Waterlog Read online

  In the imaginary company of Jack Overhill and his roving band of wild swimmers, I strolled back through the meadows in my swimming trunks to where I had left my rucksack beside a pair of obliging anglers. I changed and retraced my steps into Grantchester, entering the village past a lovely ancient walnut tree by the road, much hacked-about and pruned, but still going strong. Rupert Brooke probably never dreamed that the village pub, the Red Lion, would one day be renamed after him, but the new sign went up in 1975. There’s now a strong case for a further re-christening to the Lord Archer since the novelist moved into the village.

  The chief delight of Grantchester is its long, low retaining walls: the buttressed, yellow Cambridge brick churchyard wall, and the farmyard wall around the long bend in the village street by the Orchard Tearooms. The way the road and the walls meander through the village perfectly echoes the river and its associations. Jack Overhill knew James Nutter, whose family had worked Grantchester Mill for three generations. He in turn knew Rupert Brooke when he lived in the village after graduating before the First World War and used to meet him as he arrived on summer mornings at the pool. Nutter would already have had his swim, and Brooke would generally be on an old bicycle, and dressed only in shirt and trousers. James’s brother Edward thought Brooke snooty, so he blocked up the path from the mill to Byron’s Pool to stop him using it. Brooke simply crept through a hole in the hedge further down the road.

  The big mill-pool is still a satisfying place to swim, if shallower than it used to be. A dozen of us once came here as students in punts one summer night at dusk and swam in the pool, on and on into the night. Now it was deserted, and I circled its chill eddy just once, like some ritual dance, joined by my absent, long-lost friends, and the ghosts of Rose Macaulay and Virginia Woolf, who each swam alone with Rupert Brooke in Byron’s Pool, and of Jack Overhill and his band of roaming bathers. Byron’s lines seemed to echo down from his pool just up the river:

  So we’ll go no more a-roving

  So late into the night,

  Though the heart be still as loving,

  And the moon be still as bright.

  Next morning I had a late breakfast in one of my favourite places in the world: the University Library in Cambridge. Whatever you think of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s heavy-duty design for the outside of the building, it is surely impossible not to be enthralled once you step inside and begin to wander about its labyrinths like Charlie in the chocolate factory. I often walk and climb for miles in there, up and down its austere corridors and steep staircases, following esoteric clues scribbled on scraps of paper in the librarians’ special code. I love the questing spirit of the place. Even better is the serendipity of searching the shelves for the book you think you need and discovering an even more interesting volume perched cheek-by-jowl beside it.

  This is what happened that morning. I had gone into the library intending to go straight to the Map Room in my continual search for esoteric swims, when I called into the Periodicals Room to look something up on the way, and chanced on an early back-number of Nature in Cambridge-shire. Thumbing through it at random, my eye lit on an article entitled ‘The Search for Moor Barns Bath’. Two Cambridge botanists had gone out into a field near Madingley, two miles from where I was sitting, in search of the wet-loving plants that were recorded by naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries growing around a lost open-air bath fed by springs. The bath itself had eluded them. Writing his account of Madingley in Parochial Antiquities of Cambridge-shire in 1781, William Cole said: ‘I cannot finish this account of Madingley without mentioning the famous Bath of that Parish, about a mile from the Church on the Side nearest Cambridge, it being much frequented by the Students of Cambridge, and others, for their Health; it is generally thought to be one of the coldest in England.’ No doubt the presence of springs, and much splashing about by students gasping with the cold, created ideal conditions for the forty-seven plant species recorded growing round the bath at one time or another since 1727. The same springs were said also to supply an unusually pure and cold well, known as Aristotle’s Well, at which Samuel Pepys records slaking his thirst on a walk out of Cambridge with his fellow undergraduates during the hot summer of 1653.

  The story had a Raiders of the Lost Ark flavour to it that appealed to the boy detective in me. Here was a real life Holy Grail. I went to the Map Room and asked one of the librarians for Moor Barns Farm. She soon produced two maps, dated 1849 and 1886. I unfolded the beautiful things on one of the enormous billiard-table desks. The bath and the springs beside it were shown on the earlier map but not on the later one. Aristotle’s Well appeared on both, as well as some farm buildings, a stream, and ‘Gallyon’s Field’, with a good deal of wet ground. There was also a moat, and a wood, the Moor Barns Grove, where the bath and springs were originally located.

