Down the Ock Valley Walk there is still evidence of flood damage over 4 years after the 2007 floods. Dead trees like the curly branched variety in the picture have been left as a reminder.
A planning application has recently been put in on land near St Amand Drive, close to the River Ock, with an attached flood risk assessment by a firm based in Burgess Hill, West Sussex and I quote “… Running near the northern boundary of the site is the (bifurcated) River Ock, which flows east to the Thames (known locally as the Isis.) …”
At that point I started to doubt the flood risk. I have never called the Thames the Isis even when I lived in Oxford. Perhaps there are some in Abingdon that do.
Isis or Thames?
As I understand it, only the stretch through Oxford is called the Isis. (Derived from the Latin Tamesis perhaps?)
John S
I thought that only the stretch through Oxford was called Isis. I thought it was derived from the Latin, but thought it was more to do with Victorian Oxbridge academia’s obsessions with Greek and Roman myth, but didn’t know the Latin for Thames was Tamesis. I think that Matthew Arnold makes reference to it in his Scholar Gypsy.
Whatever, it doesn’t make you comfortable to know that the flood risk for these new houses is quite so flimsily Wikipedia’d does it?
My understanding was that the river on its whole stretch (after the founding so called 7 streams) before Abingdon is the Isis and becomes the Thames in Abingdon.
Isis being short for tamesis.
Locally therefore the river is known as the Thames.
Whatever it is called it is wet on flooding.