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  The chronicles record several involuntary dips. On 3 June 1869

  General Dixon, not satisfied with matutinal ablutions, took a mid-day bath in the open river; but, in the interests of morality, he kept his clothes on. Mrs Flowers took an active part in his rescue, and it is proposed that the Club should present her with a medal, for preserving to his country and the Club so inestimable a life, as also for the merit of landing by far the heaviest object that was ever taken out of the river.

  Village bathing had always been popular on the Test. It even has its own bard, Frank Cleverly, who has lived all his life at King’s Sombourne, six miles away. His collection of poems about village life around the little winterbourne there is ironically entitled Deep Flowed the Som. As boys, the poet and his friends used to make regular expeditions to bathe in the Test, clutching the bars of soap their mothers made them take with them.

  Lillie’s, where I had tea and hot chocolate after my swim, burying my face in the steaming cup, takes its name from Lillie Langtry, who used to stay here with the Prince of Wales a hundred years ago when Stockbridge was a racing town and there was a popular racecourse a mile away up on Danebury Hill. I tried to imagine paparazzi of the time lugging plate cameras into position for a snap. Racing must have appealed to Lillie’s instinct for drama because she owned her own racing stable at Newmarket and was in the habit of coming down for Stockbridge Week with her beau. She scored some famous successes with her horses. I took it as a good omen when I discovered that ‘Merman’ was one of them. He won the Ascot Gold Cup, Jockey Club Cup and Goodwood Cup in a single season.

  Warmed up and inwardly glowing, I set off to explore the shops. Near the post office there was a fast-flowing village pond where water surged from under the street, rotating ducks like bath-time toys in its vortex. Two-pound trout slipstreamed their own shadows. In the window of John Robinson, High Class Family Butcher, were three stuffed ferrets, two partridges and three fancy pheasants. Also a grey squirrel, likewise stuffed, atop the spice rack, and a cricket bat, bearing the painted legend ‘Robinsons X1 v. Broadway X1’. Mr Robinson achieved national fame as a champion of individual liberty when he boldly refused to stop selling beef on the bone to his customers and advertised the fact in this same shop window. A discreet notice mentioned that Mr Robinson is also a ‘Private Barbecue Specialist’.

  Further along the street was Stockbridge’s sumptuous village delicatessen, ‘For Goodness’ Sake’, offering its own venison pie, four-fruit marmalade, gooseberry preserve and ‘Millionaire’s Ham’. ‘Today’s Special Offers’ were Sevruga caviar slashed from £49.50 to £45.00 and potted lobster down from £2.65 to £2.30. A notice on the door said: ‘Please knock loud and long and I will be over in about one minute.’ I knocked loud and long. About one minute later an amiable man in tweeds and rude health from living on all these good things popped over to serve me. I carried off various preserves unique to Stockbridge but somehow resisted the Sevruga.

  Just across the road I discovered a delightful tray of old books and knick-knacks outside a little cottage. I thumbed through a book on practical girl-guide techniques, such as the construction of an airing rack out of hazel poles, or the baking of ‘bush bread’ by poking a green stick through a ball of dough and placing it over the hot embers of a camp fire. There was a useful chapter for road protesters on tree houses and rope ladders, and a section on the study of spiders. Guides were invited to make a collection of cobwebs or even to sit and watch them being spun, like Robert the Bruce did in prison. There was even a cobweb-spotter’s form to fill in, under the headings: ‘First thread fixed’, ‘Spokes complete’, ‘Weaving begun’, and ‘Weaving completed’. I bought this useful volume, together with a pair of eggcups.

  Shopping in Stockbridge felt a bit like being Alice in Wonderland. There were no people, just little hand-written messages everywhere bearing instructions. I fully expected to go into the pub and find a ‘Drink Me’ notice on the bar. The sign by the books and eggcups read: ‘50p an item. Money through letterbox of Mole Cottage. In aid of street children of Guatemala.’ Clearly there wasn’t a problem with the street children of Stockbridge.

