Waterlog

by Roger Deakin

  But Orwell had miscalculated the tides, and, as they entered the Gulf of Corryvreckan, the whirlpool dragged the outboard engine off the boat. They were only saved by Orwell’s nephew Henry Dakin, a young army officer, who had the strength to row them out of the whirlpool before they were too far in, but they capsized near one of the little islands in the Gulf. Richard went under the boat and had to be dragged out by Orwell. They lost everything, even their shoes. The party managed to get on to the rocky island safely, and stayed there until they were picked up by a passing fishing boat a few hours later.

  I approached Barnhill, a surprisingly extensive slate-roofed stone house, with single-storey additions at both ends, commanding a view of the Sound of Jura towards the mainland. Its beauty lies in its extreme remoteness. Orwell had recruited a young Scotsman, Bill Dunn, to come and help him and his friend Richard Rees run the farm in 1947. At one time, they had fifty sheep, ten cows and a pig. It was hard to imagine, looking at the wet, rushy ground, how they could have succeeded.

  Bill ended up marrying Orwell’s sister, Avril, who was also living up there. He had lost a leg in the war in Italy, and he was in the habit of nailing a piece of wood to the bottom of his wooden leg to stop it sinking into the bog. Some time in the early eighties, Bill Dunn swam the Corryvreckan. I have met people who saw him do it. He took off his wooden leg and smeared himself in sheep’s fat. It was a flat calm day, and a whole flotilla of small boats turned out to accompany him. He had been practising for weeks in the bays along the island. Dunn was powerfully built in the chest and shoulders, and crossed the Gulf from Jura to Scarba, swimming the crawl, in not much more than half an hour. By now, the distance between the two islands was imprinted in my mind: 1,466 yards.

  Pressing on north towards the Corryvreckan, I passed a second isolated farm, and the track became a path wandering over the hills. The sun was going down, and the midges were becoming impossible, so I looked for a level, heathery ridge for my camp. It is surprising how delicious a supper of bread and sardines can taste after a long day’s swimming, and a walk. It was the explorer Sir Richard Burton who said, ‘In the desert there is a keen enjoyment of mere animal existence.’ I zipped the midges out of the tent, and slept in the sweet repose of weariness that comes like spring to the body, so you can almost feel it renewing itself in every cell. But my sleep was tempered by apprehension about the next stage of the journey and I dreamed comprehensively of the Corryvreckan all night.

  The morning began unexpectedly grey, with a sprinkling of fine rain driving in off the sea as I set off up the last two miles of dilapidated path to the gulf itself. Obeying some inescapable impulse to confront my nocturnal fear, I trudged on north like a lemming. There was no telling which of us was in greater turmoil: myself or the whirlpool. I heard the commotion of water before I saw it, a low-pitched, continuous seething of brawling waves. The unnerving sound carried vividly on the damp drizzle. These were not the wide blue skies I had imagined; the scene before me was mostly muted shades of grey. The shore was a fortified steep escarpment, with no beaches, only fissured rock, indented by narrow clefts, alternately filled and sucked dry by the Atlantic swell with the awful gurgling I associate with the dentist’s chair. This was it. The Gulf of Corryvreckan. One of the most notorious stretches of water anywhere around the British Isles. Standing before it, at the extremity of the island, I felt like The Last Man in Europe, Orwell’s original working title for Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  The sea all round this part of the Western Isles is so full of warring tiderips, sluicing through narrow gaps between islands in deep channels, that it is rarely still. Enormous volumes of water have to find their way in and out of the islands that stand in their way. So serious is the danger of the Gulf of Corryvreckan that it is officially classed by the Royal Navy as ‘unnavigable’. It is not much over half a mile wide, yet it is more than 300 feet deep over most of its width, except in one significant spot, where a huge conical rock is sunk only ninety feet beneath the surface. It is called Cailleach, ‘The Hag’. The special menace of the Corryvreckan is created by the sheer force of the Atlantic tidal wave, which sometimes races through the passage at the rate of fifteen knots. The effect of the pyramidal rock is to create a standing wave up to thirty feet high which combines with a welter of eddying turbulence along both shores to create the Corryvreckan whirlpool.

