the ‘cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile and death’ of the estuary, as Marlow in Heart of Darkness had it – and finding this still quite a fair description all the way up – we attain the edge-of-the-world sunlit slopes where the water’s trail is lost. And because this expedition (or perhaps thankfully, this text) has to end somewhere, let it take as its destination, arbitrarily of course, the place where centuries’ weight in custom marks, if not the One True Source, then the human commemoration of those water molecules’ reunion, there and everywhere, into that party which, in its journey together, has come to be known as the river – the Dark River – the Thames.
| The river upstream from Cricklade’s Town Bridge, which helpfully labels it right where the name starts to lose stable meaning. |
Start: Cricklade (no train station; buses to Swindon)
End: Thames Head (nearest station: Kemble)
Length: 19.7km/12.25 miles
Location: Wiltshire – Wiltshire; Gloucestershire – Cotswold
Topics: Cricklade North Meadow, the Cotswold Water Park, Ashton Keynes, Somerford Keynes, Ewen, Kemble, Thames Head and the Source
Cricklade North Meadow
Above the first (or last) town on the Thames (as Cricklade styles itself), the Thames, the Churn, and a network of smaller braids have created a patchwork of seasonal flood meadows. The largest of these is Cricklade’s natural highlight: North Meadow, a common hay meadow whose traditional management practices have made it an extraordinarily diverse national nature reserve.
| Smaller meadows buffer the main North Meadow as well as the housing along Cricklade’s northern flank. |
| The houses follow what was originally the north wall of the Cricklade Anglo-Saxon burh. Further west you have these, part of its twentieth-century residential expansion. |
As is in evidence here, Cricklade’s fortified settlement has long been surrounded by agriculture.
| Horses are attended to at this small riverside farm. |
| The weir on this site apparently used to belong to Cricklade’s West Mill, till it was demolished in the 1920s or 30s by the Thames Conservancy. Its replacement appears to be an Environment Agency gauging weir. |
| North Meadow. |
North Meadow operates under the Lammas land system: hay is planted in February and harvested around Lammas Day(traditionally August 12th), after which the meadow is kept open as a common flood-pasture for grazing animals through the remaining half of the year. Over eight centuries this cycle, still administered by Cricklade’s ancestral manorial court system (the Court Leet) with more recent support from Natural England, has turned this meadow into one of the biologically richest grasslands in the country. Its ecosystem harbours over 250 species of wild plant, but one in particular stands as Cricklade’s special symbol.
| One with whose peak flowering this walk just happens to coincide, producing a breathtaking final display to see out this journey. |
The snake’s head fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris, used to grow widespread in this country till centuries of meadow clearances for agriculture and over-collection for markets and flower shows drove its wild population to the brink. Now protected by law, Cricklade’s North Meadow happens to be this flower’s main surviving stronghold; the fritillaries here are thought to make up some 80% of those remaining in England.
| Most of the fritillary flowers are purple, but white ones are on the increase. |
| People used to pick these freely, but it’s now prohibited. The meadow has sustained damage from trampling, as well as from dogs disturbing ground-nesting birds and leaving deposits which pollute the soil with phosphorus. There are now severe penalties for even leaving the footpaths. |
| Hard as it might be to believe, this little stream is the Thames. |
| Supposedly this bridge used to carry a small canal, a branch of the Thames and Severn Canal now repurposed as a public bridleway. |
If you’re here in good season you’ll want to take your time in North Meadow, so make sure to factor it into your walking plans.
| Don’t forget the plentiful non-fritillary species either. The rich plant life supports thriving communities of insects, reptiles and birds. |
| You can check this webpage for live updates on the fritillary situation courtesy of Cricklade Court Leet. |
Then there’s a little more farmland to cross.
| Fortunately there are nuuo. |
| Like this. |
This region is not actually quite as remote as the sweeping peripheries from here to the Oxford Basin. The invisible presence here is Cirencester: a market town north up the Churn (whence Ciren) that was the Iron Age capital of the Dobunni people, before their Roman allies fortified and developed it as Corinium Dobunnorum, the second-largest city in Roman Britain. Later re-emerging as a rich Cotswold wool town, it is now the effective capital of the Cotswold Hills and has dragged a constellation of high-prestige agriculture, trade and tourism into an orbital zone which sweeps across the Thames’s springs.
| This bridge used to carry a railway from Cirencester to Swindon, a large railway junction town down in Wiltshire. |
| The railway lasted till the 1960s, when it fell victim to the Beeching Axe. Its noticeably straight embankment survives as this riverside footpath. |
At length the river curls around the tiny hamlet of Hailstone Hill, an outpost of Cricklade – and then is ambushed by a most audacious geographical rearrangement.
| This area is home to a large population of great and blue tits. They like to wait till you have your camera exactly ready then fly off at the last second. |
Cotswold Water Park (East)
The Cotswold Hills are renowned for their yellow mid-Jurassic limestone, about 150 million years old and much in favour as a local building material. But in low-lying valleys like the Thames’s, a more recent half-million years of Ice Age glacial melts have carpeted this rock in huge deposits of gravelly debris. Over a still more recent fifty years, industrial-scale quarrying for this gravel to make concrete has carved this landscape to pieces: gouging out pits, ripping apart hedgerows and waterways, and throwing the water table into upheaval right here amidst the river’s ancestral springs.
As they deplete the old pits and move on to new ones, they leave the river’s channels to fill them in. The outcome is a sprawling mosaic of some 150 artificial lakes, and increasing – which, as though it makes it all okay, have together been re-imagined into the Cotswold Water Park.
| The first glimpse of this handiwork is the Cleveland Lakes, which make up the southeastern-most marl lake cluster. They encompass one of the Water Park’s several waterfowl-rich nature reserves. |
| This atmospheric old farm bridge retires on the lakes’ southern perimeter. |
The Cotswold Water Park now sprawls over a hundred square kilometres and incorporates a matching sprawl of human activity. Large swathes have emerged as thriving wildlife sites and received protection as nature reserves or Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), but the smiling face of the thing is recreational: a middle-class wonderland of sailing, fishing, birdwatching, watersports and holiday cottage retreats.
| Camping and boating on the Cleveland Lakes. The Water Park was previously run by a company, but it went defunct in 2012 when its chief executive was imprisoned for massive fraud after pocketing some £700,000 at the Water Park’s expense. It’s now overseen by a coalition of registered charity trusts. |
| Water-skating in action, complete with ramp for high-decibel somersaulting. Precious contact point between humans and nature? Or shocking desecration of the Thames’s hallowed spawning grounds? The debate goes on. |
| Across the lake, a gravel-hungry yellow monster prowls through the trees. |
