by Joe Minihane
Kitesurfers flashed across the far-off surf, the tide a distant white line. I was put in mind of Holkham and its roiling waves, the simple pleasure of splashing through shallow pools and out into more challenging waters. I half ran, half fell over the soft sand, desperate once again to get wet.
Other than those intrepid adrenalin junkies, the beach was virtually empty. A few stragglers milled about around the café, where Union Jacks crackled high in the stiff breeze, and although it was late, there was still plenty of light left in the day for them to enjoy. It seemed as if this whole beach was being wasted, that those on holiday here had somehow missed a trick, opting to stay by the holiday camp pool when they could have been having fun out here.
When he visited, Roger found the same. ‘As if unsure of the immense freedom before them, most people seemed to stay within range of the café, and I had gone only a few hundred yards when I found myself entirely alone,’ he wrote.
We, ditched our bags in the middle of the vast beach and changing into wet swimming shorts. James volunteered to stay put and keep an eye on the bags as Joe, Tom and I set off in a race across the hard, ridged sand.
I ran through a large pool, hoping for a pre-sea soaking, and lost a leg in deep, tar-like mud, pulling it free and turning back to see I had turned the clear pool a dark, cloudy black. Joe and Tom were long gone, away to the tide line, while I stared and weighed up the terrifying prospect of Camber Sands gobbling me up unnoticed. I cleaned off the last vestiges of gloop from my toes and jogged on, more cautious now about my route to the water.
The waves were relentless and foamy, the water far shallower than the two-strides-and-it’s-deep stuff round the corner at Dungeness. Whereas the channel there had buoyed us, here it beat us up. It felt like Mothecombe beach in Devon all over again, a chance to jump waves and perform tricks. Joe practised handstands as I grazed my knees trying to ride breakers back to shore and Tom waded out further, careful to avoid the kitesurfers who flew past at close quarters.
The sun was beginning to slip behind high cloud, cooling the sea and sending shivers up my arms. I jogged back, cracking over shells and disturbing plovers snacking on treats in the wet sand. Any disappointment about the holidaying masses not sharing this space was tempered by the fact that I’d been able to enjoy it in the company of good friends and good friends only. Sometimes swimming’s private joys outweigh the happiness of being among a large group of like-minded strangers. My mood changed like the weather, it seemed.
Back on the puddle-strewn path to Rye, the sun slid down to the horizon as the turbines of Romney Marsh’s onshore wind farm spun silently in the distance. Roger’s Audi or Tom’s Jag would have come in handy, but as we arrived back in Rye, I wouldn’t have traded the sweet ache of tired limbs and my mud-splattered clothes for anything.
A while later I found a copy of Derek Jarman’s Garden on the bookshelf of a restaurant. Jarman’s stories and poems, accompanied by Howard Sooley’s images, put me in mind of our swim that day, despite our not having gone to his garden. I remembered Dungeness’s limitless, borderless possibility as it dropped down into the sea from the shingle beach. Jarman’s open approach to his garden put me in mind of Roger’s journey and reconfirmed my belief that there could be no rules about this trip. It was a way of seeing the world anew, without boundaries. To me, Jarman’s garden was like Roger’s watery pilgrimage. Boundless, without rules, something that could be aspired to but never perfectly copied. Idiosyncratic in the best possible way. Jarman’s book made me excited all over again, ready to attempt the last swathe of swims Roger had in store for me.
In keeping with my haphazard take on Roger’s own zigzagging mission across the UK, I next took to the water far up north, in the shadow of Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland. Kent had been a summery treat, but this far up the North Sea coast I could feel autumn’s hand touching my shoulders. It was cold in the shade, and the protection of a thick jumper and a raincoat did little to warm me as I eyed the beach and the high waves smashing into the coast, the Farne Islands occasionally peeping up behind the tilting horizon.
