I haven’t blogged very much about my long-standing River Thames project. Every so often, I post an entry that features the River Thames, but up till now, it has been extremely inconsistent and I haven’t even had a tag to label blog posts with. (I’ve now started tagging relevant earlier posts Thames Project, and that is what I’ll be using from now on.)
It was nearly 2 years ago that I realised that I have had a very long-standing River Thames project going on in the background, without me even consciously being aware of it. About then, I scanned the very first roll of film that I put through my first camera, not long after I had bought it. That film is now 50 years old. One of the slides showed a view taken from London Bridge looking downstream towards Tower Bridge. I’ve mentioned this in a previous blog post. Since then, the River Thames has been a frequent feature in my photography, almost as an unconscious companion.
Scanning that image made me realise that I should probably make a specific project of the River Thames. Over the last couple of years, I’ve made a point of visiting different parts of the River Thames to photograph it, and to really get the project going.
The setting for the Thames Head Stone. Note the water starting to snake across the field: the newborn Thames.
One of the obvious sites to go is the canonical start of the River Thames at Thames Head in Gloucestershire. I went there for the first time last October and explored the area, taking pictures of both Thames Head itself, the fields nearby and one of the villages where it flows. The symbolic start of the Thames is a spring that is seasonal, and that is marked by a marker stone set at the edge of a field. Since ancient times, this spring has run during wet winters, but as the ground dries during the year, so does the spring, and the river effectively retreats further downhill. The nascent Thames flows through local villages; in winter, some of the houses have the Thames stream running at the front or back of the houses. By contrast, when I visited last October, the gullies and river beds were dry until Waterhay, about 12 km downstream.
The ground was so wet, and there was so much water coming from higher up the hill, that the river stretched well away from the Head Stone and much further round.
Last week I visited Thames Head, hoping to find it in its wet state. I’ve been following the weather forecast for the last month or so, watching the rain fall pattern over the Cotswolds and the catchment area for the upper Thames. There’s been an immense amount of rain, so the opportunity was too good to miss. Walking up across the fields from the car park, across about a mile and a half of fields, it was evident that we were going to find the spring running. The fields were completely sodden, and the gullies that I had seen the previous autumn in the dry state were now full of freely running water.
A second spring comes from rocks in the ground, further down the hill. The dry gully of autumn, where the river runs in winter, had turned into a torrent.
The nascent Thames snakes across fields downhill from the springs
The river, further downhill in dry and wet states.
I’m including in this blog some of the “wet” and “dry” states of the seasonal spring and rivers.
Arriving at the spring, it was wonderful to see ripples and air bubbles breaking the surface of the crystal-clear newborn river, as water forced its way up through the rocks.
Later that day, I was able to photograph the running seasonal stream around the villages of Ewen and Ashton Keynes, where the Thames runs close to the houses.
Ewen, (left) Autumn, dry (right) Winter, wet. The stream running past back gardens.
Ashton Keynes: the stream in winter running between front gardens and the road.
I think the start of the River Thames makes a nice way to start a specific project on the blog about the river. This complements my entry from last year “Two Stones and a Line” about the symbolic end of the Thames at the Yantlet Line. If these are Alpha and Omega, then what I’ll be talking about this year will be the places between. (Having said that, there will, as usual, be lots of other random stuff!)