To the Victoria Embankment, there to take our Government-mandated exercise by following the lines of two waterways, the Bloomsbury Ditch & the #CockAndPye Ditch. These were channels which drained the marshland that surrounded the village of St Giles - current-day Covent Garden.

The walk is one devised by @teabolton in the second volume of his guide to London’s lost rivers, & follows the line of the 2 linked ditches from the Thames at Victoria Embankment Gardens & then back to Cleopatra’s Needle. #CockAndPye

"With no known natural watercourses between the Fleet, to the east, and the Tyburn, to the west, Covent Garden and Soho are gaps in the London river map. It is, however, quite possible that the ditches rechannelled small streams that existed before the earliest maps" - @teabolton

The fields of St Giles-in-the-Fields were notoriously boggy. St Giles itself stood by the main London-Oxford road (as in Oxford Street), but was sufficiently isolated that when, c. 1120, Henry I's wife Matilda founded a monastery here, it doubled as a hospital for lepers.

St Giles always had a marsh-tang of misery & sedition about it. It remained a leper colony - on & off - until the Reformation, & was the centre of Sir John Oldcastle's Lollard rebellion in 1414. (Sir John was executed at what's now the Oxford St-Tottenham Ct Rd x-roads in 1417.)