Like Roger, I had come here from Scotland, although my reasons for being north of the border were not swimming related. I had talked Keeley into coming south for a day from Edinburgh, where we had been seeing friends performing at the Fringe. Train delays and expensive taxis meant we arrived in Bamburgh in less than ideal condition: tired, hung-over and significantly out of pocket. Despite the joy I had felt down in Kent, I could sense that my single-minded determination to cross off all of Roger’s swims was once again beginning to tip over into obsession, as it had done in the weeks and months before my wrist break. It was starting to feel like a necessity again, rather than being fun. My obstinacy and desperation to get as many swims done before summer ended was infuriating me, so I can only imagine how Keeley felt.
We walked down to the castle, around what must surely rank as one of the most picturesque cricket pitches in England and out onto the sandy path which led to the water. The thrashing of the ocean resounded in my ears, and I thought about the pathetic pair of swimming shorts stuffed in my rucksack. For the first time since March, I wanted the tight, warming cover of my wetsuit.
At least it was sunny. When Roger swam in the sea here it was a wet, late August afternoon, the power of the Gulf of Corryvreckan still fresh in his mind. The beach had been empty too, but as we brushed through the marram grass and onto the wide sands we were greeted by dozens of hardy beachgoers, each one wrapped up against the elements and determined to enjoy the brightness despite the breeze.
A few had strayed into the water. A group of surfers practised standing on the low waves of the near shore, while a lad no older than ten waded knee-deep in the breakers, his parents watching with a mix of anxiety and awe. A group of dogs splashed and barked while their owners walked on, trying to avoid the inevitable furry shakedown.
Having seen the roaring mass of uneven waves, Keeley wisely opted for towel-holding duties while I undressed in the shelter of a low dune. I had done enough of these kinds of sea swims around the Suffolk and Norfolk coast over the past two years to know that approaching the North Sea with trepidation was pointless. I dropped my head and bounded towards the water, my chest pricked with goosebumps, my pace slowed to a kind of lunar jumping as the cold water enveloped my feet, my ankles, my knees. As soon as the spume touched my thighs I threw myself under and swam as hard as I could against the rise and fall of the ocean. The whole scene felt wild and unpredictable, waves smashing into me from all directions and making anything like a proper stroke impossible.
Roger had managed a ‘long cold-water swim’ in a ‘flat, calm sea’ here, but I was the only person in the water without a wetsuit, and even if I had wanted to make a beeline for the Farne Islands, just clearing the white water would have been a challenge in itself. Instead I contented myself with swimming in and out of the shallows, watching the flash of windsurfers’ sails cut across the horizon. Occasionally the white lips of breaking waves would subside and I would catch a glimpse of the lighthouse on the Farne Islands. I thought of the puffins there, heading out to fish in the same water in which I swam. Were there seals close by? And could they sense me as I swam and waded out further? These happy questions rose in my mind as the cold dissipated and I let myself be massaged by the water.
After fifteen minutes my internal swim clock told me it was time to get back to dry land and the warmth of a bowl of soup and a mug of coffee in the tea shop. Roger would probably have been beaching himself on the Farne Islands by now, communing with nature and generally being a tougher, more water-hardened swimmer than me. But it didn’t matter. I had been here and seen the water in a way he hadn’t, gleaming in broken sunshine, the beach busy and the waves altogether more powerful.
As I walked back towards Keeley, my towel a bright blue flag snapping in the wind as she held it high, a walker approached me, thumbs aloft, Macca-style.
‘Well done, you brave man.’
Incapab
le of speech, I was only able to offer a laugh in return, smiling as I got to the back of the beach and began drying off.
All this time I had been watched over by Bamburgh Castle, its high walls and long parapets inescapable while in the water or on the sand. I couldn’t recall having taken a swim in such majestic, medieval surroundings before. The pool in Cirencester, with the old barracks as its backdrop, was the only thing that had come close on the journey so far.
Roger called this place ‘magnificent and sad’. And yes, there was an element of melancholy in Bamburgh, especially back in the village, where an effigy of Grace Darling lay in the churchyard of St Aidan’s, a tribute to her bravery in rescuing stricken seamen. But at the same time it all felt very unreal and beautiful to me. The sand eddying over the beach with the wind, the high waves, the cut grass of the graveyard picked over by hungry pied wagtails. And that huge view of the castle and beyond, out over the unknown deep of the North Sea. No, I didn’t feel sad here. I felt blessed to have found it at all, a blissful change from my previous jaunts, a place that appeared to make all its visitors happy.
