by Roger Deakin
Just downstream from Denver Sluice, a gigantic arrangement of lock gates that controls the main outlet of the Fen river system, I swam the Great Ouse, which runs out to the sea at King’s Lynn. The river here is a hundred yards wide, and I crossed its deep, thick, brown waters glancing nervously at an armada of swans bearing down on me from the massive green, steel hulk of Denver Sluice. I felt the depth and power of the river under me, and imagined it must feel something like this to swim the Ganges. The water was grained with silt, like an old photograph. Along the far bank was a gypsy scrapyard full of dead lorries and cranes and two piebald ponies trotting about amongst alarming quantities of ragwort. (It is very poisonous to animals, but the food plant of the beautiful crimson-winged Burnet moth.)
I swam towards the chimneys of a coypu’s dream: the biggest sugar beet factory in Europe. On the verge near the roundabout leading to the giant factory I had passed a miniature encampment of chrome caravan, lorry, dog kennel and a small cabin cruiser up on chocks. I had entered gypsy country here, and it continued all the way to Wisbech. Horses are still grazed by gypsies along the river banks, but their numbers have declined since the days when fenland farmers like Coley Ambrose at Stuntney kept and bred over 200 working horses. The gypsies used to go beet-hoeing, and pea-, onion- or potato-picking all over the Fens. There was fruit-picking too, alongside the village women. I had met a woman in Wilburton a few weeks earlier who described how they followed the seasons’ rhythms in their freelancing: ‘We would start beet singling, then gooseberries, then plums, then apples, then potato-picking, then more apples, then we would be packing them in the sheds.’ The days were often full of fen mists: ‘We once went potato-picking and it was so foggy we thought we were alone, but when it cleared, the field was full of people.’
With one eye on the living swans, I almost swam into a dead one on a last journey to the sea, and when I hoisted myself to the bank, I couldn’t avoid coming out like the Green Man, covered in duckweed. It was hard to accept, rowing myself through this turbid cocktail of dilute fenland, that the Great Ouse at this point included the sparkling Little Ouse and Wissey, the limpid Granta, the sacred Lark, and the sweet springwater of the Wicken Lode, all converging into the Great Ouse to run down to the Wash at King’s Lynn. The Great Ouse. It sounded and felt like the origins of life itself, where we all began, where we all end, the Alpha and Omega of the Fens, the gateway of all the eels in thirteen counties, a port of call both ways on the Sargasso run. The swim and its setting were so bizarre that only the duckweed on my towel reminded me, days later, that it wasn’t all a dream.
I drove on west, pressing deeper into the Fens, past houses tossed this way and that on sinking raft foundations, through Salters Lode and Nordelph to Well Creek, where I bathed in the Middle Level Drain in the evening sunshine. Well Creek is a narrow canal that follows the course of the original River Wissey, and forms a navigation link with the Old River Nene, the Twenty Foot River, and the Old Bedford River. It crosses over the Middle Level Drain at this point in an aqueduct, which I swam through for the perfectly good reason that I had never swum an aqueduct before, or at two different levels in the same place. There were some big sluice gates here controlling the Middle Level Drain, and water gushed into the canal, pumped up from the drain below.
A gang of boys was busy clocking up hundreds of pounds in Environment Agency fines, climbing up the sluice gates and leaping twenty feet into the Middle Level Drain. The canal narrowed to not much more than boat width where it passed through the aqueduct, and the boys further amused themselves by leaping aboard each narrowboat that chugged through, swaggering its full length in their swimming trunks, then leaping off the other side, to the dismay of its crew and much shouting on both sides. This, they explained to me, was traditional; a fenland pirate game since time immemorial.
At first disposed to regard me with suspicion, even hostility, as an oldie trespassing on their territory, the Well Creek Gang perceptibly mellowed when I executed quite a respectable, if furtive, dive into the Middle Level Drain then swam along it for a quarter-mile, past a charming waterside cottage with an old wooden landing-stage, orchard and vegetable garden. The scent of several thousand cultivated roses drifted across the water from the surrounding fields. The river was about thirty yards wide, surprisingly clear and warm, and as I swam due west up the middle, deep gold in the sun. It was the most beautiful drain I had ever seen.
