The Flow, Rivers, Water and Wilderness, by Amy-Jane Beer, Bloomsbury Wildlife 2023
There is a very great deal to learn from this book as we join Amy-Jane on actual or imagined journeys along rivers and streams and springs. Here is the author on a phenomenon entirely unknown to me, beautifully written: “Those that are less choked with organic material than our home spring are not black, but white with calcium carbonate dissolved from the limestone bedrock and deposited as calcite almost as soon as the water emerges into air. This crusty mineral coats everything in its path over the woodland floor: twigs, shells and cones – even quite delicate organic matter can be petrified faster than it decays. I have peeled rotting leaves from delicate crusts of calcite, leaving perfect but impossibly fragile casts that show every blemish and vein, but shatter as they dry.”
Obscure and wonderful words too: “rigg”, a ridge, “carr”, fen or scrub, “rhyne”, a drainage channel, and “bund”, an embankment or causeway. There is also “Unimog”, an off-road vehicle I encountered on my trip to Spurn, and “pinnate”, which when applied to leaves describes leaflets arranged on either side of the stem usually in opposing pairs. There is a lovely digression on mayflies, whose appearance reminds the author of her father’s funeral. It seems that they have several aquatic stages and two winged, the last as a “spinner or imago”, which is the short sexual phase which has us associate them with the ephemeral.
There is a reference to activist Mary Annaïse Heglar’s essay ‘But the Greatest of These is Love’, which singles out “love as the most powerful weapon in the environmentalist’s arsenal.” I concur – only love can conquer what all can too easily turn to despair as we witness the despoliation of our planet by the greedy few. When the Great Spotted Woodpecker appears at my bird feeder I am mesmerised, enthralled and, yes, I feel love. I have only once seen a Green Woodpecker, just as resplendent, and no other variety.
The author again comes to terms with death, or at least suggests a way to do so, by seeing the predator prey relationship as a transference of energy from one life to another.
In writing of Pangea, the original single land mass (more or less), the supercontinent surrounded by water, she reminds me of my first realisation and understanding of continental drift, looking at a globe and seeing how precisely the various continents would fit together if reunited. Mythologies, she posits, often seem to have pre-empted out understanding of plate tectonics (which really only came about in the 1960s). Laurasia and Gondwana were the two ‘offspring’ of Pangea. This opens a diversion on water deities which shows extraordinary knowledge and depth, perhaps best summarised in her words: “Often they are halflings or shapeshifters, alluring and monstrous in equal measure, offering both beauty and horror, sex and death.” Again we see the ambivalence of water, its effects and associations, destroyer and giver of life, metamorphosing in a unique way between solid, liquid and vapour.
Why can we not look away from water? It is to do with movement and the way “it transmits and reflects light … Psychologists call it ‘soft fascination’: the sight and sound of moving water is sufficiently stimulating to occupy the brain, but irregular enough that it doesn’t become hypnotic or monotonous. It holds attention without dominating thought, freeing the mind to swim elsewhere. It is highly conducive to reflective thought, and a powerful pull to what Strang calls ‘secular hydrolatry: the sanctification of water without the burden of religious dogma’. ” Strang is Barbara Strang, author of The Meaning of Water, Routledge, 2004.
Capel Celyn is considerably further north in Wales than the Elan Valley, but the story is not dissimilar. I wrote about the latter in Animal Wild:
We visited the dams several more times over the next few days in the day and at night. Visually, architecturally, they are stunning. I wondered about the history of it and found time to skim through David Lewis Brown’s excellent and well-illustrated The Elan Valley Clearance; the fate of the people & places affected by the 1892 Elan Valley Reservoir Scheme, Logaston Press, 2020, which tells of the displacement of 298 men, mostly farmers and shepherds, women and children, who lived there before the Elan and Claerwen valleys were flooded.
