Everything about River Brent totally explained
The Brent is a river in south-east
England. It is a minor tributary of the
River Thames. It is 17.9 miles (29km) long, its general course is north-east to south-west, and it flows within
Greater London.
The name has very ancient origins in the linguistic root of the Celtic
tutelary goddess Brigant. A letter from the Bishop of London in AD 705 suggesting a meeting at
Breguntford now
Brentford, is the earliest record of this place and probably therefore that of the river.
Topography
The river Brent and its valley's formation, is the result of glacial action during the
ice age which had started some 500,000 years ago. Back then, the major drainage channel for this part of England (or early proto-Thames), was several miles to the north and travelled east, past present day Ipswich in East Anglia. Progressively, the channel was pushed south to form the St Albans depression by the repeated advances of the ice sheet. The last advance from that Scandinavian ice flow to have reached this far south, covered much of Northwest Middlesex and finally forced the proto-Thames take roughly what is its present course today.
The original land surface was some 350 to 400 feet above the current sea level, the top of which had sandy deposits from an ancient sea, laid over sedimentary clay (this is the Blue
London Clay). All the erosion down from this higher land surface and sorting action by these changes of water flow and direction, formed what is known as the Thames
River Gravel Terraces.
The ice sheet which stopped around present day Finchley, deposited
Boulder clay to form
Dollis and Hanger Hill. Its torrent of
meltwater gushed through the Finchley Gap and south, towards the new course of the Thames and proceeded to carve out the Brent Valley in the process. Upon the valley sides there can be seen other terraces of Brickearth; laid over and sometimes inter layered with the clays. These deposits, were brought in by the winds during the periglacial periods, so suggesting wide flat marshes were part of the landscape back then, which the new river Brent proceeded cut down through. The steepness of the valley sides are witness to the very much lower
mean sea levels caused by the glaciation locking up so much water upon the land masses, thus causing the river water to flow rapidly seaward and so erode its bed quickly downwards.
Since Roman times and perhaps earlier however, the
isostatic rebound from the weight of previous ice sheets and its interplay with the eustatic change in the sea level, means that the old valley of river Brent, together with that of the Thames -has been silting up again. Therefore, along much of the Brent's present day course one can make out the water meadows of rich alluvium, which gets added to, each time it floods -which is often.
So extensive, have the changes to this landscape been, that the little evidence of man's presence before the ice came has inevitable shown signs of transportation here by water. Thus nothing is known about local mans' occupation in those times. Likewise, it may be that later evidence of occupation, even since the arrival of the Romans, may lay next to the original banks of the Brent but have been berried under centuries of silt.
Earliest recorded reference and etymology
A letter from the Bishop of London in AD 705 suggesting a meeting at
Breguntford now
Brentford is the earliest record of this place and probably therefore, by implication, that of the river.
The name may have very ancient origins in the same linguistic root of the Celtic goddess
Brigant. However, this isn't to suggest (as in some texts) that it was named after such a deity. Rather it appears that it was the usual practice to name natrue features after their most notable characteristic or quality. Any deity, being so being associated with the site or feature only afterwards.
Hydronymy
A possibility for the origin of the name is that
Brig belongs to the root for stream, as in Brigstow (modern-day Bristol).
Br is a common prefix for many rivers for example
Br-ad-field, Br-ad-ford, Br-ane, Br-ant, Br-ay, Br-ay-an, Br-et-on, Br-it-on, Br-id-y, Br-ide and of course
Br-ent of which it serves as the name to more rivers than just this one river of Middlesex. Note also, in these examples the presence of
aid, en, ad, ane, ay, and especially
ant and
ent which are all derived from the Celtic for stream or water. So, for instance:
Br-ay-an translates to
river-river-river and
Brent as simply meaning
river-river.
This, re-naming and adding to the existing names given to natural features, by the same synonym but of the new vernacular of succeeding peoples, wasn't restricted to rivers. For example, in
Cumbria there's
Tor-pen-how-hill, which translates to
hill-hill-hill-hill. Rather than give even more examples and risk boring the reader and for brevity, another possible etymology will now be considered instead.
If the first recorded instance of Brentford as
Breguntford is broken into
Breogh-ant this could be a variant of
Braoch, Breoch or Breogh for boarder or division of land and
ant for water or stream. Or the
unt in Bregunt may be the synonym of
aon for example,
land or
country, with a 'T' sound added at the end due to
Epenthesis. Soon after this, it became known as the river
Brigant. This reminds one of the Brigantes or
the people who dwell in Border-water-land. They were a tribe bordered by both sea to the west and between the great river
Humber and the
Tyne. (A tribe of the same name was also known on the European mainland also similarly bounded.)
