Floating

by Joe Minihane

  After being shown the imposing entrance to the Turkish bath (a ladies-only day, sadly for me), I was ushered into the splendid changing rooms. They represented a significant change-up from the tin shed and fox poo affair down at Farleigh Hungerford. Wood-panelled walls gave way to immaculate benches, above which hung tailored suits and brash polo shirts. A row of sinks were overlooked by free-standing mirrors, each one with a pot of razors, shaving foam and moisturiser.

  I showered and pushed through a heavy door. A single lane was tacked out to the side of the pool, where a lesson was taking place, with the rest of it given over to half a dozen swimmers quietly splashing back and forth. I made my way down the marble steps and into the water, which was heated to an unnecessary 28°C. It felt like a tepid bath after my exertions down at Farleigh and Henleaze. A fountain running the length of the shallow end sprayed colder water, and I luxuriated in its cooling embrace before setting off on the first of my planned forty lengths.

  Despite feeling sweaty from the overheated water, I soon fell into that meditative state where the only thing on your mind is the line of black tiles beneath you. I thought about how everything here looked polished and new – even the bottom of the pool seemed to have been scrubbed to within in an inch of its life. The leaf mould at Tooting and the flotsam in Hampstead were the very opposite of the experience I was having here.

  On every breath, I turned my head to look at the high pillars and wondered whether I had been transported to Ancient Greece. The heat and the surroundings definitely made it feel more like a bath, the convivial atmosphere reaffirmed after I crashed into a lady and we got chatting about the need for more lanes to help us regulate our speed. It may have been posh, but the RAC pool retained all the good grace of Roger’s ‘swimmers’ universities’ that I’d found alive and well on my journey across the UK. That feeling of sharing my swim and relaxing with like-minded people was here just as it was at Chagford, Cirencester and Henleaze.

  After a first-rate swim I took a blisteringly hot shower and, skin puckered, decided to enjoy my first wet shave in two years, courtesy of the RAC. I emerged onto Pall Mall with chlorine in my nostrils and my cheeks exposed to the elements.

  I left London the following week, stubble pricking my chin, and took the train north to Yorkshire. I was excited to be swimming in good company again and was off to meet my uncle Dave, who would be ferrying me about the Dales and beyond, along with his good friend Jim. I had a series of swims planned across the north and wanted to start out at the infamous Devil’s Bridge, just outside Kirkby Lonsdale. Roger’s visit here forms one of the most evocative parts of Waterlog, with bikers stripped to their waists and daredevils flinging themselves from the high parapet of the ancient stone bridge into the River Lune below, narrowly avoiding the hulking rocks as they flew.

  Pulling up, we found the place more subdued than that. Admittedly it was a Tuesday morning, but the only bikers here confined themselves to the car park, scoffing bacon butties and slurping tea from a snack van which seemed to have a permanent mooring at the bridge’s eastern end.

  Walking over the bridge, I soon saw why. A bench with a small plaque stood at the entrance to a copse which followed the river’s stony bank, on it a tribute to a 22-year-old swimmer who had been killed while attempting a dive at this notorious spot. On the bridge I stood and peered over the side, the low walls, the fast-moving water and sheer height giving me a swirl of vertigo. My diving skills were slim to non-existent, but even if they weren’t I would not have tried jumping.

  Wandering down to the bank, I noticed a ‘No Bathing’ sign on the far side, where the water narrowed and zipped beneath the bridge, looping away from the town and off towards the sea. But further downstream I came to a gravel island, from where the Lune shelved deeply into a wide, slow-moving pool. There wasn’t a sign to forbid swimming here, so I clambered out of my jeans and into my swimming shorts and took a few short strides before falling forward and swimming in ever-decreasing circles, allowing the current to push me one way before turning against it and pushing back with all my might.

  The water had a dark orange glow and was very deep, shelving within a metre of the bank, so much so that I couldn’t touch the bottom with my feet. Between the depth and the slow pace I could see why diving would be so appealing, even if there was no chance this would have been regarded as deep enough by modern-day standards. There was a reason the high boards at Henleaze and Farleigh had been removed after all. I swam off downstream and eyed some far-off kayakers, but there was no one else taking a dip like me. I had the Lune all to myself.

