Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  There are the Whalebone Marshes and the Halstow Marshes, Dagnam Saltings and the Grain and Allhallows Marshes, lying low and flat across the horizon. There are salt-marshes and brackish fresh-water marshes, the latter used for grazing. Some of these grazing marshes, however, are now being turned to cereals. There are no trees, because no deeply rooting plant can grow in marshland. It is hard to imagine a more desolate landscape. Yet, with its constantly changing light, it has its own beauty. It is the home of sea-lavender and golden samphire, and of the flowing salt-marsh grasses; its creeks and pools are fringed with sea-aster. And there are the endless birds, the ducks and heron and geese and curlews, the sandpipers and plovers and redshanks, that love the loneliness of the marshes.

  The communities of the marshes have always been smaller, and more isolated, than those upon firmer ground. Of the Hundred of Hoo, the area of territory between the Thames and the river Medway, it has been said that “it is the last place God made—and never finished.” A clergyman of the neighbourhood once wrote that “it was understood to be an out-of-the-way, wild sort of place in which, unless obliged to do so, people did not live.” And it is wild—or, rather, it has traces of wildness about it. This is not the wildness of nature, but the wildness of desolation. It is not a human place. You can walk along the river wall of the Hundred of Hoo for miles, between the river and the grass, without encountering anyone at all. It was notorious as the place for smugglers. The hamlet of Allhallows was, according to the eighteenth-century antiquarian, Edward Hasted, in “a most unfrequented and dreary situation.” In the nineteenth century few people visited the Isle of Grain or the Isle of Sheppey. The inhabitants of Grain—the Pannells and the Willsons and the Frys—considered themselves to be a race apart. The population of St. Mary’s Hoo increased by four people over the entire course of the nineteenth century. The peninsula of East Tilbury, and the remote Canvey Island, were once entirely estranged from the ordinary current of life. The inhabitants of the estuary were known as “Stackies” or “Stiffies.” The towns that persisted, such as Gravesend and Greenhithe, Grays and Erith, managed to survive because they were built upon the few patches of firm ground in the vicinity. There is chalk beneath Greenhithe, and gravel beneath Erith.

  There are other names here which seem like some form of atavistic remembrance, some token of an ancient and now forgotten past. The names of the villages, Fobbing and Corringham, Mucking and Thurrock, have survived for a thousand years. From the entry of the Medway Canal to Shorne a stretch of water was known as “the Priveys” from Shorne to Higham the name of the river was “Down the hole.” From Gravesend to Tilbury the water was called “the Blockhouse” or “the Jerkhouse,” the derivations of which are uncertain. But the meanings of some names are clear enough. The wide reach of the river from Gravesend and Tilbury seawards is known as “the Hope.” The submerged forest near West Thurrock, dating from the primaeval past, was known as “the Roots.” In a place where there were once few signs of change, old names linger. Havengore comes from the Anglo-Saxon root of “gore,” meaning a triangular tract of land. The name of Maplin derives from the twigs, known as “mapples,” from which brooms were once made. Holy Haven has become, over the centuries, Hole Haven.

  It has always been an area of sickness. It has been estimated that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almost half of the population suffered from malaria or what was then known as the “ague.” Thus William Lambarde, in The Perambulation of Kent (1576), noted that “Hooh is taken from ‘Hoh’ in Old English which means Sorrowe or Sicknesse, a suitable name for this unwholesome Hundred.” In his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) Defoe noted that in the marshes it was not uncommon for the men to have had “from five to six, to fourteen or fifteen wives,” but this was the consequence of mortality rather than profligacy. The men of the marshes had grown up in that unhealthy locality and were “season’d to the place” but the women, from the “uplands,” were not so fortunate. “When they came out of their native air into the marshes among the fogs and damps, then they presently changed their complexion, got an ague or two, and seldom held it above half a year.” The two rows of thirteen little tombstones in Cooling Churchyard, the inspiration for the gloomy scene at the beginning of Great Expectations, are no doubt the tokens of infantine malaria. The inhabitants of this feverish territory were described in the eighteenth century as of a “dingy yellow colour,” and it was reported that “it is not unusual to see a poor man, his wife, and whole family of five or six children hovering over their fire in the hovel, shaking with an ague all at the same time.” The children were given opium to keep them from harm, so that they became “wasted” and “wizened like monkeys,” while the adults indulged excessively in what were called “spirituous liquors.”