By now I was growing acutely aware of summer fading. August was almost at an end, and my long list of Roger’s swims seemed never-ending. Waterlog was still revealing its secrets to me after countless rereadings, pages of my tattered copy beginning to fall out after being packed and repacked ceaselessly over the previous two years.
One particular set of swims sat at the forefront of my mind. I had been planning a long trip down to Cornwall and the Scilly Isles all summer with Molly, but work plans had meant we’d already postponed the long drive twice. We pencilled it in a third time for the start of September, in the hope of an Indian summer and a chance to enjoy the county’s best beaches and pools without having to battle with the school holiday crowds. I was excited, as this was to be my first ever trip to Cornwall, my ideas of it informed almost exclusively by Roger’s writing. I kept thinking of his long, illicit swim across Fowey Harbour, of deep distant dips at Porthcurno and the Neverland of Bryher on the Isles of Scilly. I was so desperate to get down there and see it all for myself.
But first there were other swims to attend to closer to home, reworkings of Roger’s adventures in places where changes had rendered re-creation impossible.
I’d returned from Northumberland with a gnawing sense of not having done enough swims his year, admiration mixed with annoyance that Roger had managed all of this in less than a year. So, bags packed and work quickly dispensed with, once again I took the train from Paddington and met Tom in Oxford. We drove west through Cheltenham, ignoring the temptations of the town’s lido and heading to the Malverns instead. Roger’s swing through these hills focused on the mysterious joys of hydrotherapy at Droitwich Brine Baths, having failed to find any ‘lost pools’ around Great Malvern itself, its famous springs refusing to give up anything like a convenient outdoor bathing spot to my predecessor.
But the brine baths were long gone, shut in 2009 due to corroded pipes, the upkeep of the spa deemed too expensive by the private healthcare company which owned it. A campaign group, Save Our Brine Baths, had hoped to raise £1 million and reopen the baths at its original site, but was forced in 2013 to accept that the building was in such disrepair that new premises were required.
A number of the people behind the brine baths campaign had managed to push successfully for the reopening of Droitwich Spa’s salt-water lido in 2007. The lido had been left to rot after closing in the late 1990s, but was now regularly voted one of the country’s best, at the vanguard of this happy renaissance. A new brine baths didn’t seem far-fetched in light of this development. But with warm days about to be in short supply, I decided against a heated lido swim and instead directed Tom to a place where we could bathe in cold water in a less straitened atmosphere.
Roger complained of feeling ‘high and dry’ up on the Malverns, so I was feeling particularly pleased with myself for having turned to a wild-swimming guidebook and found what appeared to be the ideal outdoor swim: a cooling adventure in the disused Gullet Quarry.
We left the car on a gravel track, turning our backs on the huge views of the Midlands stretching east, and followed a muddy path up towards the water. Immediately it was clear that something was wrong. Fresh fence posts and barbed wire were laid out at the top of the pool’s perimeter, signs warning that it was an offence to swim here under a local bye-law. The old path down to the water’s edge had been cordoned off, although a small group picnicked there, their black Labradors paddling out to retrieve sticks thrown into the depths.
A small remembrance plaque next to one of the stark signs spelt out the basics and a cursory web search on my smartphone did the rest. In the space of one week in July 2012, two young men had drowned here, attempting to swim across the wide lake and not making it back. Quarry and gravel pools are notorious for such tragedies, shelving quickly to cause a sharp drop in temperature that even the strongest swimmers struggle to cope with.
From reading old news stories it was clear that this twin disaster had caused quite a stir among the local community. They wanted swimming in the pool banned by law, and got their way. Some had even asked for the lake to be drained.
I thought back to the only quarry pool I had swum in on my journey, at the well-tended Henleaze Swimming Club. There, swimmers weren’t allowed into the deeper water at the lake’s far end and lifeguards kept a watchful eye at all times, stopping anyone going into that roped-off area. No such precautions existed at Gullet Quarry. Henleaze was a swimming club after all, this just a deep, isolated lake.