  A black-headed gull sunned itself on a distant rock and I continued to swim while Dave and Jim sunbathed on the little gravel beach. Both had retired in recent years and spent a lot of time travelling together. They didn’t look alike. Dave was tall and thin. Jim was short and wiry. But each of them sported a weathered teak tan, giving them an air of well-earned relaxation after forty years of teaching. Neither of them was keen to take a dip, but it was great to have them with me, to share my joy at getting into the water with people I knew, who understood what it meant to me.

  To me this was the most perfect wild-swimming spot, but the hint of tragedy was inescapable. Roger seemed to have found the crazed atmosphere here wonderful, if a touch frenetic. But I couldn’t imagine anyone coming here and tombstoning now.

  There was a melancholy atmosphere to the place even as a wren darted past me and away upstream while I dried off. It’s easy to overlook the dangers of wild swimming. It can seem such a peaceful activity, but I thought about that unfortunate diver and whether I showed enough caution whenever I went out for a dip in a river, pond or lake. Was I becoming too cavalier? And was Roger the same when he revelled in such boyish joie de vivre? It was an issue that Waterlog didn’t really tackle, but one I had come face to face with in Kirkby Lonsdale.

  I pushed aside these concerns as best I could as we headed back into the Dales, to the village of Ingleton and its delightful little outdoor pool. Normally my trips to the Yorkshire Dales involved spending a happy day traipsing through sheep’s mess, hood up and rain pelting my face, leaving Dave to read the map and point the way. But the day was now blisteringly hot, and the thought of another swim after my dip at Kirkby Lonsdale quickened my step as I walked past pretty cottages decked with hanging baskets and up the hill to the lido, which nestles high above the River Doe.

  I arrived just in time, as the pool only opens between midday and 1 p.m., before coming to life later in the evening for locals returning from work. I handed over my £4 entry fee and marvelled at what a spic and span spot this was. Tiered seating dominated one side, the perfect place to watch the occasional gala. The neat changing area had a single electric shower and new benches for stashing clothes and valuables.

  I slid into the deep end and swam quickly, trying to squeeze as many lengths in before time was called. The water was 26°C, far warmer than the River Lune and much more conducive to a long, muscle-aching swim. I was just clocking up my thirty-sixth lap when the friendly attendant appeared at the shallow end and called time as I was about to take a deep breath and set off on another twenty-metre length.

  Afterwards, hair wet and mind quiet, I took a look at the plethora of flyers for lessons and events on the noticeboard outside. Ingleton pool clearly still played a key role in this community in the summer months, but it was another favourite swimming hole that I had set my sights on next, something a lot wilder that could indulge my need for something illicit, just as Fladbury and the Itchen had done.

  Beezley Falls, upstream from the pool on the River Doe, was billed by Roger as a Mecca for local wild swimmers and, as at Kirkby Lonsdale, daredevils. He described visiting late at night – the ‘worn precarious bough’ high above the dark, roiling black pool ‘like a gibbet’, a frayed rope, the turbulence around the rocks – before camping and returning the following day to find the that ‘swimmers thronged the banks, above the waterfall, in the pool, on every rock’. It sounded ex
actly like the kind of place I wanted to spend a long, lazy summer afternoon.

  Except when I asked locals in the village about it, they shrugged and pointed me in the direction of the pool where I had just soothed my sweaty limbs. One lady said she remembered hearing something about it, but that people didn’t swim in the River Doe any longer.

  This tied in with what Dave and Jim had told me. When I explained to them my plans to swim at Beezley Falls, they both said that it was on the private Ingleton Falls path, which cost £6 to use. Roger makes no mention of this and I was damned if I was going to pay for the privilege of walking on a path in one of our most beautiful national parks, a place where anyone should be able to come, roam and enjoy the countryside for free.

  The path had an entrance on the far side of the village, but Jim and I attempted to walk up the banks from the Ingleton pool instead, crashing through bracken and brambles and tripping over fallen logs trying to find way to the falls without paying. Low alders and high nettles blocked our path, and it soon became clear that this was no way to reach the ‘sleek black water’ of Beezley Falls.