Referring back to the prefix 'Br' again: maybe it was the dividing aspect that a river presented that this prefix had back then one and the same meaning of both border and river?
However, can the river Brent be considered a
border in the sense that the quality it possessed of dividing the land, was notable enough to be given such a descriptive title? The Brent river valley in 705 AD would have looked very different than it does today. Before modern day dredging the river was wider and more shallow. Before the construction of its weirs, the Brent reservoir and
Grand Union Canal (and its Paddington Branch, which takes much of the Brent's waters) the river would have regularly flooded even more frequently than it does today. The alluvial valley floor would therefore have been swamp. On Google Earth, the signs of many of the old drainage channels that turned the marsh into water meadow are still visible. Bordering these marshes would have been dense thickets of thorn and willow (hence the local place names to day of Elthorne [thesheltering tree.
from Helethorne with the 'h' being lost to
elision], and Spelthorne (the tree of speech).
By the
Middle Ages malaria had reached Britain, It went on to be a great problem here in the south. Just as the course of the river Thames became hotspots of this parasite, all along it and up into the
Romney Marsh, so too, one can expect, that the Brent Valley was also harbouring the disease, thus living near to it may have been too unhealthy to encourager many settlers. Only at such places where the river gravel beds afforded a firm river bed was fording a safe and practical proposition. Some such fording places were the Roman road were it crosses in Brentford itself, Green Lanes in
Hanwell (being a reminder that this was an old droving route, the word 'green' signifying that livestock could graze whilst on there last sojourn), Hanwell Bridge on the Uxbridge Road. With only a few fordable places along the course it would obviously have been easier to defend such a line and therefore this suggests served as a good and maybe important boarder. So on for much of its course north.
Another conjecture (and with out a time-machine this is all they can be) with which to add weight to this view:
The original parish of Hanwell was larger than today and stretched for some three and a half miles north from the Brent's confluence with the river Thames but is only some half a mile wide; thus separating the Parishes of Norwood on the east bank of the Brent and
Ealing towards the west, to the north it borders
Greenford and
Perivale.
One of the possible etymologies given for this ancient parish of Hanwell is 'Han' as Saxon for boundary stone and 'well' as Saxon for fresh water or spring. The Rectory Cottage to the parish church of St Mary has a large stone of about a ton in its garden. A large land owner and historian also put forward the observation that this appeared to line up with what he maintained as traces of the parish being divided up into the Roman
Centuria unit of land area, indicating that they to used this stone as a datum. However, the position of the field boundaries and roads still wait to be statistically analysed to test this hypothesis.
Nevertheless, a cursory inspection of the old ordnance survey maps, blended with an appreciation of how hedges and boundary paths drift with time and use, strongly suggests that they approximated to dimensions of the
quintarial limes of the Roman field system by a degree that far exceeds what would be expected by chance alone. Also, as already mentioned, the original parish is very narrow in the east-west direction. If we reconsider the content and purpose of the afore said letter of 705 AD it's to suggest a meeting at Brentford about the troubles between the East Saxons and the West Saxons. In other words it's recognised
ipso facto as a convenient half way point and boundary area. Other historically important meeting are recorded to have been held here in later times as well. Going back a little further, evidence of the west Saxon successfully over running the
Chiltern's to the north west can be seen in the number of place names which end in
ham ton and
worth but then they stop as if the parish of Hanwell and the course of the Brent is the boundary between the invading West Saxons and of the last vestiges of Romano-British London which lasted until the end of the 5th century.
Another suggestion has been that
Han came from the Saxon
han for cockerel. This would seem rather too broad a noun to serve as a place name but the spelling that appears in the Doomsday book is Hannewelle. Could
Hanne –
welle be derived from
Han-créd -welle noting especially the stress placed on the
e. The other sounds being dropped (see:
Elision) to make it easier to say and a touch more
euphonic.
Han-créd or rather the modern synonym
cock-crow was a term used until recently in both town and country to signify the boarder between night and day, and is neither one nor the other. Guns and other mechanisms are 'cocked' etc., etc. The suffix of 'Hat' is used today to divide computer hackers and before them: gun-slinger, witches etc., etc. This use of some nouns appears to be a feature of human language (also present in ancient Greek). Could 'cock' in this instants have been be used in the same way?
As partly touched upon, the course of the river Brent still denotes the boundary of many part of the human landscape it passes through including the boundary of Middlesex and
Hertfordshire -which is the border of the old Hundred of Gore
. It may have only been the Victorian era and the
romantic period, with all its propensity to suggest everything had links to the druids, or of some other ancient religious deity, all which alluded more to fancy with which to delight the readers of the new vogue in travelogues, rather than the result of any serious study, that true significance of the river Brent and its course has become muddied more than the river itself.