  The following morning, ten miles to the east in Winchester, I ran into a swarm of reporters outside the Crown Court for the opening of the re-trial of Bruce Grobbelaar, Hans Segers and John Fashanu on charges of fixing the results of football matches for the benefit of some Far-Eastern betting syndicates. Photographers milled about, waiting for Grobbelaar and Co. to arrive. There was excitement in the air, and I couldn’t resist slipping into the gallery of Court 3 with the assorted hacks covering the story. At least twelve wigs busied themselves around the court, as well as numbers of clerks, and I mused on the cost of it all. The first trial had collapsed because the jury couldn’t reach a verdict. They had found the evidence incomprehensible. Addressing the jury, the judge referred with relish to ‘the vast files of papers which are available to us all’. Counsel for the prosecution told them: ‘Parts of the story are, dare I say it, quite exciting. Others are extremely turgid.’ You could say that again. The interesting bits were the bizarre details about the business lives of these footballers. Fashanu’s company, Fash Enterprises, had its offices at Warm Seas House, St John’s Wood. Grobbelaar’s company was the Mondoro Wildlife Corporation Ltd., Mondoro being, the court was helpfully informed, the Shona word meaning ‘Lion God’. Nothing like this ever happened in swimming, I naively thought at the time. The furore over the allegedly doped-to-the-gills Chinese team at the Australian games was yet to come. So were similar accusations against the Irish Olympic champion swimmer Michelle Smith and her trainer-husband Erik de Bruin.

  I soon adjourned to René’s Patisserie for breakfast, and followed that with a reconnaissance of the main object of my visit, the Itchen, one of William Cobbett’s favourite rivers. Cobbett loved every inch of the Itchen Valley, from the source at Ropley Dean near Alresford all the way to the sea at Southampton. ‘This Vale of Itchen’, he writes in Rural Rides, ‘is worthy of particular attention. There are few spots in England more fertile or more pleasant; and none, I believe, more healthy.’ Even by Cobbett’s time, Winchester was ‘a mere nothing to what it once was’ – a place of residence for the Kings of England. But it still has King Arthur’s round table in the Guildhall next door to the court where the three errant footballers stood trial. And it still has the Winchester College water meadows, where Izaak Walton must have fished in his later years while staying with his daughter Anne. He died in Winchester in 1683. When I asked my way to the meadows in a bookshop, the proprietor said: ‘Let’s step outside and I can direct you with more gusto.’

  I approached the river through narrow streets lined with college houses and SILENCE – EXAMS notices. The teachers all seemed to live in some splendour, in period town houses like Mill Cottage, approached through a small latched gate and a white wrought-iron footbridge across a mill-race. Roses over the door, a tortoiseshell cat curled by the milk-bottles, and the morning paper half in the letterbox completed the picture. The banks of the little stream, a branch of the Itchen, were decorated at intervals with PRIVATE – NO ACCESS notices. In another of these houses, almost next door to the college porters’ lodge, an advertisement on a postcard in the window caught my eye: STONE HOUSE DATING FROM 11TH C. IN CRESPIANO NEAR FIVIZZANO, LA LUNIGIANA, MASSA CARRARA, ITALY. 9–12 ROOMS, 3 FLOORS. 100,000,000 LIRE = £36,000 ETC. This contrasted with another window card I had noticed earlier up in the town: A WHITE HOM MADE TEDDY BEAR WITH WHITE TROUSERS £6.50.

  The pathos of this affected me all day. This was a city of such contrasts; the bishop in his palace, the footballers investing huge sums in their offshore enterprises, a gardener in a ‘Madness’ T-shirt circling on an Atco mower round a mulberry in the college grounds, the invisible students at their exams, the teddy-bear maker coaxing the tailored white trousers over the chubby legs.

