A Tale of Two Water Towers, A Tale of Two Stations, A Tale of Two Rivers
It takes less than an hour to walk from Kemble station to the source of the River Thames: it’s usually dry at the spring-source, although I have seen bubbles surface from the depths below when the fields have been in winter-flood. The source is both officially memorialised – and also unofficially with stones left in a circle around the spring.
The infant Thames proceeds in a stuttering manner at first, rather than with a spring in its step. Partly, some say, because of the historic pumping of water at Kemble from wells for the steam-powered machinery at the Swindon railway works. The water was originally transported by train from 1872 but the expansion of the factory at Swindon with a consequent and almost insatiable demand resulted in the construction of a mains water pipe all alongside the main line from Kemble in 1903 at the rate of one mile a week for the thirteen miles.
You can admire the water tower at Kemble on the down platform, and the Swindon water tower (much admired by Sir John Betjeman) at the far end of the railway village; it was constructed in 1871. The railway works grew prodigiously: from 143 employees in 1843 to nearly 15,000 in the twentieth-century in an area over 300 acres.
The source of the Thames also lies close to the site of what was once Tetbury Road station (91 miles and 74 chains from Paddington). A prominent member of the local gentry, Squire Gordon, objected to the construction of a railway station on his estates and so Kemble existed merely as an interchange for Cirencester until 1882 (when Kemble station was constructed after the death of the squire). Tetbury Road closed to passenger traffic in 1882 and became a goods and freight depot. It’s a ghost station now – fittingly, a deserted medieval village lies not far away.
But the river makes its inexorable way to London, fed by a multitude of tributaries, including the subterranean and infamously-named Tyburn which makes its way past Paddington and into the Thames at Pimlico. And the GWR makes its inexorable way to Paddington too.
Rail and river inexorably interlinked.
A Tale of Two Water Towers, A Tale of Two Stations, A Tale of Two Rivers