by Roger Deakin
Some weeks before, I had discussed such fears, rational or otherwise, with Stephen Rees, a plumber who swims in the Cherwell, a few miles to the north of Oxford. One afternoon in the late August of 1996, Mr Rees was swimming in one of the Cherwell mill-pools between Somerton and Upper Heyford. He swam across to the far side of the pool where a lasher, a fast-flowing channel of white water, flowed in. He was about to swim up it, but waited for his companion, catching hold of a willow branch with his left arm. Almost immediately he felt ‘a bash’ in his right arm, which was trailing in the fast water. He told me he thought for a moment he had hit it on a sunken branch. Then he looked down and recognised the head of a pike holding on to his forearm and saw the flash of its body as it spun away. ‘It was about ten to fifteen pounds, say about two-foot-six long. All I saw was the head and a flash as it disappeared. Then the water began to turn red. I wasn’t exactly tanned, so I suppose the pike saw what it thought was a white fish in fast water. I had one large rip in my arm and a lot of puncture holes. I got out straight away and had to drive back home with my shirt wrapped round the wound, feeling pretty shaky.’
Mr Rees ended up in the hospital, having eight stitches in his arm and a tetanus jab. The experience hasn’t put him off river-swimming, and he has even been back to the same pool for several dips since. He also returned with rod and line to exact revenge, but only managed to catch a 4-pound specimen. Mr Rees happens to be the water bailiff for the local fishing club, so perhaps it was just that the pike recognised him. He knows there are some big pike in the Cherwell; a friend of his father caught a 34-pound fish near the mill-pool a few years ago. Mr Rees considers the chances of being bitten by a pike while swimming to be infinitely small. His theory is that his assailant had been trapped in the pool for some time, unable to swim back up the fast-flowing lasher, and was hungry, having eaten all the available fish. In the blur of the white water, and desperate for a bite to eat, it bit.
I heard a similar tale from the Shetland swimmer Paul Guinea. As he got out of one of the lochs there recently, an eel wrapped itself around his leg and came into the boat with him. The notion that Stephen Rees might have been the victim of Fish Rage is not to be discounted. I read in The Times in October 1996 of an angler in Konakovo in Russia, who landed a ten pounder and tried to kiss it. The fish sank its teeth into his nose and doctors had to prise it off, even after it had been decapitated. A friend of mine once saw a fish van in Dresden with this succinct Teutonic witticism painted on its side: SHARKS EAT PEOPLE. THEY ARE FISH. FIGHT BACK – EAT MORE FISH!
I escaped from Bungay Beach quite untroubled by anything but my own dream-pike which, once conjured into the place, could not be banished. It was a delightful place to swim, and seemed popular. I passed another young party as I departed over the swimmers’ bridge. Looking down, I noticed a pair of abandoned swimming trunks floating off downstream.
The following afternoon, I swam the length of Benacre Broad at Covehithe a few miles up the coast the other side of Southwold. It is a silty fresh-water lagoon separated from the sea by a low spit of sand and shingle beach, and its days are numbered. The bleached skeleton of a single tree stood defiantly in the middle of the sands. As I swam back in water like cooled tea towards the spit, and the sea beyond, rooks cawed in the dark woods behind me, and a curlew called from the reed-beds. Long Covert, the old bluebell wood beside the broad, is blindly marching into the sea. In spring, bluebells and pink campions grow right up to the pebble strand, which is strewn with the decaying roots and stumps of oaks and sycamores. Meanwhile, the sea was pickling the trees at the edge of the wood to extinction. First it shrivelled their leaves, then it blasted them until the trunks were white and bare. I stepped thirty paces over the beach and swam out into the North Sea.
I had come down the path along the disintegrating cliffs from the magnificent ruined church at Covehithe. Each year, the path moves further inland across the fields because great hunks of England keep falling away in the winter storms. The previous year Roger Middleditch, the beleaguered farmer, had planted carrots. By the time he came to harvest them, they were sticking out of the cliff-top and littering the beach like fish. A year later, his rows of lemming barley grew right up to the cliff and toppled over it. During the winter, Mr Middleditch had lost about twelve metres to the sea. Two years before, he had lost twenty. Since the mid-1970s, when the erosion mysteriously began to accelerate, the waves have taken forty-seven acres of the farm. It was originally nearly 300 acres; now it is 240. Less than four acres of a twenty-one acre field that led the other way to the sea from the farm in the 1970s now remain. His philosophical words came back to me as I drove away down the lanes towards Dunwich: ‘In less than twenty-five years the sea will have reached the church and our farm. The church will go, the farmhouse and buildings will go, Benacre Broad will disappear.’