  We doubled back and spread the local OS map out over a picnic table and tried to work out an alternative route. There was a northern entrance to the Ingleton Falls path – I could reach the River Doe there and try and drop in unnoticed.

  We drove up the hill and left the car by a quarry. Jim and I set off over a field of tall grass while Dave hung back to enjoy the summer weather. A mistle thrush perched on a telegraph pole piped out its song as we passed through a field gate and on towards the river. Stepping stones poked up from the shallow water, leading to a ticket office where a warden dressed in a branded baseball cap and matching khaki shorts and T-shirt was collecting fees from unsuspecting walkers. There wasn’t a path on my side of the river, meaning there was no option for me but to cross and cough up the exorbitant fee. Jim baulked, but not before I’d asked to borrow a few pounds to pay the fare.

  As Jim turned back I strode on, passing the ticket office and the gatekeeper, who was engrossed in demanding money from a pair of tourists who were struggling to understand why they were having to pay to walk in a national park. He looked up as if to speak. I offered a loud ‘Good afternoon’ and continued walking down towards the waterfall.

  Before I could even see Beezley Falls I was met by a huge ‘No Swimming’ sign and walked on to find the falls themselves cordoned off by a wooden fence. Down below was a swimmer’s idea of heaven. The deep black pool, the rocks for flopping out on, the waterfall for pummelling tense shoulders.

  But things had changed. There was no rope, and the oak bough which Roger eulogised had been snapped close to the tree’s trunk. No young boys were queuing to impress ‘a gallery of admiring teenage girls’. Instead there were signs. Everywhere. Ones warning walkers not to swim, not to leave the path at any point, that stones can be slippery when wet, and to keep a close eye on young children.

  I hate this mollycoddling approach to the countryside and know that Roger would have too. He speaks extensively in Waterlog about this very problem, right from the book’s first pages: ‘Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are signposted, labelled, and officially “interpreted”. There is something about all this that is turning the reality of things into virtual reality.’

  I pulled out my copy and found these words, using them to spur me on and flick two fingers at the landowners and anyone who thinks the countryside cannot be appreciated on its own terms. Beezley was out of bounds, the fences making it hard to reach, so I kept walking downstream. The next falls were smaller, but looked thoroughly inviting. A concrete wall, just off the path, made the perfect changing spot and, with no one around, I yanked on my shorts and waded in. The surface was a little scummy, but a few strokes in I was out of my depth, my skin singing in the cool peaty water.

  I swam big circles of the pool, stopping to take pictures and lie on my back, looking up at the high clouds through the deep green leaves of the oak trees which hung over the gorge. It wasn’t quite Roger’s adventurous Beezley swim, but I was imbued with his anti-authoritarian spirit as I swam on, gulping and spitting out the water as I went. I felt invincible, happily alone and away from the prying eyes of the warden. I took great joy in saying ‘fuck it’ and getting in regardless of the rules and regulations.

  My furtive dip lasted no more than a few minutes, but my skin tingled as I made my way back up the path. A couple spotted me pulling back on my boots and enquired about the cold and the strength of the current. Neither of them seemed perturbed or put out by the fact that I had clearly flouted the owner’s ‘no swimming’ rule. Someone swimming in the river seemed like the most natural thing in the world to them.

  By now I was really puffed up, delighted that I’d stolen a swim here as I had done all those months ago in the Itchen near Winchester. Not only that, I had got away with it right under the nose of the warden.

  I was thinking these sweet thoughts, swinging my arms with my head down as I made my way back up the path and past the little hut which marked the end of the paid walkway, when a large boot blocked my way.

  ‘You can pay here.’

  I looked up to find the warden staring at me with palm outstretched.

  ‘Oh, OK, how much?’ I asked, knowing full well I was about to be unburdened of the cash I’d by now set aside for a couple of pints back in the village.

  I handed over my shrapnel and decided politeness rather than briskness was my best approach. After all, I wanted to find out if this had been a paid-for path when Roger had come here. If it had been it was quite an oversight on his part to omit such a detail.

  ‘So, how long has this been a paid for-attraction, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Since 1885,’ came the reply. I was handed a pamphlet with my printed receipt, ‘No Swimming’ clearly written on the back in bold type.