Its course
From Barnet to Brent Cross
The River Brent rises in low hills and fields of the
London Borough of Barnet in north
London, as several different tributaries. The main one is the
Dollis Brook [1.8miles (3km) long], which rises in what was Barnet Common,
Arkley, and passes eastward through
Duck Island (Barnet). The name the Dollis is believed by some to have something to do with the rights of commoners at Barnet, and is rooted in the same word as "dole". It marks the boundary between the ancient parish of
Totteridge and
Chipping Barnet. The Dollis turns south and flows down between Totteridge and the
Finchley side of
Whetstone. A tributary of the Dollis,
Folly Brook, meets the Dollis not far from
Woodside Park tube station. From here the Dollis flows south as a boundary between
Mill Hill, and the ancient parish of
Finchley. The tributary, Mutton Brook, rises in
East Finchley at Cherry Tree Wood. It flows westward from there, underground, until it comes out shortly after
The Bishop's Avenue. Just west of Henley’s Corner, Mutton Brook joins the Dollis, and from here on the Dollis is often called the Brent, though some people maintain the name Dollis Brook as far as the
Welsh Harp. A small stream called Decoy Brook that rises somewhere in
Temple Fortune runs parallel to
Golders Green Road to join the Brent River, at Brent Bridge. One other
Clitterhouse Brook, rises at two locations on the Western slopes of Hampstead Heath. From one location it feeds the Leg of Mutton Pond on West Heath, and the lower duck pond of Golders Hill Park. On the bank of the stream by Leg of Mutton Pond, lies the site of a stone age encampment, which was excavated by the Hendon and District Archaeological Society in the 1970s. A second location feeds the upper duck pond in Golders Hill park and then flows to merge with the other branch at the lower duck pond. From Golders Hill Park the stream flows underground approximately in parallel with Dunstan Road to Childs Hill Park. At Granville Road, at the south end of the park a laundry industry emerged to use the clean water of the stream as did a nursery industry, now all disappeared. From Granville Road the stream flows underground to emerge at
Clitterhouse Playing Fields and joins the Brent at
Brent Cross shopping centre. The River Brent then flows alongside the
A406 North Circular Road to
Brent Cross, and then into the
Brent Reservoir, where it's joined by another tributory, the
Silk Stream.
From Brent Cross to Brentford
From here, still closely following the North Circular Road, it passes Stonebridge Park, south of
Wembley, and under an
aqueduct carrying the Paddington arm of the
Grand Union Canal. From
Hanger Lane, the river turns westward under the A40 Western Avenue and through Brent River Park for two miles until it reaches
Greenford. This part of the river, as it passes through the southern boundary of Greenford Golf Course, was dredged deeper in the 1960s and a control weir built, to reduce the risk of flooding. Especially of Costons Lane, along which there's a flood protection wall. Hitherto, Ruslip Road East would also regularly become impassible.
It then swings south again at Greenford Bridge to
Hanwell a mile away across the fields. Here the River Brent turn eastward around St. Mary's Church. Before again turning south and under the GWR Railway at
Wharncliffe Viaduct a high spanned railway viaduct carrying the main line railway from
Paddington to the west of England.
A mile further on, the River Brent is joined from the west by the main line of the
Grand Union Canal at the foot of a flight of
locks. From here, the Brent is canalised and navigable — the river and canal pass through
Osterley and a further three locks before joining the
tidal River Thames at
Brentford tidal lock, a mile upstream of
Kew Bridge.
In literature and poetry
Poet Laureate
Sir John Betjeman in his poem Middlesex.
Notable floods
The earliest flood record is 1682. A very violent storm of rain, accompanied with thunder and lightning, caused a sudden flood, which did great damage to the town of Brentford. The whole place was overflown ; boats rowed up and down the streets, and several houses and other buildings were carried away by the force of the waters.
1841 saw the waters of the Brent Reservoir over flow the top of the dam which caused a breech. A waves of frothing and roaring water swept down the river's course taking all before it. People died.
In the summer of 1976 Britain experienced its worst drought since records began; with Water Companies declaring it would take six or seven years for their empty, dry reservoirs to fill again. However, the following year in August, torrential rain not only filled but overwhelmed the Brent reservoir again, forcing the sluice gate to be open to their fullest extent. It carried on raining heavily thought the night. Even before the river broke its banks, the drains had started to overflow with sewerage. People awoke during the night to find their homes being flooded. Commuters set for to work in the morning to find the North London streets grid-locked due to wide spread flooding of the Brent river. Trains couldn't run. Hundred ended up homeless and hundreds of shops and business had to close to clear up the mess. Roads that were unaffected by the water and sewage were awash with the dozens and dozens of news-crews covering the mayhem.
Further Information
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