our river

River Ray at Westmead, Swindon

As befits a town in the middle of England, Swindon is very close to the east-west watershed. Three or four miles west, the waters drain into the Avon basin*. But here, the water drains east, eventually. Swindon has no main river, it was all about the railway, but the little River Ray winds through West Swindon, on its fifteen-mile journey north from the Marlborough Downs to meet the infant Thames at Cricklade.

I was thinking about our deeply ingrained dream of being transported, of moving without effort, the excitement of motion that even a thousand commutes can't quite numb. It wasn't all a dream, even before BMWs, before express trains and horse carts. Even in prehistory, children began life by being carried around. We can pretend that there's something heroic about racing drivers and jockeys and fighter pilots and astronauts, but still, there's something infantile about it, these small figurines being hurtled along by forces greater than their own.

In prehistory, too, someone could have dropped a coracle into the river just here, and been floated (if not quite effortlessly) for two hundred miles downriver and into the wide arms of the Thames estuary.

Because we are animals, moving around is the essence of our way of life. But moving around under our own steam quickly becomes hard work. The dream of being transported is to get a free ride.

Transport has meant so many things; liberation, enlargement, discovery, the greed of knowledge. Pioneering, penetration, exploitation. Escape, from suffocating home, from consequences, from the tribe's pettiness and from ourselves. Mastery and display. Finding God, finding our destiny. An unhinging, perhaps an illusion, a flight of fancy, out of our minds.

*

* In the seventeenth century there was some talk of connecting the two, thus allowing boats to travel cross-country from London to Bristol. John Aubrey says that one idea was to cut through the hill at Wootton Bassett.

(See "Henry Briggs" in Aubrey's Brief Lives ed. Oliver Lawson Dick.)

The Thames-Avon connection was finally made in 1810 when, after a century of work on the rivers Kennet and Avon, and then on a canal between them, they were finally linked by the opening of the famous flight at Caen Hill, Devizes.