Richard Mabey, who has often walked the East Anglian beaches, has a sense of the way this shifting coastline may work on the mind: ‘I sometimes wondered if the closeness of these unstable edges of the land was part of the secret of Norfolk’s appeal to us, a reflection of a half-conscious desire to be as contingent as spindrift ourselves, to stay loose, cast off, be washed up somewhere unexpected.’
That evening, I visited Suffolk’s own lost city of Atlantis, and swam at nightfall over the drowned churches of Dunwich. Pilgrims have been coming here for years to gaze at what no longer is, or to look out to sea in rough weather and listen for the fabled submarine ringing of the bells of fifty sunken churches; perhaps even to pen a line or two like: ‘Where frowns the ruin o’er the silent dead.’ The tide was almost up, and I swam off the steep bank of shingle by the fishermen’s huts. The clattering pebbles, dragged by the swell like castanets, were amplified by the night, and by the cool evening water. The moon was strung on the horizontal vapour trail of a jet plane like a musical note printed on a page.
There never were anything like fifty churches, although a Southwold historian, Thomas Gardner, had said so in 1754 and the exaggeration stuck, along with the underwater pealing of church bells, supposedly swung by the same rampaging sea that had demolished the medieval city and port on the night of 14 January 1328. Hundreds of homes, barns and warehouses in six parishes were eventually inundated. By 1573, only two churches were left standing, and most of what remained except for All Saints’ church was destroyed in the great storm of 1740. But one of the church towers still stood perfectly upright on the beach at low tide, until it collapsed in about 1900. So thorough has been the sea’s erasure that almost the only historical evidence left is in documentary records. The tempest didn’t just take churches, shops and houses, it took hills, a whole hunting forest, and the major harbour on which the city’s prosperity was founded. It washed them all away like a sandcastle and blocked the entrance to the harbour with a gigantic shingle bank, closing it forever. The contrast between the clamour of a medieval sea-port city at the peak of prosperity and the empty, silent horizon of today is enough to set the least reflective of souls thinking about the impermanence of things. All that is left of Dunwich now (apart from the car park) is a café, a pub, two fishermen’s huts, a row of houses, and a nineteenth-century church. The one medieval building still standing is the ruined twelfth-century chapel of the St James leper hospital, once well outside the city walls. There is something of the myth of Philoctetes about its survival: the outsiders have endured in the end.
The uncomfortable pebble beach shelves steeply, and I was glad to subside into the sea, swimming immediately in deep water, black and treacly after the lightness of the Waveney the day before. Far out past the breakers, shifting like a porpoise in the swell, I had the illusion that the shadowy cliffs were visibly receding. The underlying boulder clay of Suffolk erodes easily, and the layer of shingle that lies on top of it is forever being washed away and moved about by storms and tides to create an undersea topography that changes so much, they have to keep redrawing the navigation charts. I was the only bather in the cool night sea, and everyt
hing was very distant. To the north, the lighthouse at Southwold; towards the horizon, a cargo ship and a fishing boat, and to the south at Sizewell, the brash twinkling of the nuclear power station. Moving through the night, suspended in the waves over the extinct city, was like swimming over the submerged Iron-age fields of the Scilly Isles.
17
THE WASH
Norfolk, 11 August
AT FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning I set out for the north, via the Norfolk Breckland, the northern fens, and the Wash. The sun was still rising when I swam at Santon Downham, a hamlet of squat single-storey foresters’ cottages in yellow-grey Cambridge brick encrusted with lichens. The place was dwarfed by the tree canopy that surrounded it in a sudden clearing in Thetford Forest, down avenues of lime, Scots fir and oak. Everything seemed little; the post office, the pretty white criss-cross iron bridge, and the Little Ouse. I bathed from a bay of sand so fine and clean it could have been the seaside. I have known it as a swimming hole most of my life, since coming here as a miserable little army cadet on a school field camp when I was about fourteen. It was high summer and the rough, woollen, khaki uniforms were prickling us all crazy in the heat. So were the thick socks and heavy boots. Someone must have taken pity on us because we were piled into the back of a truck and bumped along endless sandy tracks until we reached this mirage of a river, stripped off, and felt its welcome embrace like all our mothers soothing and kissing us cool. I felt then, as now, the caress of long tresses of viridian water crowfoot swaying and trembling in the current. The water was crystalline and sparkling, with the sun’s brightness reflected back off the fine, chalky, gravelly bed and fish skidding in and out of the weed sheafs. The river here is thigh deep and its silky waters suspend you almost stationary as you swim upstream, like the countless minnows that nibbled shyly at my feet as I sat in the shallows, glad of the early-morning solitude.