  There were many who came to the estuary for the sport of shooting wildfowl, but they “often return with an Essex ague on their backs, which they find a heavier load than the fowls they have shot.” In the nineteenth century the common question among local people was “Have you had your ague this spring?” A parliamentary committee, established in 1864, established that the cause of the infection was the ubiquitous anopheles mosquito that bred in the stagnant waters of the marshlands. The parasite it carried has now been identified as Plasmodium vivax. This may be no more comprehensible than the earlier descriptions of “spirituous miasma” emanating from the vaporous marshland.

  By some form of melancholy parallel the estuarial river was also the home of the plague ships and the quarantine ships. In the seventeenth century those suffering from the plague or yellow fever were placed on vessels anchored off Dead Man’s Island, just north of Chetney on the North Kent Marshes. The island received its name, of course, from the bodies that were buried there; in The Thames Transformed (1976) Jeffery Harrison and Peter Grant reported that “to this day one has only to wade across Shepherd’s Creek to Dead Man’s to be able to find human bones with no effort, a surprising number showing signs of osteomyelitis, a chronic bone infection.” A plague hospital was to be established upon the shore, at Chetney Hill, but construction work was abandoned when the land was found to be unstable. This has been one of the dark places of the earth. But where there are cares, there are also cures. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries doctors frequented the marshes to collect specimens from the abundant beds of leeches in the neighbourhood.

  For many centuries the area between Barking and Gravesend was deserted except for some odd cottages, churches, farms and riverside inns for travellers along the Thames. There were trackways through the marshes, and pasture land. It was a good place to rear the beasts of the field; the marshes were known to be “kind to cattle,” and the dearest meat was known as “marsh mutton.” Now the north side of the estuary is lined with oil refineries, gas plants and sewage treatment plants; there are cement works and petrochemical works. Here is industrial architecture on a giant scale, like Nineveh or Babylon emerging on the banks of the river. And this, too, is now part of its history. The Thames estuary was the cradle of the electric power station, when at the end of the nineteenth century Sebastian de Ferranti built the first long-distance transmission station at Deptford. There will come a time when these installations, if they are allowed to survive, will be defined by their ancientness like the earthworks of the region.

  There are communities on either shore; there have always been settlers, but now they come in larger waves as part of the new “Thames corridor” spreading out towards Europe. There are developments in place for towns such as Thurrock and Gravesend. The region of the lower river has been taken up in the general regeneration of the Thames. Yet there are still areas of dereliction; ancient jetties, quays and harbours have been left to decay. There are the hulks of scuppered or lost ships. It is still a place of slimy stones emerging from the mud, of old landing stages and ancient roofless buildings slowly merging with the water and the sand. And the marshlands still exude the same ancient air of desolation.

  Bu
t then there is the sea. The Thames, now wide and exultant, has been conceived as rushing into its embrace. The mark of their meeting is the Crow Stone, placed on the foreshore at Chalkwell a mile west of Southend; it connects in an imaginary line with the London Stone at the entrance to the Yantlet Channel. This is the official point where the Thames must end and become the sea. From London Stone the ships set their course for the Nore lightship and the waves of the ocean. The song of the Thames has ended.

