The Bright Stream

I. Blue and Stone

Good morning. The sky is that particular spring blue you only get in late March — scrubbed clean overnight, not a cloud worth mentioning, the kind of sky that makes you glad you got out of bed. A stiff westerly is blowing, and it’s going to be in my face for the first half of this ride. But if I’ve read the forecast right, it will be at my back for the homeward leg. That’s the theory, anyway.

I’m through Asthall already, hands cold on the bars despite my gloves, talking into a little recorder wedged in my jersey pocket. One hand on the handlebars, holding the thing closer to my mouth than is probably wise at twenty miles an hour. The Windrush Valley is opening up on my right, and somewhere over there — just out of sight behind the hedgerow — is my favourite pub. I should be able to glimpse the river soon, and with any luck the water will have dropped after the wet spell. But that’s for later. Right now the road is pulling me south, and the wind is making itself known.

The back lanes into Little Barrington are a relief. The trees and the walls close in on either side, and suddenly the wind drops to something bearable. This is not a road for cars. It’s barely a road at all — bumpy, narrow, the tarmac cracked and patched, the kind of lane that exists because people have been walking and riding along this line for centuries before anyone thought to surface it. A dry stone wall runs alongside me, slightly drunk in places, leaning where the ground has shifted beneath it. Who built it? Hundreds of years ago, probably. These walls are everywhere in the Cotswolds — roughly six thousand kilometres of them, threading across the landscape like a nervous system made of stone. The earliest known example sits at Belas Knap, a Neolithic long barrow near Winchcombe, which puts the tradition back four thousand years. But most of what you see today dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Enclosure Acts parcelled up the open fields and common land, and someone had to mark where one man’s ground ended and another’s began.

Byways and bridleways shoot off to the left, tempting me down green tracks that disappear between the fields. Not for exploring on a road bike, unfortunately. These slick tyres want tarmac, not mud. But I file them away for another day, another pair of wheels.

I pick up the D’Arcy Dalton Way on my left — one of those long-distance paths named after someone most people have never heard of, but should have. Colonel W.P. d’Arcy Dalton spent more than half a century fighting to preserve rights of way across Oxfordshire, and when he died they named a hundred and seven kilometres of footpath after him. It seems a fitting monument. More useful than a statue.

And there, to my right, is the lovely little squat church of Little Barrington. St Peter’s. Norman, twelfth century, Grade I listed — though none of that quite prepares you for the doorway, which is carved with three levels of chevron and dogtooth decoration, intricate as lacework. The whole thing was taken apart stone by stone in 1865 and put back together again, which is either an act of extraordinary devotion or extraordinary madness, depending on your view of the Victorians. The village is in the Domesday Book as Bernintone — the settlement of Beorn, whoever Beorn was. A thousand years on, his name is still attached to this handful of cottages and one small church on a back road that barely registers on the map.

Just past the church there’s a chapel as well, which seems extravagant for a village this size. But you think about Christians in centuries past, building these places to worship in communities of perhaps thirty or forty souls, and the scale of the commitment is remarkable. The faith that moved limestone, if not mountains.

I’ve picked up National Cycle Route 57 now, which in its full ambition runs all the way from here to Welwyn Garden City — a journey I do not intend to make today — and I’m into the Barringtons proper. They are gorgeous. Through the centre of the village, past stone cottages the colour of warm honey, and I’m thinking about Gifford’s Circus. They pitch their tent somewhere near here every July, and it has become one of our early markers of summer. Nell Gifford founded it in 2000 — a traditional English circus with painted wagons, trapeze artists, horses, and a famous sixty-seat restaurant called Circus Sauce where you eat by candlelight after the show. Nell died in 2019, but the circus goes on under her niece Lil Rice, and it remains one of those things that makes the Cotswolds feel like somewhere people have chosen to create beauty, not just preserve it. We’ll be back here in July, hopefully. One of those dates you circle on the calendar while winter is still hanging around.

And with that, I’m out the other side of the village, and the wind finds me again.

II. Bright Stream

Leaving Sherborne. The name comes from the Domesday Book — Scireburne, meaning bright stream — and the brook that runs through the parish still earns it. Wide and shallow where it passes the village, it joins the Windrush at the eastern boundary, and in medieval times the monks of Winchcombe Abbey used it to wash their flocks. Four watermills are recorded here in 1086. Behind me, hidden somewhere in the trees and parkland of the Sherborne Estate, is Lodge Park — England’s only surviving seventeenth-century deer course and grandstand, now looked after by the National Trust. A grandstand for watching deer. The things the wealthy built for their entertainment before television.