There are seven dams in total and 45,000 acres of land were acquired to supply water to Birmingham. Foel Towers, built in the ‘Birmingham Baroque’ style, house systems of valves and cylinders and are used to draw off water as required. One key advantage of the choice made by the Birmingham Corporation was that the water could be delivered by gravity alone. There was much opposition but the Birmingham Corporation Water Act, which included a ban on the washing of sheep, went through Parliament in 1892. Over 5,000 men were employed in the construction at any one time, over 50,000 in all over thirteen years. When the water is low, it is sometimes possible to see the rooves of submerged house, schools and churches.
Photos from Elan Valley – beautiful or revolting?
Capel Celyn was flooded to provide drinking water for Liverpool in spite of a nine-year campaign to prevent it. Amy-Jane Beer wonders if the reservoir can ever be beautiful once you know its origins, quoting R.S. Thomas’ poem ‘Reservoirs’ in which he describes “the serenity of such places as revolting.” She wonders “how a map of such a place can ever be anything but melancholic.”
The author turns her attention to geology, referencing the first geological map of Britain produced by William Smith in 1815, readily available online. Indeed there is the green ‘swoosh’ of which she writes occupying 20% of the whole, all chalk. Grit and slate and granite have their wild Celtic appeal, she ways, “but nothing quite compares with the crumbling grandiosity and benign liveability of chalk.” Chalk is made of the skeletons of tiny marine organisms and highly porous. Water tends to run down into it but where it emerges from it, it is “Eked through nature’s finest filter, it flows pure, clear and sweet from the Earth.” Our precious chalk streams – this has not stopped Thames Water discharging sewage into our rivers for 300 hours already this year. We are barely three weeks into January. Annoyingly and uncharacteristically we are not given the details of the digital map of Britain’s rivers and streams looking like an anatomical diagram of human veins. Amy-Jane follows the Gypsey Race chalk stream, encountering the Rudston monolith, a gritstone shard “shaped like a giant ironing board.” Twice as high as the Stonehenge sarsen stones with perhaps as much again underground, we do not know how it was transported or set in place over four thousand years ago. It is the largest standing stone in England, weighs tens of tons (estimates vary rather widely), and in 1773 was capped with lead to protect the top from weathering by a Mrs Bosville. Some say her real motive was to prevent the leaking of pagan energy.
Visiting the Hogsmill river the author hears the tale of the cruel killing of a giant carp, and in her words are the fish’s pain, and hers. There is a great deal about Millais’ famous Ophelia painting and the place where he sat to create it and the fact that a water vole was included and then removed from the canvas. Water voles should be common: “For a generalist, fecund rodent to disappear from an ecosystem, something must be profoundly wrong. For them to be threatened with extinction across an entire country is an appalling indictment of our custodianship.”
Not irrelevantly, the Daily Mail carries a story about a giant iceberg which may or may not hit the island of South Georgia. It’s the Mail so it’s alarmist and probably won’t, but it has very nearly happened before. It calved from the Filchner Ice Shelf in Antarctica back in 1986, then grounded on the bed of the Weddell Sea until 2020. It has fragmented to some extent but is still around the size of Cornwall. What especially intrigued me was that it became caught in a Taylor column on its journey north, a phenomenon of fluid mechanics which it is beyond me to comprehend, which kept A23a, as it is known, rotating in place. But it has now broken free. “More than 90 percent of bergs around Antarctica enter the clockwise-flowing current of the Weddell Gyre off East Antarctica and eventually escape, shooting north along the Antarctic Peninsula and finally out across the Drake Passage into warmer South Atlantic waters—an ocean route known as ‘iceberg alley’,” explained NASA. An ‘Eddy’ in The Flow entitled “Minus seven” describes a stopper, where water moving downwards under gravity meets water below and is forced back up “creating a cylinder of rotating water moving down, up, back, and down again.” They can be fun – or deadly. Minus seven was the temperature on the day the author chose to paddle the Upper Tees. Rather her than me.
Here’s a typical example of the author’s lyrical but sometimes startling style. She describes an encounter with a freshwater crocodile in Australia, it’s eye “glowed faintly orange in the dark, like Betelgeuse.” On the dangers of kayaking, many lives having been lost on the Dart: “You can be held an inch from air and birdsong and be denied either, ever again.”
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