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Trewsbury Mead–Lechlade–Grafton Lock
‘There’s a little cup in the Cotswold hills
Which a spring in a meadow bubbles and fills’
Bret Harte, ‘The Birds of Cirencester’, 1898
My journey begins at Thames Head, at Trewsbury Mead, near the village of Kemble. This has been known since Victorian times as the ‘lovely birth-place’ of the River Thames, but it can be a difficult place to find. ‘The exact spot is quested for with difficulty,’ noted Charles G. Harper in his 1910 book Thames Valley Villages, ‘and when the traveler has found it, he is, after all, not sure of his find . . . and even the road-men and the infrequent wayfarers . . . appear uncertain. That it is “over there, somewhere” is the most exact information the enquirer is likely, at a venture, to obtain.’ While picturesque old histories of the Thames had painted ‘dainty vignettes’ of Thames Head ‘with a little country-girl in homely pinafore dipping a foot in the water as it gushes forth’, Harper found a buried well under ‘fallen masses of the dull, ochre-coloured earth’. Nearby pumping stations had ‘greedily sucked up all the water in summer’ when the place was parched, although in winter the spring could still burst out three feet high and the meadow was a water-logged morass and often a lake.
Today Thames Head remains the river’s official source, according to the Environment Agency and Ordnance Survey, and it’s still not easy to find. After a three-hour drive from London I park at the Thames Head Inn, around half a mile away, where the barman responds to my request for directions by telling me I can’t miss it. So I rush recklessly down a busy section of the A433, with no footpath for pedestrians, and turn on to a path, then it’s over a stile and across the railway line, looking nervously right and left for trains.
I stand on a small hill looking down at a patchwork of fields, green and burnished brown, the undulating line of a drystone wall, two cows in the far distance. I can’t see any signposts; which way is the source? I head down the hill and wade in shin-high water through a gate, the beige clay giving way beneath me like quicksand. By the time I see the Thames Head stone in the distance my legs are sodden from the knees down and my partner is muttering ‘this is the most stupid thing you’ve ever asked me to do’.
In front of me the grass is a luminous green, the landscape laid with stretches of water like stepping stones; a clump of shiny white snowdrops are tucked away behind a fence. The mud around the stone is pitted with boot marks; I’m not the first person here this morning.
Until a few years ago this was also home to a statue of Father Thames, but it was removed downstream to St John’s Lock after visitors started chipping pieces off as mementos. Retracing my steps I meet a woman and a man walking a dog. They live seven miles away but it’s their first time here. ‘It’s just one of those things I’ve always wanted to see,’ says the woman. The man is clutching a map and asks, ‘Where is it then?’ I tell him they are just opposite the stone that marks the source; it’s a few hundred metres away. ‘What?’ he asks, ‘that lake? That’s it?’ he laughs. ‘No gift shop?’
Back at the Thames Head Inn the source of the Thames is said to be the most common topic of conversation around the bar. While the pub is around 250 years old, it only adopted its new name a couple of decades ago. ‘People come in and ask where the source is on a daily basis,’ says Nichola King, who has run the pub for the past eight years. ‘And they come from all over the world. Last year we had two Japanese TV crews filming here. This is the source, I’m not going to argue with that, it brings me trade! And you can see how it becomes a river, it looks like a river. But for years there can be no water and, yes, people can be disappointed; they say, “is that it?”’
Thames Head also featured in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, filmed by Danny Boyle. ‘It was supposed to be Thames Head, but it was too dry so they built a “replica” and then used some real footage,’ explains Nichola. ‘Four days after the crew left, there was water! But the place hasn’t really been wet for years. People don’t swim here, they cheat a bit and start at other places.’ However, during a freezing cold winter a few years ago the pub’s chefs decided to go for a splash: ‘there was some significant water so they went in in their clothes, they’re a hardy bunch, then they walked back. They haven’t had the opportunity since then.’