The wind is still hard in my face, but there’s a trace of warmth from the sun on my back now, and the road follows the river closely enough that I catch glimpses of it through gaps in the bankside trees. The Windrush is pretty small this far out from its confluence with the Thames — more a wide stream than a river — but it is just gorgeous. The valley it has carved through the limestone is gentle and green, and the banks are thick with tall trees planted in deliberate rows. Larch, I think, though I’m no forester. If I’m right, they’re immigrants — European larch was brought over from the mountains of central Europe in the seventeenth century, planted for timber, a relative newcomer in a landscape where the oaks have stood for centuries. It’s the first hint of a thought that will nag at me all morning: how much of what we call the natural landscape is anything of the sort?

The sun is properly warming my shoulders now. My hands are still cold, but the rest of me is beginning to thaw. It’s half past nine, I’ve done fifteen miles, and I should probably think about turning around soon. I won’t, of course.

It happens suddenly — a great grey shape erupting from the bank with that distinctive slow, heavy wingbeat, legs trailing, neck folded back into an S. Grey herons are patient hunters. They stand motionless in the shallows, sometimes for an hour or more, waiting for a fish or a frog to come within range of that dagger bill. Their presence on a stretch of river is a good sign — an indicator of clean water and a healthy ecosystem. This one clearly objects to my company and flaps downstream, settling again around the next bend where it can stare into the water in peace.

Further on, they’ve been doing a load of clearing of the trees on either side of the river. Dead wood piled up in great heaps where the work crews have been through. It looks brutal, but it’s probably management rather than destruction — opening up the canopy, letting light reach the water, the kind of intervention that a river needs when it’s been left to its own devices for too long. Or perhaps not its own devices at all. Every stretch of this river has been managed, diverted, dammed, and undammed by someone, going back centuries.

And then, suddenly, I’m at the bottom of a forty-four-metre climb, and the pleasant riverside musings are over.

Bottom gear. There is nowhere else to go. The road tilts upward and my legs start to burn almost immediately, which says more about my fitness than the gradient. Standing on the pedals for the steep bit, sitting for the false flat, standing again when it kicks up. A motorcyclist passes me going the other way and gives me a cheery punch in the air — keep going, mate — which is one of those small acts of roadside solidarity that genuinely helps when your lungs are complaining.

But the reward, as it so often is, comes in stone. Someone is reinvesting in the walls around here. Beautiful new sections of dry stone wall, freshly built or refurbished, the limestone clean and pale against the weathered grey of the older courses. It’s good to see. There are government grants available now — thirty-one pounds and ninety-one pence per metre, to be precise — and the Cotswolds Conservation Board has been pushing hard to reverse decades of neglect. Six thousand kilometres of wall is a lot to maintain, and many stretches had fallen into ruin. But the craft is alive, the Dry Stone Walling Association keeps the standards up, and here on this hillside above the Windrush someone has been putting in the work.

I crest the hill and there is Farmington. A big church on the left — another St Peter’s, another Norman foundation, another Grade I listing. The Cotswolds collect them like other places collect pubs. On the right, a manor house. Farmington Lodge is a classical building of two storeys, rebuilt in the mid-eighteenth century by Edmund Waller, its hipped roof and fifteen-bayed plan sitting handsomely at the edge of the village. A dovecote stands nearby. Blossom trees against a blue sky. Cool air. I want to stop, but the road is pulling me on, and I have a long way still to go.

III. The Cathedral of Wool

We are leaving the Windrush Valley behind us now. The road climbs out of the river’s influence and onto higher, more exposed ground, and the character of the landscape shifts. The intimate green valley gives way to broader views, bigger fields, longer horizons. Black and white cattle stand on the hillside — Holstein Friesians, most likely, the workhorses of the modern dairy industry, which gradually displaced the older Cotswold breeds because no traditional cow could match them for sheer output. Everything is vibrant in the morning sunshine, the clouds picking up in the distance but not yet threatening.