  I had to go and look straight away, so I hurried out of the library and walked over towards Madingley, shivering inwardly as I tried to imagine the Coldest Bath in England. The road ran alongside the Moor Barns Grove, then I turned off down the footpath to Girton. I heard the spring before I saw it, hidden in brambles and nettles down the steep bank of a ditch. Parting the brambles with my boot and treading down the undergrowth I could see the bottom of a clear chalky stream, spring water gushing from an old rusty pipe. It burst out all around it too, with such enthusiasm and brightness that I had to go down there and taste it straight away. It was icy and delicious.

  This was exciting. I had certainly found the spring that fed the Moor Barns Bath, part of the same complex of powerful springs that should also rise up in the woods above to supply Aristotle’s Well. I went back uphill, following the Moor Barns Grove, now reduced to a strip of spinney only ten yards wide, but originally a much wider band of wood around Gallyon’s Field. The spinney was unusual for having a dense undergrowth of snowberry bushes, probably planted as game cover. I found myself in the right angle of woodland where the cold bath and springs were shown on the earlier map of Gallyon’s Field, a piece of land about as wet as George Hamilton IV’s handkerchief: it had clearly resisted all attempts at drainage. It had ended up as a clay pigeon shooting school, now derelict. Surely a remnant of the bath was here somewhere? Had it been completely destroyed when part of the wood was grubbed up some time around 1860, or was it just covered up? There were springs here all right; water oozed up everywhere.

  Tramping around the wood’s edge and the field, I couldn’t help noticing that the place was thick with cuckoo pint, a plant that loves the wet. It is one of my favourite wild plants. John Cowper Powys, who was obsessed with the magic of bathing and water all his life, liked it too. This was his most ‘poetical’ flower, ‘always growing where the dews are heaviest and where the streams are over-brimming their banks. Born of chilly dawns in wild, wet places, cuckoo flowers are the coldest, chastest, least luxurious, most hyperborean, most pale, most gothic, most Ophelia-like of all our island flowers.’ There were bluebells too, and a lot of celandines.

  The man I really needed was the Cambridge archaeologist and dowser T. C. Lethbridge. He was the figure at the centre of the Gogmagog Affair, an archaeological controversy that eventually drove him from Cambridge in frustration and despair in 1952. At Wandlebury Ring on the summit of the Gogmagog Hills to the south of Cambridge, Lethbridge believed there must be a giant figure of Gog embossed on the hill with chalk like the Cerne Abbas giant. He dowsed, and he used an iron bar, driven into the turf, to prospect for the hidden chalk outline he thought was there. In fact, what he claimed to have found were traces of the giant chalk figures of a woman on horseback with a sword-waving warrior on one side of her, a sun-god on the other, and the moon behind her. Although there was certainly an Iron-age settlement up there, the Cambridge academe discounted Lethbridge’s work as unscientific, and he eventually left the city, taking his dowsing rods and pendulums to Devon. Lethbridge dowsed on, and wrote that he had perfected his craft to the point where his pendulum could detect truffles in a nearby wood, o
r distinguish between sling stones that had been used in battle and identical-looking stones gathered from a beach.

  I crossed the field towards an interesting rectangular depression some fifteen feet by twenty-five. A striking bank of cowslips rose up one side, and still more cuckoo pint. It was almost on the same level as the old moat I had seen on the map, now dry. Was this the site of the bath? If so, it must have been a delightful place to bathe, although the picture that came to my mind, of goose-pimpled undergraduates, naked, purple and prancing with numbed extremities, rather spoilt the romance.