  What no navigation guide could communicate is the deeply unsettling atmosphere of the place, the intense physical presence of the whirlpool and the scale of the turbulence. Wind and tide were herding the waves into the narrow gulf, and they stretched away, falling over themselves, for a mile across the sea beyond the outer coast of Scarba.

  The whirlpool was clearly visible, three hundred yards offshore towards the western end of the gulf. Inside its circumference was a mêlée of struggling white breakers, charging about in every direction, head-butting one another. Outside, the surface was deadly smooth. The neatly-folded swimming trunks in my rucksack felt somehow irrelevant as I stood by the shore, feeling a very tiny figure, unable to take my eyes away from the epicentre of the vortex. It seemed scarcely credible that a swimmer could have made this crossing from Jura to Scarba.

  Bill Dunn’s swim was true to a tradition of derring-do in the face of the maelstrom that began with Bhreachan, an early Norse king who gave the gulf its name – Coire Bhreachain. In love, and out to prove it, he vowed to anchor his galley in the gulf for three days and three nights with three specially-made anchor lines of wool, hemp and virgins’ hair. The first two parted, but the virgins’ hair held fast until the last hour of the last night. The ship was dragged into the whirlpool and Bhreachan’s dead body was later hauled ashore by his own black dog. He was buried in Uamh Bhreacain, a cave on the north shore a mile from where I stood.

  I had to face the fact that I wasn’t going to swim the Corryvreckan, at least not on this occasion. It would be madness to swim alone, and suicidal in these conditions. But even given the right tide and weather, would I have done it? And why? I would certainly have attempted it with an escort boat and a navigator with local experience. It would be a test, a way of facing out a risk in order to feel more fully alive, like climbing a tree or a mountain. I feared the whirlpool, therefore it fascinated me and dominated my dreams. But there was another thing. I longed for the heightened experience of somehow physically sharing in the Corryvreckan’s excess of mad energy. Perhaps this is what a wolf feels when it bays at the moon, and perhaps it was quite as impractical a desire. Nevertheless, I felt that the whirlpool, in league with the moon, and renewing itself at every tide, could likewise renew the swimmer bold enough to seize the moment and cross it in a moment of repose. It would be like tiptoeing past a sleeping tiger. Keats wrote in a letter to his friend Bailey, ‘If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about in the gravel.’ By swimming the Corryvreckan, I wanted to ‘take part in its existence’, to feel part of it, to swim with it, not against it, in one of its gentler moods.

  The whirlpool and the gulf were the quintessence of the wildness of Jura, and just the kind of thing Orwell’s police state in Nineteen Eighty-Four had abolished, because they knew such wilderness nourished freedom of thought and action. When Winston and Julia go into the country and make love in the apparent solitude of an ash glade, they hardly dare to speak because they know there are microphones hidden in the trees. Whirlpools and wild places are inextricably linked with our capacity for creativity, as Orwell demonstrated when he chose to come to Jura to write his last novel.

  Only the deer saw me turn away from the Corryvreckan and make my way slowly back up the hillside. I would go instead, I decided, to the far coast in search of Bhreachan’s cave, then follow the coast south to Glengarrisdale Bay, one of Orwell’s favourite places. The map was thick with caves along that untrodden shore, and I wanted to see Maclean’s Skull Cave. Its occupant, so the story goes, had been murdered in clan warfare, probably by the ruling Donalds. Until recently, there were still peop
le on Jura who remembered playing with the skull of Maclean as children, fitting the broken pieces back together like a jigsaw puzzle. The dead of the island were always carried to these caves to rest on their journey to Iona, where they were buried.