The Little Ouse is a wadi running through the Breckland desert. It comes as a surprise to find a river of such beauty in this arid, sandy place, like coming over a barren ridge and seeing the lush palm groves of the Draa Valley south of Marrakesh. In the neolithic days when the whole area was a populous centre of industrial flint-mining, the river must have been a busy place.
I left my clothes near the bridge and walked barefoot on the warm sand along the river bank upstream for a mile and drifted back down, swimming gently with the current, pushing between the sensual weed, past more sandy bathing bays and sun-hollows in the miniature reedy dunes along the banks. The river was covered in a fine orange dusting of poplar pollen only visible at surface level, and rainbows played in the spray curtains of water-jets hosing a potato field with pumped river water. Dark chubb dodged under the banks amongst the roots of crack willows, and every river stone I turned over had a whole caddis-larva housing estate hidden beneath it.
The Little Ouse is the reflection of the Waveney, rising out of the peat pools of Redgrave Fen to flow in the opposite direction and join the Great Ouse in the Fens at Brandon Creek. I dawdled and splashed back to the bridge between banks full of the lush rankness of willowherb, reed and loosestrife, reaching it just as the post van crossed, and the first bathing party of children arrived.
Driving on through Santon Warren past Grime’s Graves towards Ickburgh, I turned off and parked, and set off on foot down a woodland ride and across a meadow. I heard the brimming river before I saw it, pouring and dancing more like mountain water beside a grassy path that bordered a marshy wood. This was the Wissey, a river so secret that even its name sounds like a whisper; a river of intoxicating beauty that appears somehow to have avoided the late twentieth century altogether and to know nothing of drought or over-abstraction, let alone pollution. It was full of fish and wild flowers, and, for all I knew, crayfish and naiads, wonderfully remote from any sort of civilisation. The banks were thick with purple water-mint, forget-me-not, hawkbit, and clouds of yellow brimstones and cabbage whites browsing on the purple loosestrife along the banks. The water was polished, deep green and gold, shining from its velvet bed of crowfoot and fine gravel; it seemed quite out of time, flowing as sweetly as the river in Millais’ painting of the drowned Ophelia, decked in wild flowers. (He actually painted it near Ewell in Surrey.)
The Wissey rises in a moated fish pond at a farm in Shipdham near East Dereham in Norfolk and quite soon runs through the never-never land of an army training ground, forbidden to most of us for over fifty years, left undisturbed for months on end, and, crucially, unfarmed. Thus insulated from modern agricultural pollution, the Wissey is one of the purest lowland streams in East Anglia.
Feeling like a philanderer of rivers, with the water of the Little Ouse still in my hair, I went in respectfully through some reeds and began breaststroking tentatively downstream, in water that kept changing tempo, through chalky shallows and deeper pools under the intermittent shade of alders. At times it was so shallow I hauled myself along through nine-inch riffles, cushioned on lush beds of water buttercup. Then I would round a curve and be tilted and rushed downhill almost as I had been on Dartmoor, emerging into waist-deep water full of the fleeting shadows of trout or chubb.