  I was shocked. But what about Roger’s swimming paradise, his illicit late-night dip and the crowds swelling the banks on a summer afternoon? I told my interlocutor about my predecessor’s visit and the swimmers he’d found frolicking in Beezley Falls.

  ‘When was this? In the nineties? No, we don’t have that anymore,’ he said. ‘We got rid of the rope swing and there’s a very clear sign saying it’s prohibited. Some boys still come up and do it when I’m not here, but they run off as soon as I appear. We have the pool in the village for swimming.’

  By now it was obvious that I’d been in myself and the warden was warming to his theme, his distaste for wild swimming evident in his growing agitation.

  ‘We had a death at Kirkby Lonsdale. People shouldn’t swim here. It’s extremely cold and it could be dangerous.’

  I was furious. Of course it could be dangerous. But so could swimming off a beach on the south coast or, for that matter, striking out for the deep end of a pool when you’re unsure of your ability. I walked off, struggling to conceal my rage – at the fact that this path was against everything the Yorkshire Dales and national parks were meant to stand for, and at the warden for using a tragedy in Kirkby Lonsdale to paint a negative picture of wild swimming, when the incident had clearly been a terrible one-off.

  But as my anger settled I felt confused. Roger had depicted this place as a swimming idyll, which it no longer was and may never have been. The sombre feeling at the Devil’s Bridge earlier in the day was also a marked change from what Roger had experienced. But then the awful events that had happened there and the warden’s portent about ‘dangers’ in the Doe were what happened when people made bad choices. Not all wild swimmers choose to jump twenty feet into a too-shallow pool, just as not all walkers choose to go wandering off steep paths without first checking the terrain. To conflate the issues was to trivialise them and reinforce the taboo which still existed around swimming in rivers.

  I trod carefully over the stepping stones and realised I was reeling from conflicting emotions: a buzz from the swim; annoyance at Roger for not telling the truth about how this place wasn
’t a swimming free-for-all; and frustration that swimming in anything other than a chlorinated pool was seen as a pastime for kooks and crazies, to be discouraged at every turn.

  This mood burned inside me as we drove across the Dales and out towards Malham. My run-in at Beezley had dampened my excitement for more wild swims, but the sun was still high and there was plenty of time to go in search of Roger’s famous tufa limestone pool in Cowside Beck, buried deep beneath Yew Cogar Scar.

  Dave had studied the maps and even tried to look for the pool himself the previous summer after we’d talked about it at length over the phone, bounding down from the Malham side of the beck only to find the little stream shallow and lacking anywhere remotely swimmable. Like him, I had only Roger’s descriptions and an OS map to go on, and left him and Jim high on the road at the top of the valley. My legs buzzed from the scratch of thistles and teasels as I stepped carefully down the steep-sided hill, ankle-cracking lumps stymieing my progress.

  I had a few visual aids from my predecessor’s account to help me: a spinney of ash, gnarled trees growing perpendicular to the walls of the scar, wide holes in the otherwise narrow stream. The drop was so steep that I couldn’t see the water until I was almost on it, its light burble hitting my ears first. It ran white over rocks, black where it deepened. There was no pool in sight.

  I scaled a creaking old fence, there to keep the sheep in check rather than stop walkers enjoying the right to roam, and walked a few metres upstream, back towards Malham. But this way there seemed to be no gnarled trees, no ash, no wide holes. And so I turned 180° and set off on a long yomp in search of this elusive bathing spot, somewhere to forget my unease about the afternoon’s events.

  A pair of buzzards circled high above, their occasional caws making me nervous as clouds began to bubble up and the sun went in. I kept walking along the beck’s narrow bank, a dipper following my every move, darting ahead and leading me to what I thought might be Roger’s pool. After an hour’s clumsy trekking the valley began to open out, the beck beginning to meander in wide sweeps. I started to think I saw rocky outcrops and overhanging trees where there were none, imagining mossy pools where in fact shallow water rushed over limestone. I had clearly taken a wrong turn when I had reached the water. And so, with the evening fast approaching and my legs tired from the trudge and the three swims of the day, I peeled off every item of clothing, waded into the shallow stream and lay down, stark naked. It was shockingly cold, but my first ever skinny dip was the ideal way to soak off the disappointment and annoyance of Beezley Falls.