Although nowadays there are numerous other routes that travellers can take to reach Oxford, this was not always the case. Spots where the river Thames was crossable were few and far between, and anyone wishing to avoid Swinford could expect a sizable detour.

As a consequence, the route across the river at Swinford was one of the busiest in the county, with travellers from Cheltenham and even Wales passing through on their way to Oxford and then London.

Before the current bridge was built in 1769, crossing the river at Swinford could be a downright hazardous task. When the river was low in summer, the crossing would be little more than a refreshing paddle. However, in winter when the river was in flood it was an entirely different matter.

A ferryman was on hand who would, for a small fee, ferry you across the river in his flat-bottomed boat. But even so, disasters were common.

In the winter of 1636, four sheriffs from Wales were tasked with transporting £800 in Royal gold eastwards from Wales to the Treasury in London. They made it as far as Swinford, but found the river flowing fast and high. Not wanting to delay their important journey with a long detour, the sheriffs decided to risk it and bribed the reluctant ferryman to take them across the churning waters.

They were halfway across when disaster struck. The ferry overturned, some say due to the weight of gold onboard. All four sheriffs were drowned and their cargo of gold was washed away down the river, never to be seen again.

The experience of the Welsh sherriffs was not at all unusual, the river has a history of similarly dicey crossings. Just a few years before the bridge was built, methodist preacher John Wesley came close to drowning when he attempted to cross the river here while it was in flood.

A poor quality ‘toll bridge’, little more than a wooden causeway, had been constructed nearby to facilitate crossing, but when Wesley arrived the water level was already higher than the causeway. Wesley’s horse stumbled on the causeway and came close to plunged into the deep water, taking its rider with it and the pair only managed to make it across with great difficultly and number of close shaves

King George II has a similar experience while crossing the flooded river a few years later in his royal coach. It is perhaps because of this incident that George decreed that whoever should build a bridge here should be permitted to collect tolls tax-free in perpetuity.

The person to take King George up on this offer was the 4th Earl of Abingdon, who paid for the construction of a bridge that opened in 1769. Made of stone and high enough for boats to pass underneath while heavy carriages passed above, the Earl of Abingdon’s bridge was a great improvement on the wooden bridge it replaced.

However, it didn’t prove the money-spinner the Earl had anticipated. Just five years after it was constructed, the bridge was badly damaged by flooding. The Earl’s attempts to raise money to repair the bridge by raising tolls failed, and the Earl was declared bankrupt soon after.

To many encountering the bridge for the first time, the 5p fee for cars probably seems absurdly small. Surely the owners could raise the price substantially and people would still pay up? What prevents the owners from doing this is the fact that bridge was created by a 1767 act of parliament, the Swynford Bridge Act.

As such, it would take another act of parliament for the owners to be granted permission to raise the fee. In fact, an attempt in 1981 by the then-owners to raise the fee for cars form 2p to 10p was refused by a High Court writ. The fee was not raised to 5pm until 1994, when an inquiry agreed that the extra fee was needed to allow the owners to keep the bridge in a good state of repair.

Frankly, the legal proceedings that would be required by the owners to get the act of parliament altered again could cost them a huge amount legal fees, with no guarantee of success. As it stands, the current 5p fees still net the owners around £200k in tax-free income each year, so it’s easier for them to keep the fees as they are.

Many drivers who have found themselves stuck in the long queues that form around rush hour have probably wondered why the Oxfordshire Country Council doesn’t just buy the bridge from the owners. Surely it would be better to just purchase the bridge, abolish the fees and remove a notorious traffic bottleneck?

The answer again comes down to money. The bridge was last sold in 2009 for over £1 million, and so the council would probably need to pay considerably more than that to buy the bridge from the owners today. In fact, the Country Council turned down the opportunity to purchase it in 2009, saying at the time that they could not afford it.

The Council would then find themselves in possession of an expensive (if historic) bridge that would cost them a considerable amount to maintain, but which no longer generated any income to pay for said maintenance. It would just end up stretching the county’s already straining transport budget even further.

Incredibly, the toll booth that stands in the middle of the road at the west end of the bridge was not constructed until the 1990s. Before this time, toll collectors went about their job with considerable risks from passing cars.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, before the construction of the booth a number of toll collectors had been struck by cars and injured!