All this was really a rehearsal for the grand swim I had in mind for later, by way of crowning the day, in the Wash itself. Returning to the aqueduct and sluice, I swam under them both to the far side with less than six inches’ headroom above the surface. I blame Enid Blyton for such laddish behaviour; the Famous Five were always swimming in and out of smugglers’ caves or in forbidden canals, usually at night, signalling to one another with torches. Everyone in Enid Blyton books always carried a torch, and the batteries never went flat. The improbable adventures were amongst my earliest stories, so I have only to see a sluice, or an aqueduct, and I am six years old again. There were no fines for the Famous Five; only a stern ‘Now then children, what is the meaning of this?’
In the dusty sunset glow, I motored over towards the Wash to swim at last in the wake of King John, whose treasure has been lost in the quicksands since 1216. From the map, I had chosen Gedney Drove End as the most likely-looking starting point, on the grounds that it sounded remote and romantic. It was certainly remote. I parked outside the pub, then walked through a cornfield on a lonely footpath, almost obliterated by the plough, so that it constantly threatened to edge me off into the dyke. (De Quincey says this is what Wordsworth did to all his walking companions. He would start off on your left and edge you inexorably over to the right until you were nearly in the ditch, at which point you would move round to his left, and he would veer off the other way.)
I eventually reached the sea wall, a thirty-foot grassy bank with steep wooden steps and a rickety handrail. There were notices about the dangers of the tides and creeks, and another depicting a swimmer with an ominous red line through him. He looked remarkably like me. In spite of all this there was a stark beauty about the minimal landscape in the failing light. The creeks and marshes stretched away to oblivion and a watchtower for the RAF shooting range here was silhouetted against the sky. There was nothing but the last gurgling trickles of the departing tide.
Out on the horizon were three or four hulks, small Belgranos for the planes to strafe and bomb on weekdays. The watchtower door was heavily padlocked, yet someone had been unable to resist the opportunity to put up a notice: NO UNAUTHORISED PERSON BEYOND THIS POINT. There was a picture of an unauthorised person with a diagonal line through him. I fancied he, too, looked uncannily like me, and realised that the same compulsive urge that makes a great graffiti artist is also at work amongst the bureaucrats. I ventured gingerly out on to the marsh, a desert of cracked mud and little meandering creeks that suddenly came to life with dozens of crabs, running for their lives into the craters whilst gesturing at me defiantly, not to say rudely, with their front claws.
I had tiptoed past yet another sign: DANGER. UNEXPLODED BOMBS AND MISSILES. IT IS ILLEGAL AND HIGHLY DANGEROUS TO EXCAVATE ANY OBJECTS FOUND ON THE MARSH. THEY MAY EXPLODE AND KILL YOU. Now that was more like it. No piddling £50 fines for would-be paddlers, samphire-gatherers, or King John’s treasure-hunters in the Wash. Just death. I glanced guiltily at the loudspeakers on the watchtower, half expecting a ticking-off. Peering into the middle distance I made out more targets planted in the mud like unauthorised persons stuck fast in their wellingtons.
I had been naive in imagining I might swim in the Wash. Even if it hadn’t had the plug pulled out of it, I would probably have appeared on someone’s radar screen and been strafed. I retired to the New Inn at Gedney Drove End, noted for its collection of several hundred china pigs, where I got my head in the trough, then zig-zagged back down the footpath, after the manner of Wordsworth, to camp for the night, an unauthorised person, on the lon
ely rim of the unswimmable Wash.
18
NATANDO VIRTUS
Derbyshire, 12 August
AS I ROLLED up my dewy tent in the early mist, it struck me that camping by the Wash had been just the right response to the place; the only kind of roots anyone should put down in such an uncertain mixture of land and sea, where the coastline was forever being redrawn. I love East Anglia’s wide horizons, but if I stay too long I can feel becalmed; there’s enough Celt in me to need the turbulence of the hills too, and the dashing upland rivers and streams.