  An Alternative Topography, from Source to Sea

  KEMBLE: Once known as Kemele or Camele, meaning boundary. The derivation, however, might be from the ancient British god Camulos. The river collects itself here, so to speak, from a number of little streamlets or rivulets that meander through the fields. Harrison says that the stripling river “first of all receiueth the Kemble water called the Coue.” The early inhabitants of the area were the British Dobunni, whose territory was later occupied by the Romans. A Roman burial site was discovered here. It is mentioned in the charters of the Anglo-Saxon kings, the earliest dating to AD 682. Two Saxon cemeteries have also been found here. There used to be a grove or wood close to the church, which was described by a nineteenth-century antiquary as “the scene of the peculiar sacrificial rites of that race” no particular evidence has been provided for this claim. The church itself was struck by lightning in 1834. The yew-tree in the churchyard is the oldest living organism in the village, which is well known for the ubiquity of the water-crowfoot or Ranunculus aquatilis. The first ducks of the Thames are to be seen here. The Thames used to be known to the locals as “the brook,” which in many respects it resembles. It is diminutive, with an agreeable tinkling sound. Before the advent of modern life the village organised an annual festival known as Jackimans Club; there was also a wake, during which the effigy of an ox was paraded around the village. The neighbourhood is not heavily populated and few, if any, people are to be seen along the banks of the river. The bridge that leads from Kemble to the neighbouring village of Ewen has the distinction of being the first bridge, topographically, on the Thames. The inn at Kemble was kept by one “Damper” Adams, a maker of wooden ploughs. His ale was so notoriously bad that a gang of men stole the casks and poured the beer into the river. The names of the villages in this region of the Upper Thames have a peculiar charm, leading one American essayist to remark that “an atmosphere of legendary melody spreads over the land.” The oldest legends here, however, were of battlefields and border territory. It was once a very bloody place. Camulos himself was a warrior deity, often linked with Mars. Where there is trade there is power, and where there is power there is strife. The whole region has been striated with conflict throughout its human history, and the fields and meadows of the Upper Thames have often been cited as the location of battles between the various British tribes, between Saxons and Britons, between Romans and Britons.

  EWEN: The name can be derived from Aewilme, meaning spring or source, yet another confusion in the confusing provenance of the Thames. As a source of springs it was deemed to be a holy place. On eighteenth-century maps it is spelled as Yeoing, and was pronounced by the locals as Yeowin. The river here is cleared twice each year, for the unimpeded passage of the water in its infantine state. The area was known for the number of its centenarians, and was thus pronounced to be especially healthful. The inhabitants were known for their appetites as well as their great age. One inhabitant, Cornelius Uzzle, devoured 12 pounds of bacon—6 pounds raw and 6 pounds parboiled—at the Wild Duck Inn. The Wild Duck exists still, and is renowned for its excellent food. The entire area, downriver from Kemble and Ewen, has been very fruitful for archaeologists; there have been sites here from the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods as well as their later counterparts. The Upper Thames can in fact make the claim of being the most ancient, and most continuously inhabited, territory of the British Isles. It can be said with some certainty that all the towns and villages of the Upper Thames are based upon British or Saxon originals; they are by fords, or by trackways, or sit defensively upon frontier lands.

  SOMERFORD KEYNES: Pronounced Canes. The presence of a ford here, in the summer months, is plain enough. The other part of the name comes from Sir Ralph de Keynes, who held all the land in the vicinity during the reign of King John. There is a Saxon “megalithic” doorway in the church, the relic of the earliest building on the site. There is also a Viking carving of two playful dragons. It is conjectured that the Saxon church was built by St. Aldhelm, who was a landowner here long before the arrival of Ralph de Keynes. The Upper Thames was a relatively heavily populated area in the early centuries of the Christian era. There were once five mills in the locality, indicating that the river once ran faster through these sleeping fields. In fact the village is still sometimes affected by floods. There are small hamlets in the immediate neighbourhood, inspiring William Morris’s line concerning “the little stream whose hamlets scarce have names.” It is, or was, a place of intensive agricultural labour. As one rustic put it, at the beginning of the twentieth century when rural dialects were still preserved, “pleny o’ ’ard graft an’ nat much bezide at Zummerverd.”