My mind also turned to the death at Kirkby Lonsdale and the stringent warnings of the warden at Beezley Falls. Perhaps I had been blithe in my assessment. Obviously I knew to use caution when wild swimming, but tragedies can happen to anyone at any time. Maybe jumping from high branches or swimming in cold water without the protection of a wetsuit or a lifeguard wasn’t worth the risk after all.
I once again noticed that same melancholy atmosphere I had felt on the Lune in Kirkby. Making snap judgements about outdoor swimming based on one or two cases was never wise, as with all things in life, but did I show enough respect and take sufficient care when I went out on my own? And what would the families of those young men make of me undertaking such a trip? Would they think me foolish? Should swimmers avoid quarry pools altogether? I was beginning to think so.
Tom and I left and decided to find somewhere wholly different. Of course, as Roger had found, hidden swimming spots are none too easy to come by in this country of springs and salt water, and so we made for the most obvious place on the map: the River Severn.
Just outside Tewkesbury, we parked up at the Lower Lode Inn and walked upstream, past creaking camper vans and through a campsite where students and hippies were sprawled out enjoying the dying embers of summer.
Down a steep path towards the river bank, we found a handy anglers’ staging post, wide enough for both of us to get changed. There was nothing as luxurious as shallows for wading in, instead a submerged post onto which I was able to lean my weight before sliding into the pacy water. It was freezing, the coldest I’d experienced all summer, so I swam hard and fast in a vain attempt to warm up. I made sure to stay close to the side of the river, the current of the central channel moving at a rapid rate and large boats looming in both directions. Tom followed, offering up a brief ‘Oh my God’ before swimming in the opposite direction.
After a few minutes’ nattering about swims and winter plans, we pulled out of the dreary Severn and dried off fast, drinking tea between putting on jumpers, jeans and T-shirts. I realised now why Roger hadn’t swum here. It wasn’t what I would call pleasant, and could have been dangerous. My appetite for swimming had been dulled by the day’s events and I settled into the passenger seat feeling conflicted, the cold of the Severn still pressing on my chest. Swimming had become a huge part of my life, but I could see why so many would see my approach to it as asking for trouble. I hoped that Cornwall might iron o
ut these kinks and get my mind back to why I loved it so much in the first place.
CHAPTER EIGHT
September
River Fowey, Cornwall – Helford Passage, Cornwall – Treyarnon, Cornwall – Godrevy and the Red River, Cornwall – Porthcurno, Cornwall – Marazion and St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall – Bryher, Isles of Scilly – River Wharfe, Yorkshire – Hell Gill, Yorkshire/Cumbria – Cowside Beck, Yorkshire – Hampstead Mixed Pond, London – Bryanston, Dorset – Highpoint, Highgate – Burwell Lode and Wicken Lode, Cambridgeshire
Summer had returned for a valedictory lap as we crossed the Tamar. I was about to spend the next five days swimming my way around Roger’s Cornwall, before taking the boat west to Bryher and a long-awaited date with the Scilly Isles.
Molly had been behind the wheel for six hours and delirium was beginning to set in. Her little red car was a messy scene of discarded coffee cups, poorly packed camping equipment and sweet wrappers. Both of us were borderline manic as we drove westward towards Fowey, the car stereo cranked up, blasting out The Smiths, music completely at odds with the hot and hopeful weather. Between tracks we talked about the swims I had planned for us over the weekend, how the journey was coming to an end. My spreadsheet was quickly turning green and there were around a dozen or so dips left.
Fowey seemed like the logical first stop on our journey. It was the first of Roger’s dips we would hit on our drive down from London and was also the one that everyone I had spoken to about coming here told me I needed to do.
Molly jerked the handbrake on and we spilled out of the car park set high on the hills above the town, stuffing our bags with towels and swimming kit as we bounded down the town’s narrow lanes, the deep green glint of the harbour visible at every turn. Yachts, dinghies and ferries filled every available space. It was only now that I was here that I began to appreciate the sheer magnitude of Roger’s achievement of swimming across this wide, boat-jammed stretch.