  Crossing the field again, with my pencilled map in hand, I found Aristotle’s Well straight away. Just below it was another rectangular area of very wet ground full of willow herb. Could this too have been a bath, fed by the same spring as Aristotle’s Well? The well itself was an ancient brick structure like a buried egg. I shifted the heavy hexagonal concrete lid the farmer must have made for it, threw myself flat on my belly, and looked inside. Again, perfectly clear water flowed from a pipe in the brick into a pool some four or five feet deep. I had never seen a well this shape before. As I lay admiring its secret beauty I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised to have discovered a water nymph at my shoulder. I couldn’t reach the surface to taste the springwater, but it looked and smelt good, and it felt cold all right. It was satisfying to discover a neglected fragment of history in such an unremarkable field.

  The air was heavy with St Mark’s flies; shiny, black, and about a half-inch long, feeding on cow-parsley flowers. They are top-heavy insects, with a thorax like an old Dragon Rapide biplane and a body that tapers to nothing. Their flight is jerky and uncertain. They kept taking off like Blériot on a maiden flight, dropping out of the sky quite suddenly, only to catch themselves, as if on an invisible safety net, and set some new and equally aimless course. Their larvae live on the roots of wet grasses, and they must all have emerged at the same moment without any clear idea about the direction their lives should take. Truly a fly for our times.

  Cold bathing remained popular all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and four Cambridge colleges had their own cold baths: Peterhouse, Pembroke, Emmanuel and Christ’s. It is hard to imagine modern undergraduates hiking out here for an icy dip or a drink at a spring. The idea that the baths in the Moor Barns thicket could have been ‘the coldest in England’ sounds very much like the sort of advertising claim that would be made for a spa, or a similar commercial enterprise. It has the ring of untruth. Was someone charging admission to these baths? Well into the nineteenth century, resorts such as Scarborough advertised the coldness of their bathing as a major attraction. And they were quite right in claiming that cold bathing was good for people.

  Back in the Map Room after my unscheduled detour, I returned to my original purpose of discovering the most natural course across the country for the continuation of my journey. In his book Maps and Dreams, the anthropologist Hugh Brody describes how the Inuit of British Columbia dream the route of each new hunting expedition, experiencing in their dream the very animal or fish they will hunt and kill, and even drawing a map on a piece of paper before setting off. In Sam Shepard’s play Geography of a Horse Dreamer, Cody dreams the winners of the horse and dog races. And the Aboriginal songlines, as well as following the footprints of the totemic ancestors, wind invisibly about the continent connecting waterholes. My journey too would have as much to do with the geography of my mind as with that of this country. In some ways my desire to seek out and join up stories, memories and my own physical experience of swimming in watery places throughout the land had little to do with the official kind of maps. If I had a totemic ancestor, it was the otter, or the eel, swimmers who often cross country by land, following their own instinctive maps. Yet I was still drawn to do much of my dreaming in the Map Room, browsing for hours over Ordnance Survey maps of varying scales. Somehow I found the sheer presence of the maps inspiring; the delicate accretion of the detail of our landscape all around me. Much of this country was still terra incognita to me. I would often begin with the 1-inch map, progressing to the greater detail of the 2½-inch, the 6-inch, and even the great 25-inches-to-the-mile series made in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  I studied the nautical charts that show tides and currents too. I was specially interested in the Hebridean island of Jura, where George Orwell lived, and the fearsome whirlpool that lurks in the Gulf of Corryvreckan off the wild northern coast, making it almost impossible to navigate. I pored over the six-inch map, staring at the single word ‘whirlpool’ marked in the almost mile-wide straits that separate Jura from the rugged, uninhabited island of Scarba. I calculated the exact distance across at the narrowest point: 1,466 yards. Practically speaking, the distance was meaningless, because the tidal currents would carry a swimmer well off the course of a straight line. I felt sure that, in the right conditions and at the right moment in the complex pattern of the tides, I had a sporting chance of pulling off the Corryvreckan swim. I knew, at any rate, that I would have to go up there and try.

