by Joe Minihane
I was treading my way back to dry land carefully when I heard a shout.
‘Put some bloody clothes on.’
It was Jim. Unbeknownst to me, he’d followed me along Cowside and had also failed to see anything like a tufa pool. We left the water behind, shooting off up the steep hill back to the road. Unlike other places on this trip where I’d struggled to match Roger’s experience, I resolved to return and find the hidden pool and swim in its swirling embrace. I had the idea it could just be the best swimming spot in Waterlog, a soothing place to make worries and annoyances about feisty wardens disappear for good.
We spent the night at the youth hostel in Malham. In the common room, with a smattering of walkers and other outdoor types, we watched a bore draw and penalty shoot-out between Argentina and Holland in the World Cup semi-finals.
I woke early, swimming on my mind. My next swim was one I had been dreading ever since I first decided on following Roger’s journey: a soak in the Leeds to Liverpool Canal at Gargrave. The Middle Level Drain on the Fens had been fascinating, if a tad murky, and I had eschewed the grimy Well Creek canal which ran across it. But having come so far from home, there was no point in missing out this far northern outpost of the canal network. I remembered Tim’s gentle chiding and used it to drive me on.
Roger spoke of ‘having’ to swim in a canal. How could he swim across Britain and not? But as we clicked through a metal gate on the towpath and walked east from the town lock, I really wished he hadn’t bothered. It was another beautiful day, warming up after a morning mist, and I had my swimming shorts on underneath my jeans, ready to whip them off and get in at the first convenient spot. The heat was making me itch for a swim, but the rainbow glint of boat oil on the surface and the dirty brown murk of the water was an off-putting sight.
The setting, however, was beautiful. We passed under a stone bridge, where two pretty cottages backed onto the canal. Each had neatly manicured lawns and blooming gardens, one with an old racing bike spray-painted yellow nestled in a flowerbed to mark the recent passing of the Tour de France through the Dales. I paused to take pictures, but was only putting off the inevitable.
A few hundred metres downstream, where the fields opened out and the shade of the trees subsided, I found as good a spot as any – a small inlet dropping towards the dark drink. I lay down my damp towel and began to get undressed as Dave broke out his camera and began taking snaps.
‘Are you birdwatching?’
A lady with an inquisitive border collie had appeared from nowhere, looking us over with a curious smile.
‘Yes,’ we chorused. I felt too embarrassed to tell her my real plans, despite standing barefoot, and left Jim and Dave to chat while the dog eyed me suspiciously. He was wise to my game and I knew it.
After a few minutes the lady set off towards Gargrave. As she turned the corner, I took my chance, slipping in feet first and wading out to the middle. It was no more than four feet deep, with a rough, squelchy bed.
I launched myself forward, spluttering, sending a duck and her young scattering from the reeds on the far bank in panic. I could hardly blame them. I imagine this was the first time anyone had been foolish enough to swim here since Roger had done so. There was no way I was going to manage the ‘token mile’ of my predecessor, so instead swam hundred-metre lengths, back and forth. I kept my mouth tightly closed and my head up, and when I took in the summer sky, the ducklings in the distance and the lush green of the surrounding hills, I realised I was very much enjoying myself. I thought of the other canals I knew: the Huddersfield Narrow Canal through Marsden in West Yorkshire, the Grand Union and Regent’s Canals in London. I was glad to be swimming in this one, with these surroundings, rather than those sometimes grubby affairs.
I dried off happy. My gloom after Beezley and Kirkby Lonsdale, and the failure to find the tufa pool, had lifted, even if questions about wild swimming’s status and Roger’s account of his trip remained. I had semi-conquered Yorkshire’s Waterlog swims and returned south for something a little less alluring and a lot more industrial.
CHAPTER SEVEN
August
River Medway, Kent – Dungeness and Camber Sands, East Sussex – Bamburgh Beach, Northumberland – River Severn, Gloucestershire
Swimming in the canal at Gargrave had helped me steel myself for what was coming next. As the final planning of my Waterlog journey began to take shape, a series of less than beguiling dips was looming, ones I had left off the long list I had stuck to my office wall in the hope I’d forget them, but which were revealed whenever I idly flicked through the book’s pages for inspiration and further guidance. The long schlep across the industrial River Medway to Fort Hoo was perhaps the least appealing, but one I didn’t want to leave until summer was on the wane.
Like Roger, the thought of swimming in this polluted, busy river made me extremely nervous. My predecessor had a local boatman to take him across to the old island fort, but my only accomplices were a brand-new OS map and a deep sense of foreboding.
I took the high-speed train to Gillingham in Kent, London sweltering in one of its brief annual heatwaves as we reached top speed, slipping across the marshes and away from the capital’s hinterlands. I studied the map intently, looking for a convenient way to get down to the water and a place where I could at least attempt to make the crossing unnoticed by passing boat traffic and the watchful eye of the coast guard.
I walked through Gillingham’s backstreets, crossed dual carriageways and passed through an industrial estate, reaching the Saxon Shore Way. The bucolic name didn’t quite match the surroundings. The Yorkshire Dales felt a long way away.