I’m on the Monarch’s Way now, or at least crossing it. Six hundred and twenty-five miles of long-distance footpath, tracing the route that Charles II took in 1651 after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester — forty-three days on the run, disguised as a servant, hidden by thirty-eight loyal subjects, narrowly escaping Parliamentary troops on at least eleven occasions, and famously concealing himself in an oak tree at Boscobel House before eventually reaching a ship at Shoreham and sailing for France. The whole desperate flight is marked out across England, from Worcester to the south coast, and here it threads through the Cotswold uplands as though a fugitive king once cantered across these same fields. Which, give or take a few hedgerows, he probably did.

Not far outside Turkdean now, which is famous — I use the word loosely — for being mentioned in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the lecture scene at the beginning of the film, Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones references the Neolithic barrow at Turkdean, which sounds impressively specific until you discover that the barrow in the film is an amalgam of several real sites in the county, stitched together by a screenwriter who presumably liked the name. But the connection, tenuous as it is, was enough to draw the cameras of Channel 4’s Time Team here in 1997, and what they found was genuinely significant: a large Roman villa at Chalkhill Barn, built by a wealthy Romano-British family around the second century and enlarged in the fourth. Real archaeology, prompted by fictional archaeology. Turkdean has been occupied since the Neolithic, and its name — Turcandene in the eighth century — is Old English for the valley of the river Turce, possibly from a Celtic word meaning boar. Indiana Jones was late to the party by several thousand years.

A mud patch. My slick tyres slip sideways. The A40 looms — a horrible road to cross on a bicycle, fast traffic and poor sightlines — and then I’m through, back onto quiet lanes, and the restricted byways are shooting off to either side again, gorgeous for walking or running but no good for a road bike.

And then, without warning, I’m in Northleach. Or rather, I’m in what Northleach has become at its edges: a housing estate. Modern homes, cars parked on the roads, solar panels on the roofs. After the sparseness of the lanes it’s a shock, like switching channels mid-programme. This is the town that was once one of the most important wool-trading centres in the Cotswolds, rivalled only by Cirencester and Chipping Campden. Its church — St Peter and St Paul, the so-called Cathedral of the Cotswolds — is one of the finest wool churches in England, with a lavishly carved south porch and a world-class collection of fifteenth-century monumental brasses depicting the merchants who paid for it all. The brasses show them with their feet resting on sheep or on wool sacks, which were effectively their business cards cast in metal: I made my fortune from the fleece, and I built this church to prove it. The boom lasted from about 1340 to 1540, two centuries of extraordinary wealth flowing through a small market town at the junction of ancient roads.

I can’t get to the church today. The route doesn’t allow it, and I’m running behind already. But the knowledge of it sits there in the back of my mind as I ride through the modern outskirts — a reminder that this landscape has known prosperity before, and reinvention, and that every English town is several towns layered on top of each other if you know where to look.

Out the other side of Northleach and into the climb at Holdsworth. A nasty little effort sneaked in here on the edge of town. Right down in first gear again, nowhere to go but up. Knees burning. This is a mercifully short one, but there is a moment halfway up when the world narrows to just the front wheel and the tarmac and the sound of my own breathing. And then I crest it, and the view opens out, and it is just the green of the grass and the blue of the sky. Stunning. One of those moments where the effort earns you something you couldn’t have got any other way.

And here — a red kite lifts off from the field beside me.

Not a young one, I think. The forked tail is unmistakable, that distinctive russet-and-white underwing catching the light as it banks away. There was a time, not so long ago, when you would never have seen a red kite in this part of England. By the late twentieth century the species had been driven to the brink of extinction in Britain, clinging on in a handful of Welsh valleys. Then, in 1990, thirteen birds were released in the Chilterns — two Welsh, eleven Spanish, brought from the hills of Navarra — and one of the greatest conservation success stories in British history began. From those thirteen birds, and subsequent releases, the population has grown to more than five thousand breeding pairs across England. They are everywhere now, a daily sight across the Home Counties and increasingly here in the Cotswolds, and it is easy to forget that within living memory they were gone. The biggest species comeback in UK conservation. And this one is cruising the thermals above a Gloucestershire field as though it has always been here, which in a sense — a deep, ancestral sense — it has.

IV. Stone, Speed and Silence

The tailwind arrives like a gift. Cruising at twenty miles an hour on the flat takes almost no effort, and I’m grinning into the wind for the first time all morning. New roads — I’ve never done this stretch south of the A40 before — and they’re good ones. Smooth tarmac, light traffic, long sightlines.