  Approaching the Itchen along College Walk, I came eventually to the water meadows and two or three piebald hor
ses grazing by the river. I vaulted a low fence, steadying myself on a PRIVATE FISHING notice, and crossed the meadow to a convenient willow, where I changed into bathing trunks and a pair of wetsuit boots for the return journey from my swim, and sank my rucksack and clothes into a patch of nettles. At the chalky, gravel bank I confirmed Cobbett’s observation, made on 9 November 1822, that: ‘The water in the Itchen is, they say, famed for its clearness.’ I plunged into the river, which was three to four feet deep, with here and there a shallow, sandy bank cushioned by water crowfoot. The current was fast enough to make it slow going if I turned and struck out upstream. But I rode downstream with the river in a leisurely breaststroke, keeping my eyes open for whatever might be round the next bend. I was rewarded with the sight of a water vole crossing over and disappearing into the reed-bed on the far bank. The river swung round in a long arc through the water meadows, and very sweet it was too. Here and there I saw the dark forms of trout, and minnows hung in the sandy riffles. This was very fine swimming, and I continued downstream towards the places once known as Milkhole and Dalmatia, where the Winchester College boys used to swim. The Itchen is fed at intervals by natural springs, which is why there are watercress beds along the valley. At Gunner’s Hole, a fabled bathing pool further upstream which I intended to explore in due course, the springs are said to create dangerous undercurrents from time to time, and in the early part of this century a boy was drowned there. What the college now calls ‘proper swimming’ only began in 1969 when an indoor pool was built.

  Breaststroking softly through this famously clear water I was soon dreaming of the strawberry garden at the family seat of the Ogles at Martyr Worthy upstream, thus described by Cobbett:

  A beautiful strawberry garden, capable of being watered by a branch of the Itchen which comes close by it, and which is, I suppose, brought there on purpose. Just by, on the greensward, under the shade of very fine trees, is an alcove, wherein to sit to eat the strawberries, coming from the little garden just mentioned, and met by bowls of cream coming from a little milk-house, shaded by another clump a little lower down the stream. What delight! What a terrestrial paradise!

  I had climbed out of the river and was strolling back through the lovely water meadows still far away in my daydream, milkmaids plying me with laden bowls of fresh strawberries and cream, when a shout rudely intruded on my pink and brown study: ‘Do you realise this is private property?’ The horses looked up for a moment and resumed their grazing. I decided to ignore the two irate figures on the fenced footpath and pressed on with all dignity in my bathing trunks towards the hidden clothes in the nettle patch. It crossed my mind to make my escape across the water, but then I thought of Cobbett and what he would have done, and that settled it. I was going to stand up for my rights as a free swimmer.

  I got changed as languidly as possible, then casually leapfrogged the fence and sauntered off along the path, whistling softly to myself, as an Englishman is entitled to do. ‘Excuse me,’ came a voice, ‘does that fence mean anything to you?’ This was unmistakable school talk, and I turned round to confront two figures straight out of Dickens; a short and portly porter with a beard and Alsatian, and a gangling figure on a bike with binoculars, strawberry-pink with ire, the College River Keeper. I introduced myself and enquired the cause of their disquiet. They said the river was the property of the college, and full of trout for the pleasure of the Old Wykehamists who sometimes fish there. It was definitely not for swimming in by hoi polloi.

  ‘But the ladies in the public library told me the whole of Winchester used to swim in the river here right up to the 1970s,’ I said.

  ‘That’s just the problem,’ they replied. ‘A few years ago we had six hundred people coming from the town, swimming in the river, eroding the banks and leaving litter behind.’

  It sounded like paradise to me.

  ‘But surely,’ I said sweetly, ‘we should all have access to swim in our rivers just as we should be free to walk in our own countryside. Don’t they belong to all of us?’

  The River Keeper practically fell off his bike. The porter flushed a deeper strawberry and allowed the Alsatian a little closer to my person. They both looked pityingly at me.

  ‘There’s plenty of coast and sea not far away if you want to swim,’ ventured the porter.

  At this point things suddenly turned nasty. They accused me of scaring away the trout and the porter muttered about calling the police. I said stoutly, and perhaps unwisely, that if I frightened away the fish, which I doubted, perhaps I was doing them a good turn, since if they stayed they would only be murdered by the Old Wykehamists. I told them I swim in the Waveney all the time in Suffolk in a place where bathers and anglers have co-existed happily for at least a century. And anyway, I said, why not designate one stretch of river for bathing and another for the Old Wykehamist fly-fishermen?

  ‘We couldn’t possibly do that because the water quality is too dodgy,’ said the porter. ‘Upstream of here they spray pesticides on the watercress beds and there’s a sewage works discharging what should be clean water, but isn’t always, into the river.’

  I quoted Cobbett to them on the famously clear water. They laughed. There was no sign of the police, but the porter urged me to go away immediately and have a shower with plenty of hot water and soap to wash off all the pollutants in the river. People had been getting skin rashes, he said. Wishful thinking on his part, I fancied.