I drove out of Lincolnshire across country, past Sherwood Forest and Nottingham (now re-christened ‘Robin Hood Country’ on the signposts), to the southern extremities of the English highlands in the Peak District of Derbyshire, where the rivers Derwent, Wye and Dove flow down to join the Trent in the Humber at Hull. Things changed dramatically at Matlock, yet another once-successful spa, as I wound up into the Peaks along the steep-sided valley of the Derwent, and then the Wye. I was unable to resist a detour at Ashford-in-the-Water to walk up to Water-cum-Jolly for a dip in this lively, wooded trout river. I still don’t know for certain that the place-name wasn’t a fiction on the part of the map-makers; that my swim in the big, deep, brimming mill-pool, walled by a limestone cliff, with a forty-foot wide cataract thundering into the mill-race beneath a shuddering wooden bridge, wasn’t a mirage of the long-distance swimmer engendered by the rigours of the long road, and that enticing, almost pidgin English name. ‘Water-cum-Jolly’ seemed to embody in three words the very essence of the joys of swimming.
I arrived at Hathersage in time for a pre-lunch dip in the village swimming pool, an open-air, heated, miniature lido set high on a hillside with spectacular views of the Peaks on all sides, almost within sight of Kinder Scout, Jacob’s Ladder and Mam Tor, but only twenty minutes’ drive from Sheffield. The free-thinking traditions of the village stretch all the way back to Little John, first of the green activists, who is buried in the churchyard.
I had never seen a pool with a bandstand before; an imposing, octagonally-roofed, regency-looking structure shared with the bowling green just uphill. Inside, the pool was set in lawns, with the smell of just-scrubbed wooden benches in the changing sheds, copper beeches and sweet chestnuts, and a grandstand along one side. From the outside, the place looked more like a half-timbered barn, with hipped, tiled roofs and weather-boarded walls. There were tennis courts beside it, and a busy restaurant and café open to everyone. Everything was delightfully, and deliberately, unmodernised. The pool clearly occupies a central place in the social life of the village.
I immediately felt welcome, and all my frustrations at the Wash dissolved in the blue water, which was heated to a positively effusive 84 degrees fahrenheit. The pool was full of healthy-looking Hathersagians, all steaming back and forth, and fearfully good swimmers. No wonder that on hot days people queue round the streets of Hathersage eager for a dip, and the pool has been known to have to close its doors after the first hour of business.
I felt I had swum straight into the pages of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Philosopher’s Pupil, set in an English spa-town called Ennistone, where life centres around the swimming pools and baths, all naturally heated by the spa water, bubbling from hot springs. The motto over the doors of the Ennistone Baths is Natando Virtus, and the townspeople all swim there seven days a week, morning, noon and night, introducing their children to the infants’ pool at the age of six weeks. As a focus of life in the town, the baths fulfil a similar role to the agora in Athens. ‘Serious swimming’, says the narrator, ‘was a matter of pride in our town.’ In the Hathersage pool café, swimmers were reading the papers and tucking into hearty, Little John-style lunches in the convivial north-of-Watford atmosphere that is such a welcome surprise to the alienated southerner: ‘Afternoon, Mr Johnson. Have you got that quid you owe me?’
‘Can we talk terms?’
The pool was originally given to the people of Hathersage by George Lawrence, a successful Methodist manufacturer of razor blades in Sheffield, and is still managed by the parish council. It used to be fed by a spring in the hillside, and heated by a coal boiler. When it grew muddy, the villagers would spend two weeks emptying it, and another two refilling it. The helpers all got free swimming. For years, it was closed on Sundays, according to Mr Lawrence’s decree, but the village has elected to relax such puritanism, risking the charge of the visiting evangelist who came to Iris Murdoch’s Ennistone and cried out, ‘You have dethroned Christ and worship water instead.’
From the sparkling surface of the pool, I imagined the orchestral thés dansants that might have been held around the bandstand on such afternoons as this. It set me thinking about the close relationship between music and swimming. Rhythm is one of the principal pleasures of swimming, as well as its essence. I often have a tune in my head in the pool, provided it isn’t being drowned out by muzak (chlorinated music), one of the best reasons I know for going native in a river or the sea. On the other hand, it might be interesting to think about using waterproof transducers to create an underwater sound system and perform live music from the poolside through the medium of water itself. Like whalesong, which can carry for 400 miles under the sea, music heard underwater is magically clear and wonderful.
