Thames Path: Oxford-Eynsham: Saturday 27 August 2011
Here with just a few minor changes is the post I wrote in 2011, still available with many more pictures on My London Diary, though I’ve added some useful links here.
The question most people reading this may well be asking is ‘Where the **** is Eynsham?’ and fortunately the answer is ‘Not very far from Oxford‘ and one of its main attractions is the good bus service taking you back there.
However had you been reading this web site a thousand or so years ago (tricky because I don’t think those Anglosaxons were too hot on internet protocols and although the avian-based RFC1149 would have been technically feasible it was only published in 1990, more or less as Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the web) the question you might have been asking was ‘Where the **** is Oxford‘, a rather less significant place until it got the idea of a having a university.
As we found when we got there, Eynsham had a huge abbey, though the only real sign we saw remaining of it were its fish ponds. But that was at the end of our walk, shortly before I mutinied and made for the Red Lion.
Our family walk started at the station and we made our way to the Thames, where our Thames Path book (the official guide, now in a new edition, but others are available) seemed to show the path on the wrong side of the river.
Years ago, before we had a Thames path, I remember getting quite excited about the draft proposal for it, and even making a few suggestions. Of course there was a tow path next to the river except where some less scrupulous riparian owners had stolen and enclosed parts of it, but it did have an unfortunate habit of jumping from one side to the other at remote places where until around the 1930s there had been a ferry.
Now I’m not so sure that such ‘long-distance paths‘ are such a good idea. They encourage people to approach walking in a very competitive and one-dimensional way, ‘bagging‘ stages of the route in what are more route marches than enjoyable.
My kind of walk tends to go a quite a slow pace overall, stopping to look at and photograph things that take my interest, diverting from the path to look at what seem interesting features on the map, not worrying about getting any particular distance. But of course outside the city there are certain practicalities about finding a bus stop or station from where you can get home. My companions are usually rather more heading for the goal, and you will see the backs of two figures in the middle distance in some of my pictures, though not me running after them to catch up.
But at least this was a fairly short walk, and we did have time to look around Eynsham, a large village with around five pubs and a post office, as well as a heritage trail around the extensive former abbey grounds which we did around half of. The others were also keen to look for traces of the former railway, an extremely thirst-making and largely fruitless task, serving largely as a reminder of how short-sighted we were in abandoning way-leaves on what might by now have seemed a very suitable route for lightweight community transport.
The final picture was taken from the top of the bus on my way home as it went over Swinford Bridge, with a view along the Thames to Eynsham Lock. The bridge is a local traffic bottleneck, with long queues at the rush hour holding up traffic for around 20 minutes or more as motorists have to stop to pay the toll. Although the toll for cars is only 5p – cash only – that nets around £175,000 a year and, under the Act of Parliament granted in 1767 the income from it is free of income tax – which had not then been invented.
A long campaign (at least since 1905) by users continues to get the toll abolished, most recently with a petition to their local MP, a Mr David Cameron, who you think might be able to do something about it. But the owner of the bridge, who bought it in 2009 for £1.08 million remains anonymous, and could well be a considerable donor to Conservative party funds.
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