  ‘But if the water is so evil and polluted, why aren’t the trout all dead?’ I asked. ‘And why have you fenced in this footpath in a straight line miles away from the river instead of letting people enjoy winding along the lovely banks? Isn’t that a bit mean?’

  ‘I’m not wasting any more time with this,’ he said, and flounced off, the Alsatian casting hungry looks over its shoulder.

  The episode raised some serious issues about swimming in the wild, if you can call Winchester wild. I reflected again on Cobbett, and how upset he was at the hanging of two men in Winchester in the spring of 1822 for resisting the game-keepers of Mr Assheton-Smith at nearby Tidworth. What they did amounted to little more than I had just done, yet I had not, in the end, been marched, dripping, up the hill to join Grobbelaar and Co. in the dock. Things were changing in Winchester, but only slowly. The truth was, I had enjoyed my row with the water bailiffs very much. I already felt invigorated after a really first-class swim, and now I felt even better after a terrific set-to. But it seemed sad, and a real loss to the city, that the college no longer allowed swimmers in the river, or picnickers on the water meadows. I was left feeling very much like the otter, ‘trapped but not detained’, by one of the Houghton Club keepers in December 1853.

  The matter of ownership of a river is fairly simple. Where a river runs through private land, the riparian owner also owns the river itself. On the question of access, the key legislation is the 1968 Countryside Act, which deliberately defined riverside and woodland as ‘open country’ in addition to the ‘mountain, moor, heathland, cliff, downland and foreshore’ originally listed in the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act. ‘Riverside’ includes the river as well as the banks in the definition of the Act. So whenever politicians mention ‘open country’ they are talking about rivers and their banks, as well as all those other kinds of countryside such as mountains and moorland. And when the Labour Party Policy Commission on the Environment promised, in July 1994, ‘Labour’s commitment to the environment will be backed up with legally enforceable environmental rights: a right of access to common land, open country, mountain and moorland,’ they meant rivers and river banks too.

  On the very same day as my Winchester fracas, Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for National Heritage, had been saying: ‘I look forward, as Heritage Secretary, to working in partnership with the Ramblers’ Association to secure access to open country, mountain and moorland for the ordinary people of Britain. Let’s make a “right to roam” a reality!’ So how about the right to swim? That so many of our rivers shoul
d be inaccessible to all but a tiny minority who can afford to pay for fishing ‘rights’ is surely unjust? I say ‘rights’ to point up the paradox, that something that was once a natural right has been expropriated and turned into a commodity. Fishing rights are only valuable because individuals have eliminated a public benefit – access to their rivers – to create an artificial private gain. The right to walk freely along river banks or to bathe in rivers, should no more be bought and sold than the right to walk up mountains or to swim in the sea from our beaches. At the moment, only where a river is navigable do you have rights of access along its banks.

  In a recent survey of public opinion, the Countryside Commission discovered that one in three of all the walks people take in Britain involves water, or waterside, as a valued feature. In April 1967, a government official drawing up the 1968 Countryside Act observed:

  We have received a considerable volume of representations that the present arrangements for securing public access and providing a right of public passage on waterways is inadequate. In our opinion the solution lies in extending the powers to make access agreements or orders to rivers and canals and their banks . . . and we would propose therefore to extend the definition of open country to include these categories.

  The flaw in the 1968 Countryside Act turned out to be that it relied on giving local authorities powers, but not duties, to create more access to rivers and their banks. Making voluntary agreements with private landowners could still work, if only the local authorities put more energy into it, and if only the landowners didn’t have such enormous vested interest in the lucrative fishery. The government now says it will ‘seek more access by voluntary means to riverside, woodland and other countryside as appropriate’. There is plenty of scope for such schemes: if all the river banks in Buckinghamshire were opened for public access, it would double the total length of footpaths in that county. Riverside access is extremely popular. Perhaps we should learn from New Zealand, where they have renewed a law originally enacted by a colonial governor at the request of Queen Victoria. ‘The Queen’s Chain’ gives a twenty-two-yard strip of public access along the bank of every river in the land. Across the Channel in Normandy and Brittany, too, people have unlimited access to the rivers.