Feeling distinctly jolly after my swim, I settled down on a bench in the grandstand with a mug of hot chocolate and the newspaper, next to a maths teacher relaxing in a bathing costume with a red biro and a stack of fourth-form equations. She told me the bandstand was always used during gala week, when the bunting was out, and brass bands would play. It is out of use at the moment because its guardrail doesn’t conform to European Community standards.
I discovered another village pool three days later, in the Yorkshire Dales at Ingleton, built by the village miners in 1933. All the labour was voluntary, and the open-air pool was originally filled by a pipe running down from the River Doe beside it, and emptied on Sundays by opening a sluice at one end. Everyone would come down and help ritually scrub it out, and it would be filled again on Monday, gradually warming up over the week. One way of taking the chill off the pool, they reckoned, was the immersion heater effect of a body of swimmers at 98.4 degrees fahrenheit. (The collective noun for cold-water swimmers would be, perhaps, a shiver.) It was deep enough to dive into from the changing-room roof, and nobody ever suffered any ill effects from the unchlorinated river water. The pool may have been cold, but it was always free, and there were midnight swims after the Saturday night dances. In 1974, the Ingletonians tiled their pool, installed a boiler, and began charging incredibly modest admission fees. It was a delicious 82 degrees fahrenheit when I went in, and of course, heating the pool had rendered it even more magnetic as the self-supporting social centre of the village.
19
AN ENCOUNTER WITH NAIADS
Yorkshire Dales, 13 August
THERE IS A long tradition of wild swimming in Yorkshire. Sweating out a shift in the heat and dust underground, coal miners must have cast their thoughts longingly, in summer, towards the abundant cooling rivers and becks of the limestone country of the Dales. In no other industry was communal, ritual bathing such a deeply essential part of life; there were always showers or baths at the head of the pit. Getting into water is still second nature in this part of the world. Hill walking and cycling have always been popular in the north, and the Dales are full of tempting swimming holes to cool one’s weary frame. The springs and underground streams burst everywhere from the labyrinthine limestone. Every village has its favourite places, some of them secret and difficult to reach, and often actually called this or that ‘hole’, like Foss Hole and Chemist Hole, in the superb River Doe above Ingleton.
The Yorkshire Dales have been shaped and carved by rivers. The Swale, Ure, Nidd, Wharfe, Ribble, Aire, Skirfare and Tees all rise in these hills, with the Lune running south to Lancaster out of Cumbria, and the Eden running north to Carlisle. With such abundance of water, few places are richer in wild flower
s than limestone country, and Richard Mabey, an aficionado of the Dales, had intrigued me with a chance remark that set me off on a quest for a particularly remote and enchanting swimming hole above Littondale. His caution that I would probably have to abseil down to it only increased my curiosity. He described a clear tufa pool hidden in a cleft somewhere up a beck, guarded by a limestone canyon on the walk between Arncliffe and Malham. This was too interesting not to pursue, and in any case I couldn’t get the place-names he mentioned out of my head: Cowside Beck and Yew Cogar Scar.
At the Falcon Hotel on the village green in Arncliffe, I was awoken early by the screaming of swifts, and a swallow singing in the eves over my open sash-window. It reminded me of home. The little hotel is a haunt of trout anglers on the River Skirfare, a tributary of the Wharfe, and nothing much seemed to have changed since 1950. It was just the sort of place I could imagine T. H. White holing up in for the weekend.
I set out across country towards Malham, climbing up along the top of the steep-sided gorge that contained the beck. The tiny figure of a cyclist laboured up the road on the other side towards Settle – ‘a cruel road’, they called it in the pub. Everything here carried the signs of use: the path, the sheep-holes worn brown into the hillside, the polished pine handholds of the stile ladders. Massive stone walls plunged almost vertically down the steep sides of the dale to the beck in perfectly straight lines, and the limestone strata showed through the grass like flock in a threadbare sofa.