Then, beyond a tired-looking funfair, there it was. The River Medway. It shimmered far off in the distance, the near shore a mess of mud and shallow creeks, the tide having receded to make any kind of entry impossible. My planning had become so much better in the past year, but this really was a foolish oversight on my part. Even if I’d wanted to take a long swim, I couldn’t have anyway. I cursed my failure out loud, but deep down I knew that this was a good result, that I had dodged a swim which by Roger’s estimation wasn’t actually that much fun. I decided to keep walking anyway, away from the town and towards the RSPB’s Nor Marsh reserve further downstream. It was a hot day and I wanted to make sure I enjoyed the weather while it lasted.
As ever when a swim was denied to me, I felt a pang of longing for the cold embrace of the river, but had to remember to tune myself into the water and how it felt without getting in. After a while, I sat on the wall built to hold back the tide and watched the river come to life. The occasional sail boat slid away out to the North Sea, while black-headed gulls skittered over the mud, leaving tiny prints in their wake.
‘Enjoy the view, mate, it won’t be there for much longer,’ said a cyclist as he rode past behind me, his tyres crunching over the gravel path. He meant Kingsnorth Power Station, which stood idle on the Isle of Grain on the north side of the river. But he could just as easily have meant the whole view.
The Isle of Grain was where London’s former mayor Boris Johnson had once wanted to build a huge new airport, despite the protestations of environmental campaigners that it would destroy migration routes for the millions of birds who used the Medway as a staging post. Although this was once a heavily industrial place, there was a real beauty about the path which hugged the banks of the river. I couldn’t understand why such vandalism seemed necessary. This stretch of river and its scattering of nature reserves brought happiness and relaxation to the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in this busy part of England. But what price happiness when a new airport can help the UK compete in the never-ending global race?
I thought about this as I walked on to Sharp’s Head Bay and Horrid Hill, a short peninsula where children on school holidays were searching for insects and serious birdwatchers stood, binoculars clamped to their faces, watching far out across the river. Nor Marsh’s abundance of birdlife would doubtless be ruined by the creation
of an airport here. Our islands are so small and precious, and ruining what few wild places we have left seemed to me shocking as I watched people arrive to enjoy the wildlife or simply relax in the lunchtime sun. The scream of jet engines was the last thing I wanted to hear.
Despite my missed swim, I felt blessed to have come to this corner of Kent on such a glorious day and to have had a relaxing, joyous experience on the banks of the Medway. But my cravings resurfaced as I walked on and a series of potential swimming places was revealed to me. Horrid Hill offered its own delights, places where, if I’d had the foresight to check the tide times, I could have dropped straight down into ten feet of estuary water. But a few hundred metres on, an even more perfect spot homed into view.
It was a short slipway, at the bottom of which a small flotilla of dinghies stood tilted on the silt, waiting for the water to return them to their natural, buoyant state. Along its side was a small wood, where I could easily have changed into my shorts and struck out for a long, circular swim, around Horrid Hill and back into Sharp’s Head Bay. But as I checked the tide times pegged to a nearby noticeboard, I knew such a trip was a fantasy. The long tidal range meant that it would be dark by the time the river lapped again in this sheltered place.
It would have been easy for me to see this trip as a failure to follow in Roger’s footsteps. A year previously I most certainly would have berated myself for not doing things ‘properly’. But, as on Jura, I didn’t feel any guilt. Rather I was happy that I had come and seen the place as it was now and imagined how Roger would have felt here. Elation at the birdlife and local enjoyment of this rewilded reserve. Distaste at the absurd plans to turn what was now a popular natural environment into an international hub airport for no reason other than greed. I told myself this journey was in the spirit of my recreation of Waterlog – part homage, part personal mission to find my own place in Roger’s tale. Feeling the water when I couldn’t get into it, allowing the swims to come to me however they wanted to. On the Medway I found the calm I’d enjoyed in much less industrial, far more idyllic surroundings.
I decided to stay focused on Kent for my next of Roger’s swims, and got together a gang of friends to join me for a bike ride and a series of summer dips on the other side of the county. Dungeness and Camber had always seemed so close to London, but I didn’t want to tackle them alone, so I had let them slip down the list in favour of challenges on Dartmoor and across the north of England.
A week after visiting the Medway I once again boarded the high-speed train from St Pancras. I was joined by Joe and Tom, who had gamely swum in the Test back in January, along with James, another old work colleague and good friend. We zipped out of town and changed at Ashford, where we took the stopping service across into Sussex at Rye.
Doing the trip on foot would take more than a day, so I had arranged bike hire, but our steeds, rented from a garage in the centre of town, were in less than perfect condition. A loose pedal here, a clunky chain there. But despite that, and being blasted by a downpour as we biked through the ancient town and out towards the Camber road, it felt good to be cycling to a swim again. This was the first time I had done so outside London since my dip in the Lark near Ely a year earlier, and I had forgotten how sweetly biking and swimming dovetailed. I hadn’t really enjoyed cycling since breaking my wrist and didn’t go out on two wheels nearly as often as I had prior to the incident. The joint ached if I rode for too long, and every time I saddled up in London I had visions of my attacker looming over me as I tried to edge my bike past him. Riding outside the city, on quiet roads and dedicated tracks, was much more appealing. Within minutes I had worked up a sweat and was dreaming of sinking into those high waves at the bottom of the steep, shingly beach on Dungeness.