  I was halfway across the hills when the rain closed in. It came in thick curtains driven by a strengthening west wind, and I began to get really wet. So did the boggy moor. My boots filled up with water because I had stupidly left my waterproof trousers behind in the tent. Each time I struggled with the sodden map in the wind, I got more lost. Rain even drove into the rucksack like water-cannon. Just as my feelings of fine solitude were turning to self-pitying loneliness I met a toad coming the other way along the peaty deer-path. She stood up, straightening her hind legs like a runner on starting blocks and stood glaring at me with a defiant ‘don’t mess with me, chum’ look. I stepped aside. But the encounter with another living being somehow rallied my spirits. So did the beautiful jet-black slugs, and the plentiful insectivorous sun-dews, one of my favourite plants ever since I first encountered them in the New Forest on school botanical field-camps. Here, they are a friend to man, snaring midges on their honeyed tendrils. I tried humming to myself in the curiously private world of sound that exists inside the clammy hood of an anorak. I did my best to convince myself of George Meredith’s idea that we should ‘love all changes of weather’, and his assertion in The Egoist that ‘rain, the heaviest you can meet, is a lively companion when the resolute pacer scorns discomfort of wet clothes and squealing boots’. I lurched on, strafed by the gusting rain, half-walking, half-paddling, scorning the discomfort with all my might. The weather was worsening all the time.

  I decided to abandon the caves and turn back. Dense mists swilled from hill to hill and I was by now ‘mokado’, a Romany word meaning ‘soaked to the skin’ that George Borrow once casually threw into conversation to establish his credentials as he sought shelter from a downpour in a Cornish gypsy encampment above Rosewarne. My feet, by this time, had been for a distance swim in my boots. I sensed the imminent onset of trench foot under the composting socks, and incipient blisters boiling up like party balloons. Somehow, I found my way back to the only shelter for miles, my tent, and lay in it nibbling chocolate like an adolescent, contemplating the eight-mile walk back to Ardlussa and the post-bus, and thinking wistfully of the Ardpatrick bath.

  24

  A CASTLE IN THE AIR

  Northumberland, 28 August

  THE LONG ROAD south from Jura afforded me plenty of time to reflect on my failure to swim the Corryvreckan. My spirits were more than a little dashed, but I resolved to return and try again. I was on my way south from Edinburgh along the Northumbrian coast, where I came to the sands of Bamburgh beach, once trodden by the early Celtic Christians from Iona. In a flat calm sea I took a long cold-water swim straight out towards the Farne Islands, almost hidden in the lead-grey mist. The lighthouse there stood out like the white snick of an otter’s bib. I was alone on this great horizon except for two lovers lying out like seals in the gentle surf of the outgoing tide. Mist flowed in like cigar smoke, wafting into a second surface hanging just above me as I swam.

  Behind me, Bamburgh castle stood out like a cloud in a sky that continually changed. It took a long time for the water to deepen, but then I was cutting through the oily calm in a soundless dream of swimming. I kept on striking further out towards the lighthouse, and the island where Cuthbert, who succeeded Aidan, the first Bishop of Lindisfarne, spent the last years of his life in retreat. He used to like to pray standing up to his arms and neck in the sea at dead of night. Emerging on to the beach at daybreak, he would kneel down on the sand and resume his prayers. The Lives of the Saints relates how one of his brother monks saw two otters run out of the water to warm his feet with their breath and dry him with their fur.

  As the mist thickened, I turned and swam back towards the castle, spotlit in a shaft of sunlight, too romantic to be true. The lovers were walking back, picking their way across rivulets in the sand where starfish and small jellyfish sidled back to sea. Two runners splashed past along the sea’s retreating edge, and there was a distant rumble of thunder inland. As I crossed the wide, puddled sands, the sunlight fell from the castle and it looked suddenly grey and forbidding. Beyond it all was distant golden evening. Gulls floating on the sea looked airborne, lifted on the mist that painted out the horizon in pale grey. Then the rain came, just as I was getting dressed, and I felt suddenly lonely and ridiculous on this huge expanse of magnificent beach. I threw the rucksack over one shoulder and ran hard, barefoot through deep sand under the tall sand-dunes, until I reached a natural gap between them and a path through marram grass that stung my wet calves as I ran, slowed down by the cloying sand. This halving of each stride by the sand made the running dream-like, as the swim had been.

  The Farne Islands still hovered like planets suspended in the mist. I felt far wetter than in the sea. Then the car itself was misted up inside. I felt miserable. But when I dived through the deluge into a phone box in deserted Bamburgh a rainbow appeared over the heavenly castle. It was all absurdly magnificent and sad. I drove on in my own mist to Lindisfarne, spinning across the causeway, not caring whether I were cut off by the tide or not. In the seventh century, King Oswald of Northumbria had commissioned Aidan to come down from the monastery on Iona and convert his people to Christianity. Aidan had chosen to live on Lindisfarne because it reminded him of Iona, and because twice a day the tide covered its causeway and closed it for prayer. Seals lowed somewhere in the gloom as I walked round the curve of the strand by the harbour at dusk, past some of the best buildings in England: black rows of fishermen’s sheds improvised from the tarred hulls of upturned boats.

