Oil Drum Lane

Since the ice ages, the Thames in Oxfordshire has flowed south towards Reading and onto London through the Goring Gap, which separates the Chilterns from the North Wessex Downs. Being deep and wide enough to be navigable for much of its length meant that it was always a major transport route, but also presented a barrier to those travelling on foot.  This all made it something of a gyre in early English history. What follows is based on notes from one of my cycle routes on pootler.co.uk, but serves equally well for a quick visit by whatever means suits you.  Wallingford lies at the centre of the area where the river enters the Gap, and which was crossed by land routes used since time immemorial, including the ancient trackways, the Roman roads and the later tollroads. But the key is that, throughout the year, and  especially  if you had a few thousand heavily armed and malodorous pals with you,  it was the best place to ford the river.  The Thames in flood ...

Hillforts pepper our hills; there are possibly as many as four thousand of them. But they are not always on hills and quite probably not always, or even often, forts. That label was pinned on them by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the 20th century’s most revered pre-history pundits and, as a former Brigadier in the Army, he might simply have seen what he was trained to see!  Here he is, doing a Gandalf impersonation.  Looking for some basis for the generalisations needed to keep the blog notes short, I visited dozens of them, waded through inscrutable archaeology papers in the British Library, scaled a mound of local landscape history books and tiptoed into the prehistory nerd websites. We need a literary Ozempic for some of this stuff. Some of the hillforts do seem to have seen conflicts. Cadbury in Dorset saw battles with the Romans.  Others seem to have been built with defence in mind, for instance, by adding additional fortifications at the otherwise weaker entran...

  People are shaped by the places they come from.  A shared heritage, language, and real or imagined ethnic ancestry can also play a part.  All of these often  overlap and conflict with the nation-states and arbitrary borders resulting from migrations, wars, colonialism, and chance.  This goes far beyond the  misunderstood and opaque bundles of rights attributed to  ‘ownership’ of land and ‘citizenship’,  which I wrote about in previous posts.   The fact is that the concept of the ‘state’ with clearly defined borders is a convenient and relatively recent political simplification. T he requirement for passports to move between them didn't become a common practice until the start of the 1900s.  You didn’t need a passport to enter the empires of Macedon, Rome or the Habsburgs. Even Britain didn't require them until World War One.    Barbarians at the gate.  Without passports.  The United Nations (UN) has a view on w...