The pub boldly declares its link with the Thames, with a frieze of Father Thames on the outside wall, photos and maps in the entranceway, a 50p postcard of the source on 1 January 2000, and inside a stone bust of Father Thames on top of an old sewing machine. But Thames Head’s claim to fame as the source has been under dispute for at least 200 years. ‘Like the source of the Nile, the position of the original fountain of the Thames has been variously assigned, and its birth place has been almost as much contested as that of Homer,’ wrote the Scottish poet and author Tobias Smollett in 1801. In Victorian times some attributed the head of the Thames to a ‘clear fountain’ in the vicinity of Cricklade; others preferred the ‘rivulets which advance from Swindon and Highworth in Wiltshire’, or Seven Springs, a hamlet near Cheltenham and the source of the River Churn. ‘What is the source of a river?’ asked Smollett. ‘There is no obvious one, right answer. In the end we are not dealing with a scientific issue but in the broadest sense a spiritual issue.’ In 1937 there was a lively discussion in the House of Commons when Mr Perkins, MP for Stroud, which included Seven Springs, objected to the Ordnance Survey Map showing the source of the Thames as Thames Head. The Minister for Agriculture, Mr W.S. Morrison, who also happened to be MP for Cirencester and thus Thames Head, insisted this was correct. When a peeved Mr Perkins asked if the Minister was ‘aware that the source known as “Thames Head” periodically dries up’, an Honourable Member interjected to ask, ‘Why don’t you?’ Today, however, there are plaques on the walls above the springs at Seven Springs with the inscription: ‘HIC TUUS O TAMESINE PATER SEPTEMGEMINUS FONS’ – ‘Here, O Father Thames, is your sevenfold source’.
Whether or not Thames Head is the source, it’s near impossible to swim from here. Instead it is downstream near the town of Lechlade where the Thames meets the Severn Canal and the River Coln that it becomes a navigable river. ‘Where Lechlade sees thy current strong,/First waft the unlaboring bark along,’ wrote Thomas Love Peacock in 1810. Five years later he accompanied Percy Bysshe Shelley on a journey to Lechlade by boat, having set out from Old Windsor with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her stepbrother Charles Clairmont. The plan was to travel to the river’s source, but they failed to ‘draw our boat up to the very spring of the Thames,’ wrote Clairmont, and by the time they got three miles above Lechlade ‘the weeds became so enormously thick & high, that all three of us tugging could not stir the empty boat an inch’.
The shallow water didn’t even cover the hoofs of cows standing in the middle to drink, while at Inglesham Weir, remembered Peacock, ‘a solitary sluice was hanging by a chain, swinging in the wind and creaking dismally’. So the boating party turned around and spent two nights at Lechlade, where Shelley wrote the poem ‘A Summer Evening Churchyard’ in St Lawrence’s churchyard, where ‘Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,/Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen’. The path through the graveyard today bears his name – Shelley’s Walk. Perhaps it was this Thames trip that inspired him to write, ‘rivers are not like roads, the work of the hands of man; they imitate mind, which wanders at will over pathless deserts, and flows through nature’s loveliest recesses’.
In the sixteenth century Lechlade had been a flourishing port, shipping goods to London, and it continued as an important inland trade route with the introduction of the Thames and Severn Canal in 1789. Docks were built and Lechlade became a loading place for cargo. But by the mid-1860s barges were now ‘almost unknown’ noted the press, part of a general ‘decay and desuetude of the river’. In London the Thames was filthy; at Lechlade there were navigation problems.
In the coming decade leisure traffic replaced the barges, and rowing and
punting became popular. Victorian Lechlade was a pretty little town, where boats could be hired and the river ran in ‘a goodly stream’ under the bridge. Yet I can find very few reports of any swimming in the period. In 1855 a man named Samuel Hope, who was ‘in the service of the Vicar of Lechlade’, drowned while bathing with some friends. He got ‘put out of his depth into a large hole in the river, although cautioned by his companions not to do so’. Like most people, neither Hope nor his friends could swim.
Then, in 1905, the town launched an annual water carnival on the Thames on August bank holiday, and the following year the Lechlade Swimming Club took control of events. It’s not clear when the club was formed, but like other Thames clubs they organised river races and fêtes. In 1909 the press reported fine weather, good attendance and a programme which started at two o’clock and ‘kept the majority interested until well after dark’. There were boat races, including a ‘mirth-provoking’ tub race, and a 300 yards team swimming handicap in which five teams competed, four from Swindon and one from Bristol.