The ride was long, filthy and lots of fun, the gravel cycle path covered with deep puddles and my hired bike lacking anything as sophisticated as a mud guard. I could feel my backside becoming wet in the saddle as my white T-shirt became dotted with dirt. It felt glorious to be out, the wide-open skies of this strange corner of England leading us on towards the only place on these islands classified as a desert. The sun had cut through the early cloud, and the last of the showers had been blown out as we followed the road on a hard left-hand turn towards the church tower at Lydd, the crack of rifle fire from the MOD’s coastal firing range sporadically sounding over the incessant, hefty wind.
Cycling was becoming tough in the harsh sea wind, but we pushed on, rabbits darting out from bushes to run alongside us. At one point a stoat skittered down the path beside Joe. I shouted in joy and almost got wiped out by a bramble hanging across the path. This was just what I wanted from a day out swimming. A challenge, good company and the promise of cold water.
Still, I had underestimated just how tough this trip would be, especially on those whose legs weren’t used to lengthy stretches in the saddle. James and Tom brought up the rear, and we slowed to their pace before kicking on, a last few miles down the road towards Dungeness and a date with the English Channel.
The last stretch was brutal, a slog against a howling gale which blew over the flat sandy gravel and hit us square on. Roger arrived at Dungeness in his car and took time to enjoy the borderless garden at Derek Jarman’s house, a gorgeous, off-kilter place to relax before a cooling dip in the ocean. But by the time we reached the Pilot pub, cycling past the nuclear power station and its tall warning signs about unauthorised personnel, we were shattered, and any plans I had considered to visit Jarman’s old fishing cottage were forgotten. I bolted my bike to a road sign and managed something akin to a royal wave as the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch train clattered past, parents grinning as kids screamed with delight, most likely at the sight of four grown men trying to catch their breath after a brutal bike ride. All was well at the English seaside.
I looked around and found myself in a happy 1980s time warp. Everything around me reminded me of my childhood: pubs that hadn’t been done up for thirty years, a Happy Shopper, friendly older people who looked like my grandparents eating sandwiches in their cars. It seemed that the hard road here had actually been a form of time travel, bringing me back to simpler times.
Glad to be off our bikes, we half walked, half waddled down towards the water, dropping level after level before reaching the clattering waves. A large family stood peering out to sea, but no one swam and, as I began to pull on my trunks, a voice piped up telling a child about the dangers of getting in the water here. Of strong undercurrents and the inevitability of death.
It sounded to me like a risk worth taking and so I moved faster, running into the sea while being watched like a zoo animal by the group back on the beach. I resurfaced after diving under to see them hurrying back to the car, averting their children’s gazes in case I’d given them any ideas. Perhaps the spectre of Dungeness B’s nuclear reactors away down the coast had given them further pause for thought. I didn’t consider it as I took an accidental mouthful and swam out over the powerful rollers.
Roger called swimming at Dungeness ‘some of the purest bathing on the south coast’ and I was inclined to agree. It felt deep and heavenly and I revelled in the fact that I had given my body up to the higher power of the English Channel. This sea had done me good over the past year, and it was great to be back in its chilly reaches once more. I swam in wide circles, conscious that to go too far would doubtless see me swept out and into more turbulent waters.
Tom and Joe soon joined me, Joe practising his butterfly stroke while Tom and I splashed each other and took pictures with my waterproof camera. James, not overly keen on swimming, stood watching from the shore, stripped down to a pair of black shorts. His stocky frame appeared to wince as he edged himself in, but he refused to cry out against the cold as I stumbled out and lay down to dry off in the late summer sun. It was great to be in the water with these guys again, their willingness and happy abandon meaning my mood always soared when I was around them.
We parked ourselves in a row on starched towels
and ate the treats we’d picked up in Rye: pork pies, cheese, fruit tarts. James, undoubtedly the most bibulous man I know, produced a bottle of wine, chilled by the windy ride, and we sipped from plastic cups and toasted our successful trip. We had managed to forget that we needed to turn the bikes back round and go for another dip before heading back to London.
The return leg was interminable, buffeting winds smashing into us head first and making our progress no faster than walking pace. As we struggled on, swearing into the elements, I could have sworn I saw Roger driving past in his knackered old Audi, following the same route he had all those years ago, back towards Camber. He’d have been quite cocooned from the gales hammering into the south coast. I cursed the fact that we hadn’t come down in the Jag, my joy at cycling now well and truly eroded. The pedals were harder to turn with every rotation. The buzz of the adrenalin from the ocean had worn away to nothing and I grew weary with every mile we rode.
It was gone 5 p.m. when we slowed and stopped opposite the Pontins holiday camp in Camber, darting into the corner shop to buy bottles of water and waiting an age to pay while holidaying families stocked up on industrial quantities of ice cream. We locked the bikes up to a low wooden fence, scaled the high dunes and ran out onto the sands.