Twenty-four miles an hour now. The landscape is scrolling past in a series of postcards. A dry stone wall in the foreground, a green field of early crop behind it, a row of trees on the horizon, power lines threading the gaps between them. The power lines spoil it slightly, but everything else is gorgeous. More dry stone walls being repaired — someone is investing seriously around here, and long may it continue.

Mature woodland on my left. Probably oak, and if so, these trees are doing more work than anything else in the landscape. A single mature English oak supports over two thousand three hundred species — insects, fungi, birds, lichens, mosses — more than any other native tree. An ancient oak, four hundred years old or more, is an entire ecosystem in a single trunk. They are the keystone species of the English countryside, and there is something reassuring about cycling past a stand of them and knowing that this particular piece of biological infrastructure has been here since before the Enclosure Acts, before the canals, before the turnpikes.

Bibury four miles to my right. We’ll skirt that today.

Then a big downhill. Thirty miles an hour plus, the wind pushing me, the road dropping away — and it’s spoilt by a tight bend, a scattering of potholes, and a car coming the other way. I brake harder than I’d like and the speed bleeds off. Then up again, a short ramp but super steep. Out of the saddle, heavy breathing, the kind of gradient that exists purely to remind you that you are not as fit as you were at twenty-five.

There will be no walking today.

I make it over the top, the road levels, and I’m rolling again. Into Aldsworth, which turns out to have more to it than I expected — a gorgeous little centre, tiny but perfectly formed, the kind of village that doesn’t appear on tourist itineraries but probably should. And then back out onto quiet lanes, the wind still at my back, the miles falling away.

V. What Lies Beneath

Something changes in the landscape as I leave the ups and downs of the Windrush Valley behind. The road flattens. The hills give way to a broad, open plain, and I can feel the difference in my legs — the relief of level ground after an hour of climbing and descending. I’m heading east now, towards the upper reaches of the Thames floodplain, and the transition is surprisingly abrupt. One mile you’re in rolling limestone country, the next you’re on the flat, with long views and big skies and a sense of openness that feels almost East Anglian.

I wish I knew more about my geology. Riding through a landscape like this, I’d love to understand the forces that shaped it. My instinct says glaciers — that the contour of these hills and valleys must have something to do with how far the ice sheets advanced during the last ice age, and that the flat ground I’m on now marks the point where they stopped.

But instinct, it turns out, is wrong. The Cotswolds escaped the ice sheets entirely. During the last two major glaciations, the ice reached the surrounding lowlands — the Vale of Moreton, the edges of the Thames valley — but the limestone uplands themselves remained ice-free. The rock beneath my wheels was laid down between two hundred and ten and one hundred and forty million years ago, in a warm, shallow sea that covered this part of England during the Jurassic period — a sea not unlike the modern Bahamas, teeming with hard-shelled creatures whose compressed remains became the oolitic limestone that gives the Cotswolds their character and their colour. The landscape I’m riding through is not glacial but erosional — the escarpment has been wearing slowly backwards for the last one and a half million years, the rivers cutting their valleys as the land lifted and tilted. The transition from the Windrush’s limestone uplands to this flatter ground is geological rather than glacial: a shift from Jurassic stone to the younger alluvial deposits of the Thames basin. It is, if anything, more remarkable than my ice-age theory. This landscape was built by time and water, not by ice.

My right shoulder is aching, as it always does at this point in a long ride. I try cycling with no hands, stretching it out, but the tailwind makes it tricky to balance, so I give up and grip the bars again.

Fields now. Flat arable on my right, brown cattle on my left. Overhead, the sound of engines — RAF planes, circling or running exercises. I’m close to Brize Norton, the largest RAF station in the country, home to 99 Squadron and their eight C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft. As I watch, one of them appears overhead — a huge grey shape hanging almost motionless against the sky, flying into the headwind so that its ground speed is barely walking pace. It looks impossible, something that big moving that slowly, like a whale suspended in air. These aircraft can carry forty-five tonnes of freight anywhere in the world, and right now they are probably involved in the logistics of the conflict in Iran, shuttling equipment and personnel from this quiet corner of Oxfordshire to wherever the situation demands. It’s a strange juxtaposition: the pastoral green, the birdsong, the stone walls, and then this reminder that the modern world and its entanglements are never far away. The Globemaster passes overhead and is gone, and the silence closes back in.

