In Oxfordshire, Laura Parker follows glimmering water downstream and back through time.
It’s just a slip of a stream. Sixteen miles from clean spring to silt-dulled end, the Glyme glints down shallow valleys and shines below willows.
It is the bright stream, Saxon-named glim for its strange gleam. Light has lain on its surface for a thousand years. More. One hundred thousand years. More. Right back to unimagined time, carrying its current from Jurassic seas.
A gradual gathering of sources becomes a steady rill, outlining ancient sheep-grazed meadows held, for now, in the fragile grip of an aged farmer.
Soon after its unstoppable outset, it is met by some of the old ways, where Romans tramped and salt was packhorsed south from saline Midlands springs.
Long before those incomers, megaliths were uphauled and set as burial markers to stop time. Hoar stone, Ent stone, Leonid’s stone; these names became villages, grown from the efforts of the deep past.
The Glyme streamed then as it streams now.
Flooding and fluxing, it smooths the winter leas and leaves summer lushness by the chalk fords. These Chalfords, Nether, Upper and Over, villages of trade and manor, of demesne and tilth, sleep now. The turf has crept over their humped outlines and stilled their stones.
The Glyme moves swiftly on.
Mills were wound against its flow, grinding grain and crushing bones to feed the fields. In the fleece years, the wool-beaters diverted its leat. Over the Cleveley cliff it roared, turning the wheels to power the cam, to lift the hammers, to strike the cloth. A further gift was the fuller’s earth from the influent Fulwell, the fine clay making the cloth clean and unravelable. Here rides wealthy John Zaynewyrthe, riding across at Radford to grant John the Fuller his land. The river’s industry made them rich.
Along with livings, leisure. A rocky secret grotto revealed; a calcified goldwell turned to fountains, statues, cisterns, and a baroque feast. The doomed king’s queen reached into the rose-coloured jets and plucked two baubles dancing there. What a night that was. Soon King Charles was cut shorter and the stones tumbled in civil chaos. Now a mundane road churns traffic, indifferent, over the Enstone Marvels.
The Glyme gives a river’s shrug.
Its next lengths are all for sport. At Cydda’s manor, now Kiddington, its banks are dug and wide-opened, a tickling place for trout. It basks the manor in its reflections, a vanity mirror for the mighty. Downstream, an Arab prince comes game-shooting but his millions can never game the river, never own it. The Glyme slips by, languidly raising an oxbow wave, then ripples past the village stocks at Glympton, the settlement in its name.
Narrowed once more in a rising valley, it is channelled towards Wootton, the farm by the wood, then sweeps in a broad curve past a modern battleground. Say NO, say the signs. No to solar, No to houses, No to the Palace’s plans. But, bleats Blenheim, we’ve planted woods for the people and wildflowers for the walkers. Please stay on the paths. The river floods the footbridge, swelling in subtle rebuke.
A pink-flowered incomer salutes its final progress through once-working willowed water meadow to the ever-leisured lake, and the overblown bridge that once mocked it for a minnow.
In the Queen Pool, the mingling begins. Here the Glyme is received, endlessly.
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Laura Parker lives in Oxfordshire where she keeps a small flock of sheep. She writes about nature and culture for ‘Country Life’ and her work has appeared in ‘The Clearing’ and ‘Spelt’ magazine. Follow her on Instagram / Bluesky.