The Lechlade Swimming Club was still running the carnival in 1920, with gold medals now on offer, and it had a bathing hut near the Round House, a late eighteenth-century building that had probably once been a canal and lock keeper’s house. In 1907 a Diving Championship was also launched at Lechlade, and although this created ‘very little interest’ the press accurately predicted the sport would become popular, for ‘as a spectacular display there is nothing to equal diving’. In 1913 the Western Counties Diving Championships were held at Lechlade where now ‘a large crowd’ witnessed the Thames swimming and diving events, including a ‘50 Yards Ladies’ race. The town continued to host diving galas until at least 1935. That year Cecily Cousens, a seventeen-year-old from Swindon who had recently won the women’s high diving championship of England and a bronze medal at the Commonwealth Games, ‘received injuries at Lechlade while practising from a temporary platform erected for a gala at which she was to give an exhibition. During her dive she struck a boulder and she was in a dazed condition when assisted out.’ However, she recovered sufficiently to resume swimming.
Others weren’t so lucky. In 1929 a student in Cirencester and a ‘lady friend’ had hired a rowing boat and when they reached the Round House they changed into bathing clothes. They then walked along the bank in the direction of Inglesham where the man dived in, immediately got into difficulties and drowned. The inquest found that although it looked like the bank shelved gradually, in fact there was a sudden drop. The student couldn’t swim, and when his friend tried to help him, believing the water was shallow enough to stand up in, she ran down the bank, got stuck in the mud and couldn’t move.
In the early twentieth century, with the closure of the canal, trade through the town dried up and Lechlade soon became a popular place for retirement. The broadcaster Piers Plowright used to come here in the 1940s, after the war, for family holidays: ‘It was where I played and imagined and began to write.’ In a recent radio programme Piers retraced the course of his beloved river along with the different stages of his life. In the process he wrote his own Thames-side stomp:
From the Head of the River
To Lechlade Town
Nothing goes up and nothing goes down
Till the water gathers from out of the hills
Where childhood ends and history spills.
London children were also taken here for countryside holidays in the 1960s. One remembers, ‘we were sent on holiday by the Country Holiday Fund. We were inner-city kids. The place was so beautiful and everyone so kind. I remember swimming in the Thames and there being a bridge. It was a world apart from our life in London. I have never forgotten it.’
While early records of swimming at Lechlade may be scarce, it’s clear that people have bathed here since at least Victorian times, and while it could be a dangerous pastime by the early 1900s it had evolved into more organised displays of entertainment and sporting prowess, particularly diving. This then gave way to a more leisurely use of the Thames as an escape into the country for city dwellers who were free to enjoy the river.
Today Lechlade’s website describes the place as ‘a small attractive riverside town’, with ‘a healthy tourist trade, particularly in the summer when the Thames is busy with cruisers, narrowboats and small boats’. However, it warns: ‘Swimmers beware; the depth of water is variable with many undertows along the reach above Halfpenny Bridge.’ But this is a favourite place for modern river swimmers. ‘Swims of up to two miles are possible if you plan your entry and exit points,’ advises Wildswim.com, while Michael Worthington in his swimming logbook I Love the Thames promises ‘proper swimming, a current that whisks you along and amazingly little human presence to spoil things’.
So loved is this stretch of the river that in 2003 the newly formed adventure company SwimTrek started a four-day swimming holiday from Lechlade. The following year veteran river swimmer Frank Chalmers signed up, swimming during the day and sleeping on the accompanying barge at night. ‘Rivers define their people,’ he says, ‘every river has a character, with different industries and cultures, and I thought the River Thames was great. It’s quite narrow going down from Lechlade and there are lots of swans. The adult swans are really protective of their cygnets, and when you see their wings raised in anger six feet above you, you think: “Oh my God, this is dangerous.” But the support canoe would block you in so the swans didn’t feel threatened. A swimmer’s view is completely different from a walker’s view. Early on in the Thames, the river is cocooned and you don’t see the horizon – it’s like a flume that you swim down. When you’re walking, the river seems to punctuate the countryside. When you are in the river you might see nothing except the water and the bank, and then suddenly you are jolted upright by the blue of a kingfisher flashing across your vision.’
