A riverside diary entry on the drought’s effect on the river’s origins far upstream, feeling suddenly small next to a waterway you thought you understood completely, and what “bone dry” actually looks like at the source
The source of the River Thames dried up this month for the first time since at least 1976, a fact I read while sitting on my usual bench looking out at a stretch of water that, down here in London, still looked entirely full and entirely unbothered, and the disconnect between those two things properly rattled me.
Why I’d Genuinely Never Thought Much About Where This River Actually Begins
I’ve lived beside the Thames for years, watched it through every mood and tide, and somehow never once properly considered the actual, physical point where it starts, some spring in the Cotswolds I’d have struggled to locate on a map before this week. Reading that it had simply stopped, dried up entirely, made the whole river suddenly feel considerably more fragile than the vast, permanent-seeming body of water I see every single day.
What It Actually Means For A River’s Source To Dry Up Like This
Essentially that the whole system is being fed from further downstream, tributaries and groundwater and rainfall accumulated elsewhere, rather than from its own traditional starting point, a genuinely unsettling reversal of how I’d always assumed a river simply worked, flowing outward and downward from one clear beginning.
How This News Actually Changed The Way I Looked At My Own Stretch Of The River This Week
Considerably more anxiously than usual, if I’m honest. I found myself watching the water level near my flat with a kind of low-grade vigilance I’ve never previously applied to it, as though I might personally notice the exact moment the drought’s effects finally travelled all the way down to London.
Why This Feels Like Part Of A Genuinely Bigger Pattern This Summer
Between the drought, the burst mains, and now the actual source running dry for the first time in half a century, this has been the year I finally stopped taking this river for granted as some permanent, unshakeable feature of the landscape and started understanding it as something genuinely vulnerable to what’s happening to the climate around it.
What I’m Actually Planning To Do With This New, Slightly Uncomfortable Awareness
Pay proper attention, mostly, rather than simply admiring the view from my usual bench without ever really considering what’s actually happening to the water beneath it. It feels like the very least I owe a river I’ve spent this many years living happily alongside.