  25

  THE OXBOW

  River Windrush, 29 August

  I TOOK A HIGH swallow dive south out of the mists of Lindisfarne and Bamburgh all the way down into the headwaters of the Thames in the Cotswolds (not ‘the Cotswold hills’, which, as William Cobbett pointed out, is tautologous because wolds are hills). I drove through rainstorms over glistening roads most of the night, and slept in the car somewhere near Oxford, rain drumming on the roof incessantly, feeling seedy and exhausted, disgusted with myself for having fallen from my state of grace in the Northumbrian sea and devoured an ‘all-day breakfast’ on some oily motorway or other. I crept into the sleeping bag, grateful for the one luxury of the trip: my goose-down pillow. I was due at the birthday party of an architect friend at Coleshill, close to the upper Thames, and so pathetically eager for company that I was a day early and had the whole of a rainy Friday to kill in the Cotswolds. The truth of it was, I hated coming south and I loathed the unending straightness of the desolate, black motorways. How I had longed for a bend in the road – even just a bit of a kink – for some relief from the relentless efficiency of travelling in a continual bee-line. Even with the radio for company, there is nothing so lonely as a long, straight road. And besides, there was so much more water in Scotland and the North, so many shores still to tread, such unknown swims.

  What an irony that with the sleep still in my eyes, and straight lines on the brain, this should be the day I discovered a whole new way of swimming rivers. A Third Way of swimming so blindingly simple, nobody had noticed it. It happened in a Cotswold tributary of the Thames, the Windrush, whose beauty to me that day was that it still winds, and still rushes.

  About a mile downstream from Burford on the meandering footpath to Widford, I found the finest oxbow bend I have ever seen. Sheep grazed the meadows, and the cropped grass was in wonderful condition, springy and deep green. At the narrow turkey-neck of the oxbow were two old pollard willows. One of them masqueraded as a hybrid, with dog-roses, hawthorn and elder growing from the marsupial recesses of its anguished trunk. Each was an independent world, with whole cities of insect life in the grimy wrinkles of its bark, and generations of birds-nests in its dense topknot. I slid into the upstream side of the oxbow, and swam all round it almost back to whe
re I had begun, climbing out by the twin willows again. Two hops across the grass, and I was back in the river where I began, swimming the next power-assisted lap around the grassy peninsula.

  The Windrush flowed strong and fast, swollen by the rains, sweeping me along and flinging me ever outwards with its centrifugal force. It was only two or three feet deep, often less, and very clear, with a gravel bed under dark bunches of water crowfoot waving in the current. All down this valley the river snaked joyfully, unconstrained by anyone who might have thought they could put it straight on its exuberant, doodling course to join the Thames. It went its own way, like Shakespeare’s dawdling schoolboy on his way to school. Like all running water, it wanted to turn everything into the image of its constantly undulating form. It worried at the river banks, hollowing them, rounding them into oxbows. If you made a very slow-motion stop-frame aerial film of a river’s history, it would look like a swimming snake, or a writhing garden hose when water is run through it. Left to itself, a river will always meander. This is how rivers grow longer, and slow themselves down, and hold more water, and make themselves more interesting and pleasing to the human eye, as well as to the creatures that live in them. By increasing the total length and capacity of the Windrush, these natural meanders, oxbows and flood meadows slow and diminish the impact of sudden storms by storing the floodwater. They also provide a far richer natural habitat for all the river creatures that crave the shelter of uneven places and all that is haphazard about the river’s whimsical progress.

  Despite the gloominess of the afternoon, these boomerang swims were highly satisfying, because they solved the river-swimmer’s eternal problem of returning to your towel and clothes. It was like tobogganing endlessly downhill without having the fag of trudging back uphill. I was so absurdly delighted with my discovery that I swam round and round until I was dizzy. Fortunately no one appeared on the footpath to witness this excess except a few unimpressed sheep.