The River Thames

It's interesting how a river can have a personality, and how that personality can survive through millennia and countless waves of incoming people.
The Thames is Britain’s most important river. Today it is a reflection of Britain’s commercial might as it flows through the heart of London, and for millennia it has been central to trade, defence, invasion, sustenance and ritual.

‘Thames’ is perhaps Britain’s oldest place name. It derives from Tamesis, the name recorded by the Romans, which has a pre-Celtic origin and means ‘dark’. This is in common with other river names including the Thame, a tributary of the Thames, and the Tamar in Cornwall. Its flow is typically muddy and it is tidal for a large stretch of its course. 'Dark' may also reflect its spirit, which even now is said to demand human lives each year, to suck swimmers inexplicably beneath its surface, and to whisper to people on its banks and entice them to jump. 

The confluence of the Thames and the Windrush in Oxfordshire

The river's importance far predates the Romans who founded Londinium. The Thames has one of the highest densities of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments of any British river. These include the great henge monuments of Stanton Harcourt near Oxford, the Dorchester Rings, and the henges under the city of Oxford and at Abingdon. Many of these were situated at confluence points, which were perhaps used strategically for their landmark value or symbolically as a meeting point of waters and people.

The Devil's Quoits at Stanton Harcourt

The source of the Thames is disputed but often said to be at Seven Springs in Gloucestershire. The river Kennet which flows through Wiltshire is one of its earliest tributaries, and is suggested by some to be the original ‘source’ river. The Kennet is sourced at the springs which surround the world-famous monuments of Avebury and Silbury Hill. Perhaps some of these monuments’ prestige came from their location at Britain’s watery heart.

The ritual importance predates even the Neolithic period. Large numbers of human skulls and other bones, along with stone axes and tools, were deposited in the waters of the Thames during the Mesolithic period, long before the first farmers arrived. There is increasing evidence that many of Britain’s sacred sites had a sanctity thousands of years older than previously realised.

                 The River Kennet

Many rivers have a female identity. The Thames is one of the few that is considered male. ‘Old Father Thames’, a bearded old man, has long been the personification of the river. It is often linked to the Egyptian Goddess Isis. The Thames at Oxford is called ‘Isis’. This is suggested to be a cult brought by the Romans, or an esoteric mystery cult of much greater antiquity, but in fact this is a much more recent name, probably coined by Oxford students in the Medieval period, and is a truncation of the Latin ‘Tamesis’.

Unusually, there is little more folklore associated with this mysterious and long-revered river.

            Old Father Thames

Tintagel Castle

Tintagel Castle is precarious on a near sheer promontory, almost now an island, on the wave- and wind-battered north Cornish coast. More is known about Tintagel’s legends than its history; it is famous as the birthplace of King Arthur.

According to legend, Tintagel was the castle of Gorlois, a Cornish Duke. Gorlois’s wife, Igraine or Ygerna, was much desired by the powerful and ruthless Uther Pendragon. During a battle between Uther and Gorlois’s armies, the wizard Merlin disguised Uther in Gorlois’s form. Uther rode to Tintagel, seduced the unsuspecting Igraine, and nine months later she gave birth to Arthur, Britain’s greatest hero.

Other supporting legends grew up around Tintagel. Merlin’s Cave is a 100m-long sea cave which runs all the way under Tintagel. This was where, as described in Tennyson’s 19^th century poem Idylls of the King, Merlin found the baby Arthur washed up at his feet and raised him until he became king. The cave is accessible at low tide and is an eerie place with the booming surge of the sea echoing along its length. Folklore states if you take a stone from the cave you will have good luck. But woe betide if you take two!

                                   Merlin's Cave

The Arthur connection has traditionally been dismissed as fairytale by historians. The ruined castle visible today is a 13^th century fort built by the Earl of Cornwall, 700 years after Arthur’s time. But excavations in recent years have found evidence of a settlement dating to the late Roman period and a century or two afterwards, precisely the time Arthur supposedly lived. Archaeological finds suggest a high status settlement, perhaps home to a powerful warlord or a ruler of the kingdom of Dumnonia. Red slip pottery was imported from Africa and wine amphorae from the Mediterranean, present here in higher quantities than any other site in Dark Age Britain. It has been suggested Tintagel was a trading post, although the sheer cliffs and treacherous coastline appear an unlikely haven for trading ships.

The site is easily defensible, guarded by the cliffs, the sea and the narrow stretch of land which has to be crossed to reach it. Tintagel derives from the Cornish Din, meaning fortress, and tage, meaning choke, probably referring to the narrow access. It would make a good site for a powerful ruler.

            Archaeological work in 2017

The Arthur legend was written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12^th century, in The History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey claimed his work to be an accurate historical account, but it is generally now discredited as a blend of fact, myth and personal supposition.

But Geoffrey must have been inspired somehow. He claimed his work was factual so must have acquired supporting evidence, no matter how tenuous or fantastical, to back up his ideas. A legend likely survived of the great fortress at Tintagel, only a few hundred years before Geoffrey’s time, perhaps even of a great hero who was born here, and Geoffrey took that information and worked it into his story. Some of Geoffrey’s more outlandish ideas have been recently shown accurate. Perhaps his story about Tintagel will one day prove the same.

Devil’s Quoits Stone Circle

The Devil’s Quoits, a stone circle near Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire, was one of the bigger stone circles in Britain. Little of its original structure survived Medieval destruction and the construction of a Second World War airfield, and what is seen today is a near-entire reconstruction.

The 80-metre wide, slightly flattened circle today comprises 28 stones, originally 36, with an outlier outside the circle to the south-southeast. Folklore states that the devil was playing quoits one Sunday on nearby Wytham Hill, the only prominent landmark in the area, and these stones are the result. They are local stone with a lot of gravel inclusions, of irregular shape, up to 2m in height. Most of those present today are replacements.

The stones are set inside a henge ditch with an outer bank, which probably predate the stone circle. The ditch was originally 7m wide and 2.5m deep, with two entrances to the west and east. As was standard practice, antler picks, presumably those used to dig the ditch, were laid in the bottom after work was finished. The ditch was dug around 2900BC or slightly later, with deposits of cattle bones and pottery continuing for the next thousand years.

The circle with the outlier. The bank is in the background.

The Devil’s Quoits is located on the entirely flat floodplain of the river Thames, which today is three kilometres to the south but in Neolithic times was probably a multitude of braided streams winding through a marshy landscape, flooded in winter and reasonably dry with a few flowing channels in summer. The confluence with the river Windrush is nearby.

Several great ritual complexes were sited along the Thames during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, almost all of them on confluence points. The Thames and its tributaries were of vital importance for travel and navigation when the land was still largely impenetrable forest with few roads or paths, and the river was also used for rituals, offerings and burial.

The confluence of the Thames and the Windrush.

The local landscape bears no resemblance to former times. Gravel extraction pits have left huge lakes, and mounds and banks have destroyed any natural features. In the original landscape, the huge site would have been a landmark for miles around and a focal point for journeys, gatherings and trade. It was a focus for Bronze Age burials long after its construction. Those which were excavated before their destruction revealed the graves of men, women and children, often with elaborate grave goods such as daggers and pottery vessels.

The western causeway.

The site was abandoned by the Iron Age and was extensively ploughed during the Roman period, although it remained a feature of local folklore, and the village name derives from ‘stone-town’. Gravel extraction during the past half-century has destroyed around sixty Bronze Age barrows, ring ditches which often surrounded burials, and other graves containing an unknown number of human bodies, which are now incorporated in roadworks and construction sites across the country. It’s perhaps a blessing that a small part of the site survives.