A dead straight road. Pylons keeping pace with me as I pedal. Good for cycling — I can ride down the middle and dodge the potholes — but less fun for driving, I’d imagine. The cattle watch me with the placid indifference that cattle have perfected over millennia.

We call it the countryside, but really farming has completely transformed this landscape. I’m struck, as I ride through it, by how little actual wildlife there is. The birds, yes — I’ve seen the kite, the heron, heard the wood pigeons and a skylark somewhere behind me. But mammals? Nothing. No rabbits, no hares, no sign of foxes. I saw a squirrel back in the woods, and that’s it. The fields are devoid of wild mammals unless they’ve been put there for farming.

The absence is real, and it has causes. Myxomatosis arrived in Britain in 1954 and killed ninety-nine per cent of the rabbit population within two years — an ecological catastrophe whose effects rippled through every food chain in the country. The rabbits have partially recovered, but the landscape never fully did. Hedgehog populations have fallen by between a third and three-quarters in the last twenty years, victims of pesticide use, habitat loss, and the shift from pasture to arable farming. By 2016, seventy-three million hectares of UK land were being sprayed with pesticides, often multiple times a year. The green fields that look so lush and healthy from a bicycle saddle are, for much of the wildlife that once lived here, a desert.

I wonder what the natural landscape would have been, before all of this. Woodland, presumably. And the answer is yes — longer ago than I’d guessed. The first farmers arrived in Britain around four thousand BC, six thousand years ago, and before that the land was covered in what ecologists call the wildwood: a closed canopy of elm and lime and oak, self-sown and uncultivated, stretching from coast to coast. It was not a park. It was dense, dark, and difficult to move through, the kind of forest that exists now only in fragments and in the imagination. The Cotswolds have been farmed for six millennia. The landscape I’m riding through is not natural — it is one of the oldest managed environments on Earth, shaped and reshaped by every generation that has worked it. Even the trees I admired earlier, the oaks and the larches along the Windrush, are placed there by human hands. The countryside is a garden. A beautiful one, but a garden nonetheless.

King’s Lane. A good name for a road. Very flat around here, which makes it exposed to the wind — a good thing for me today, as it pushes me along at a pace my legs couldn’t sustain on their own.

And then a hill appears in the middle of nowhere. Except it isn’t a hill. It’s a railway bridge. A reminder, again, of how this landscape has been used and abandoned and used again. This line was almost certainly a victim of the Beeching cuts — the report published in March 1963 that recommended the closure of two thousand three hundred and sixty-three stations and five thousand miles of railway across Britain. Within a decade, a quarter of the country’s rail network had been ripped up. Gloucestershire lost several lines, including the Kemble to Cirencester branch in 1964. Probably sixty years since a train crossed this bridge. But the bridge is still here, the embankments still cut through the fields on either side, and the line of the track is still visible from above — a scar that the land has not quite absorbed. Landscape archaeology in brick and earth. The ghosts of journeys that no one makes any more.

It’s twenty to eleven. My legs are starting to feel two hours of riding. I’m glad to be on the flat.

VI. Not Today, Blake’s

Clanfield. I skirt into the outskirts on legs that are starting to make their feelings known after two hours of riding. And there it is — Blake’s Kitchen, the old post office turned cafe, where all the bread is baked on the premises and the cinnamon buns have a local reputation that borders on the devotional. I can picture it now: the warmth of an oven that has been going since dawn, the smell of sourdough, a very late breakfast and a seat by the window.

But I’m not stopping. Not today. The tailwind is still there, the legs still have something in them, and Witney is not far. There’s a momentum to this ride that I don’t want to break — a feeling that the morning isn’t finished with me yet, or I’m not finished with it. Blake’s will be there next time. The cinnamon buns will wait.

So I push on through Clanfield and out the other side, back onto the flat, the road unspooling ahead of me towards home. The clouds are building now from the west, just as the forecast promised. By this afternoon there will be rain. But the morning was mine, and the Windrush Valley was bright, and the walls are being rebuilt, and the kites are back, and the wheels are still turning.

Forty-one miles. Nearly fourteen hundred metres of climbing. Three hours from door to door. One heron, one red kite, one C-17 Globemaster, six thousand years of farming, and one hundred and forty million years of limestone beneath my tyres. Not a bad Saturday morning. Not bad at all.