  ASHTON KEYNES: The name derives from the Anglo-Saxon words esc meaning ash and tun meaning place. It might thus have been designated as the settlement by the ash-trees. Neolithic axe-heads have been uncovered in the vicinity. William Cobbett, in Rural Rides (1830), described it as a “very curious place,” principally because it is made up of a number of parallel streets criss-crossed by the rivulets of the Thames. There are twenty bridges in the village, each one leading to a little house. The river is united in the centre of the village, and then runs under several arches before disappearing within a line of beeches. The first fish of the river are to be seen here. It was once of importance as a market town, and there are traces of a monastery. There are extant four crosses along the highways, dating from the fourteenth century; they have been described as preaching crosses, but their true purpose is unexplained. The biography of the village, by Madge Patterson and Ernie Ward, is suggestively entitled Ashton Keynes: A Village with No History.

  POOLE KEYNES: The name is of unknown origin. But this may be the oldest settlement on the Upper Thames, the remains of Paleolithic habitation having been found here. That would give it a date some 1,750,000 years ago. The church, of fourteenth-century foundation, is therefore a recent development. The neighbourhood has so long a history of human settlement that its momentum has slowed in recent years.

  CRICKLADE: The first town upon the river, some 10 miles from the source at Thames Head. The name may refer to a river-crossing beside a hill, in this case Horsey Down to the west, while others derive it from the two British words cricw and ladh meaning stony or rocky country. Or could it be a reflection of Cerrig-let, meaning the stony place where the Churn finds an outlet into the Thames? There were some antiquarians who believed it to be a corruption of Greek-lade, or assembly of learned scholars and monks. It was reported in monkish chronicles that in 1180 BC Brutus, the Trojan survivor, came here with a group of his countrymen and established a university among the early Britons. Samuel Ireland and others also believed it to be the site of the first university in England, but one founded by Panda of Mercia in AD 650 and thus predating Oxford downriver. A Saxon burh or enclosure has been found here. We have Drayton, therefore, hailing the town as:

  Greeklade whose great name yet vaunts that learned tongue,

  Where to Great Britain first the sacred muses sung.

  The more these origins are examined, the more ambiguous and uncertain they become. One of the town’s two churches is dedicated to St. Sampson, an ancient Celtic saint. At the southern base of the tower, on the roof of the church, is a sculpture of a dragon and a knight; in the old tradition of the place a dragon did infest this region, until being despatched by Sir Guy of Warwick. There is a fractured stone effigy of an unknown man in the church, said to be the image of one who fell from the tower and was killed; it was not fashioned by hand, but grew on
the spot where the man died. St. Augustine held a synod in the vicinity. There was once a community of Nonconformists here, too, and until the end of the nineteenth century baptisms were conducted at a rustic bridge called Hatchetts on the outskirts of the town. The Roman avenue called Ermin Street or the Irmin Way passed through it, before traversing the river, and King Alfred built a wall around the town. The Danes under Cnut eventually sacked it, but a wooden castle was built here in the twelfth century. It once possessed a Mint, and “Cricklade coins” have been unearthed in several vicinities. In recompense for their protection of his mother, Maud, Henry II granted the townspeople a charter allowing them to trade in any part of the kingdom. As an old anonymous verse put it:

  Light men laugh and hurry past,

  Sentry of the Roman Way;

  Shall you live to laugh the last,

  Wise old Cricklade? You, or they?

  Wisdom may take many forms. The town was well known in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for the venality of its inhabitants in general elections. Cobbett remarks that “a more rascally looking place I never set eyes upon. The labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig beds, and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig. In my whole life I never saw wretchedness equal to this.” The inhabitants of Cricklade also had an unusual manner of conducting funerals, whereby the coffin was placed at the front of the post-chaise. The town has now shrugged off its dubious reputation but it still exudes quietness and retirement from the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, according to Charles Dickens junior, “it has not been the scene of any remarkable events.” Its early history was more adventurous. What other small town can boast the legends of Brutus and of Augustine, of Alfred and of Cnut? And a dragon? In the North Meadow here there is a splendid flowering of the rare Thames plant, the snake’s-head fritillary.