Downstream

travel to the river’s source,
but they failed to ‘draw our
boat up to the very spring of
the Thames,’ wrote
Clairmont, and by the time
they got three miles above
Lechlade ‘the weeds became
so enormously thick & high,
that all three of us tugging
could not stir the empty boat
an inch’.
The shallow water didn’t
even cover the hoofs of cows
standing in the middle to