The Wissey probably derives its name from an Old English word, ‘wise’, meaning simply ‘river’ and an early East Anglian tribe, the Wissa, may originally have been the People of the Wissey. But how did Wisbech, further west in the Fens, come to derive its name from a river that goes nowhere near it? It is interesting evidence of the dramatic extent to which rivers have changed course over the ages in the Fens. The Wissey, which once ran all the way west to Wisbech, has been intercepted on its way by the Ouse at Denver, and thus finds its way to the Wash at King’s Lynn. Many of these changes have been caused by successive drainings of the Fens, beginning with the Romans. Fenland rivers build up silt in their beds and rise up above the surrounding land. Eventually, one may burst its banks somewhere and set off across country on a new course. The rich, silted beds of the extinct rivers and dykes are called roddons, and the twisting roads that cross the Fens follow the earlier meanderings of the rivers. Lines of old willows are also signs of ancient watercourses. At Cottenham, north of Cambridge, you can walk in the course of the old Carr Dyke, and the black, silt roddon of the prehistoric River Cam is clearly visible at Welney.
A series of wooden breakwaters set diagonally into the Wissey caught my eye as I swept along in a green tunnel. They were like paddles dug in to steer a canoe, and created similar eddies in the stream. These were croyes, constructed by the Environment Agency to deflect the current and enliven the river. They would have the same effect as rocks in the course of a Cumbrian river. By forcing the current through a narrowed gap they cause turbulence, which will gradually gouge out a pool downstream, flushing away the sandy bottom to reveal gravel. Different kinds of creatures live on gravel, so this enriches the diversity of the river’s life. When the river is in flood, eddy pools develop as havens for fish and other creatures to hole up; shelter from the storm. In relatively straight rivers you can offset alternate croyes and help recreate the lost meanders. It seems odd that the same people who ironed out the meanders in the first place are now busy spending more of our money putting them back in.
There wasn’t a soul about, and the insect hum of a really hot day was already building up. A kingfisher streaked right over me in a searing afterburn of blue. You always hear them first, piping a shrill little whistle as they fly, as if to clear the airspace, like Mr Toad at the wheel. Iridescent, black-barred demoiselle courting couples flew in and out of the rushes or rested on them in clinches. These graceful insects are aptly christened Agrion splendens. Blue was the fashionable colour in this river. Delicate blue damselflies and big blue aeschna dragonflies hung in the air just above the surface, taking no notice of me at all. I felt like Gulliver, moving through the Lilliputian fleet. Stones concealed caddis larvae like pearly kings and queens, and lively water shrimps scuttled for cover.
At Didlington bridge, a mile downriver, I found myself in a natural swimm
ing hole complete with the regulation rope dangling from a branch. The river was deep and free of weed and I swam in a shaded bower formed by a curious miniature grove of stunted oaks planted close together and never thinned. The ornamental cast-iron bridge was wreathed in wild hops, but the Breckland around Didlington felt abandoned; I had hardly seen a living soul all morning, except hundreds of miserable-looking white ducks standing about in a distant stubble field in the shade of green awnings like disconsolate wedding guests. At the Water Board’s Gauging Station by Didlington weir, swimmers were put firmly in their place by an attractive red proclamation from the Environment Agency:
WARNINGIT
IS AN OFFENCE: TO JUMP INTO THE RIVER FROM A BRIDGE, LOCK OR ANY OTHER STRUCTURE. TO SWIM WITHIN 36M OF ANY LOCK SLUICE, WEIR OR WATER INTAKE OR IN ANY LOCK PEN.
MAXIMUM FINE £50. WE CARE ABOUT YOUR SAFETY.
After a picnic lunch by the little river, I drove on to Hilgay, to the south of King’s Lynn, where I swam by mistake in what turned out to be the poetical-sounding Cut-off Channel, one of the main arteries of the fenland system of drains. It runs west in a big arc from Mildenhall to Denver Sluice. I realised afterwards that I had misread the map, and was under the impression I was swimming the lower reaches of the self-same Wissey, when in fact it runs parallel through the same village half a mile away. Such is the confusion of interlacing water courses in the Fens. I crossed the somnolent water by Snore Hall, an ancient pile snoozing through the centuries, half sunk in the peat, that could have been a model for Toad Hall. The channel was forty yards wide, deep, and stretched away for ever in both directions. A pair of anglers watched me as I swam over, rescuing a roach en route. It had jumped and landed on a patch of tangled, floating weed. The puzzling experience contrasted wildly with my bathe in the upper Wissey. It was like swimming in warm minestrone. Much of the surface was choked with floating islands of half-rotten weed, and I staggered out gratefully through black water into a silty reed-bed, wondering what on earth had become of the pristine river of half an hour ago. I felt profoundly disillusioned, and it wasn’t until later that I realised my mistake.