In 2005 property developer Andy Nation, the first person to swim the length of the non-tidal Thames, started his journey about a mile upstream from Lechlade at the Round House, ‘because that’s the first place you don’t scrape your knuckles on the ground when you try to swim’. Born in Ilford, Essex, in 1949, his first charity swim was in 1970 when he completed 240 lengths of Barkingside swimming pool to raise £400 for a cancer charity, with his sponsors offering 1d per length. He went on to raise money in a variety of ways, such as flying on the wings of a Tiger Moth biplane, and when it came to the Thames, he says, ‘I did it because no one had done it before. People’s reactions were, “you’re mad, it’s never been done and it’s too long”.’ But Andy covered over seventeen miles on his first day, and in the end swam 147 miles in twelve days to Teddington, where the Port of London Authority told him to stop, despite his initial aim of going all the way to Southend. In the process he raised £20,000 for the Anthony Nolan Trust.
Andy says the non-tidal Thames is very clean; the only problem was boat discharge and at one point ‘there was a boat coming towards me and I got a slap in the face, I went high but not high enough and got two mouthfuls, luckily it went to my stomach not my lungs. It didn’t taste very nice. I burped and spluttered and carried on. Then I went to that night’s accommodation, ran a hot bath, and threw up in it. I was ill the rest of that day, it was suggested I take a day’s rest.’
And what did he think about while swimming?
‘Absolutely everything, the mind wanders. When I trained I counted the lengths but when doing a continuous swim I thought about my overnight accommodation, whether I’m pacing myself too fast or too slow, whether the escort boat is doing what it should be doing. You think and you swim, that’s all you’re doing, though you can come under a bridge and think, I wonder which bridge this is?
‘You don’t hear much in the water except for propellers and you don’t know if it’s a boat coming towards you or if it’s behind you. There are signs. As a boat gets close you wait for a bow wave. The first little wave will tell you where the boat is coming from; if it rolls over your shoulder you don’t worry because although the next one wil
l be bigger, if it’s from behind you, you will float, so you can maintain your normal breathing pattern. If the boat is coming from in front of you then you will get a slap on the forehead with the first little bow wave and then you have to raise yourself up or you will breathe in a mouthful of Thames from the next wave!’ For sustenance on his trip, Andy ate Mars Bars, sandwiches, and ‘a supplement in a squeezy sachet, it was like strawberry jam, it was so thick that I had to rinse my mouth out in the Thames it was so horrible. I was eating about 10,000 calories a day and still losing weight.’
The year after Andy’s swim Lewis Pugh also started near Lechlade, in order to swim the length of the river, without a wetsuit. Then thirty-six, Lewis was already a noted endurance and cold-water swimmer. Born in Plymouth, his family emigrated to South Africa when he was ten. He returned to England in his mid-twenties, and after reading International Law at Cambridge worked as a maritime lawyer in the City of London, at the same time serving as a Reservist in the British Special Air Service. He then gave up his job to campaign for the protection of the environment. The year of his Thames swim Lewis had already completed an expedition to Antarctica, and the year before he’d been to Spitsbergen in the Arctic. Returning to England he was shocked that the threat to the wildlife environment he’d seen on his travels wasn’t being taken more seriously, so in conjunction with the World Wide Fund for Nature he came up with the idea of swimming the Thames.
England was then in the middle of a major drought, water rationing had started in London, and Lewis hoped his swim would draw attention to climate change and show that people didn’t have to travel far to see what was happening in their own environment. ‘It was the toughest swim I’d ever done,’ he says today. ‘I was hugely unprepared. A couple of months before I did a recce looking at the flow with Nic Marshall [a friend from South Africa who was to accompany him on his swim]. We threw sticks into the water near Lechlade, Nic ran a hundred metres and we timed how long it took for the sticks to get to him.’
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