  I deciphered the contours and the 6-point type on neatly-folded sheets, gazing into spots of turquoise that were tarns, or thin veins of blue that rooted into hills and sometimes bore promising words like ‘waterfall’. The wilder the terrain, the harder it was to unravel the thick brown tangle of contours into an imagined landscape such as Dartmoor, with its rivers tumbling off the high ground in every direction. I connected the blue marks on these maps mentally, imagining possibilities, not planning a route as a military man would, but feeling my way towards the places that most aroused my curiosity, more like a prospector. One map I singled out was that of the Rhinog Mountains in Wales, a big sweep of wild, trackless country I had visited once before with my son. Strung out below the ridge was a series of enticing tarns, and the paper was marble-veined with rivers and streams.

  I had requested the map of the Fens too, which I now spread out on the big desk. Water was spilt all over it in trickles of blue, some sinuous, continually doubling back on themselves, others the dead straight lines and grids of the Dutch engineers who pioneered so much of the drainage. You could swim halfway round the world in these fens. Here and there a road tried to find its way through the maze of blue lines, but this was clearly, uncompromisingly, a vascular system of water. Roads in the Fens had come as something of an afterthought, as fen people moved about by barge or boat or on foot along wattle duckboards until well within living memory, and many just stayed put. At the centre stood the Isle of Ely on the Great Ouse. The long sink of the Ouse Washes ran in a confident diagonal across the unfolded sheet.

  I scarcely heard the buzz from the tea room next door that filtered through the massive Egyptian catacomb wall. I was already swimming with the eels on Adventurer’s Fen, trying to decide whether to go up Burwell Lode or Reach Lode, whether I might manage to cross the Great Ouse below Denver Sluice, and wondering where exactly it was that fen people were baptised in the River Lark at Isleham. Could I swim along the Crooked Drain at Stuntney, I wondered, or the Black Drain on Hilgay Fen? I was using the map, in fact, not to find my way but to get lost; to lose myself in the landscape. Wherever I eventually wandered and swam would be my own non-conformist map of our land. After a day’s armchair-swimming, I set out the next afternoon for the real thing: the Fens themselves.

  5

  SWIMMING WITH EELS

  The Fens, 14 May

  THE APPROACH TO Ely is always dramatic. The city and its cathedral loom at first faintly through the blue haze of the Fens, distinguishable as a whiter shade of pale. As you draw closer the whole island shimmers like a mirage or a UFO that has just landed, and as the cathedral spire comes into focus, the place seems poised to take off again. Even the moated allotments, with their lowly huts like outside privies, derive an air of grandeur from their own row of boundary poplars reaching for the heavens and striping them with long shadows. This is a holy island no less striking than Mont St Michel, and no less holy, set off by the graphic flat
horizon, rising out of the deep brown earth beneath a sea-blue sky. It dominates the most mysterious landscape in Britain, full of water and odd corners that can still be hard to reach, let alone find. As Daniel Defoe put it when he surveyed the Fens from a safe distance at the top of the Gogmagog Hills in 1724: ‘All the water of the middle part of England that does not run into the Thames or the Trent, comes down into these fens.’

  I was on my way over to join Sid Merry, the last eel trapper in a city where the monks once paid their tithes to the cathedral with 30,000 eels a year. Sid Merry was born by the waters of Babylon, an island separated from the city by the Great Ouse, opposite the slipway by the Ship Inn. Cut off from the rest of the city, and often flooded, it must have been christened by some wit in one of the monasteries or at the cathedral. The Merrys’ house on Babylon is now long gone, like the other seven that once stood there, but Sid still owns the land. He grows vegetables on it and keeps ducks and geese in pens surrounded by fences of eel-netting. A variety of old boats in various states of repair stand around propped up by wooden stilts.

  We boarded his punt from a wooden landing-stage. I sat on an upturned crate feeling curious and apprehensive at the prospect of meeting my totemic ancestors. Sid untied several keep-nets full of puzzled-looking eels that hung underneath the boat and attached them to the landing-stage. The light was softening, and by the time our evening’s work was done, it would be dark. Sid goes out every day just before dusk to lay his eel-traps in the river, and the lines of complex nets and hoops, weights and steel chain lay in neat piles like laundry in the bottom of the boat. Everything had a distinctive whiff of mud, water-mint and fish. As we went down the wide, lazy river the only sound was the punt’s outboard engine and the slapping of the bow-waves against the banks.