Floating

by Joe Minihane

  * * *

  A few days after our Abbey Bridge swim, I returned to Suffolk for a very different kind of dip. It had been a while since I had stretched my arms in any kind of lake, let alone one which formed the centrepiece of a Capability Brown-designed garden.

  Heveningham Hall, a few miles from the town of Halesworth, was where I would be doing just that. I had lugged my bike up from London and followed the rolling road which Roger had cycled along on his final ley-line adventure, although I was going in the opposite direction.

  I had been given permission by the stately home’s owners to ‘enjoy’ the water and had arranged to meet Graham, the estate manager, on a bridge which crossed the lake close to the road. At the designated spot, about a hundred metres from the road, I spotted a vintage Land Rover. The gravel track which led up to the bridge was blocked by a scalable fence, over which I heaved my bike, before gracelessly chucking myself over.

  As I approached the bridge I shouted a quick hello.

  ‘Graham? Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Er, no, I’m Lynton. Can I help?’ replied the man in front of me. Clad in a navy jumper, cream trousers and tassled loafers, he didn’t look much like an estate manager who spent every hour outdoors.

  I explained that I had agreed to meet Graham here, who I was and what I wanted on his land. Lynton – the general manager, as it turned out – relaxed and laughed as I told him about my Waterlog journey and how Roger had swum here as the gardens were finally being finished to Brown’s designs, two hundred years after he had first laid them out. The home and gardens had fallen into disrepair under its previous owners and the current residents had spent a great deal of money to bring it back to its present condition. The spoil from the lakes, which had been re-excavated in the late 1990s, now formed a high hill on the far side of the lake, where mature trees were glowing orange in the late October light.

  Lynton enthused about the water in the lake.

  ‘It’s very clear. In the summer people chuck themselves in off this bridge. Mind you, no one swims at this time of year.’

  Graham soon arrived and Lynton drove off back towards the stately pile, which peeped just above the trees. I told Graham I’d be swimming in a wetsuit, which he claimed was cheating. I used Roger’s defence that an otter never feels the water on its skin, its fur acting like natural neoprene. He laughed and left me to it.

  Rubbered up, I made my way down below the bridge and sent a cautious foot towards the water. I plopped in and stood waist deep, both my boots buried deep in the mud on the lake’s bed. The swim from the bridge to the eastern end of the lake by the village of Walpole was about half a mile, a manageable distance in a pool or lido, but much harder in autumn-cooled water with weeds poking above the surface.

  I set off slowly, finding the same ‘submerged skyscrapers’ which Roger had struggled through on his swim here. They made settling into any kind of rhythm almost impossible, although as I stared down into the deep I could see them swaying gently, the weak light catching their bright green tendrils as I stroked past them.

  This was the first serious bit of open-water swimming I had done since Henleaze, and it turned out that my directional skills, so good on dry land, were utterly hopeless in the water. I swam front crawl, zigzagging from bank to bank, the far end never appearing any closer whenever I swung my head forward to catch my breath.

  Before he left me, Graham said that when they excavated the lake twenty years ago it had begun to fill up thanks to the springs which dotted its bed. I could well believe it. My head was throbbing with the cold and my eyes bulged every time I stuck my head under.

  Eventually I opted for Roger’s favoured head-out breaststroke, which at least allowed me to swim in something approaching a straight line. Soon I was among the thick reed bed in the shallows, where I stuck down a foot to be greeted by an awful stench rising up from the deep. My gloved hands grabbed at the sharp reeds and I dragged myself out, my conquest of Heveningham Hall’s lake complete.

  Despite being fully kitted out, I felt that happy glow normally reserved for the moments after a ‘skin swim’ and strolled back towards the bridge with a grin on my face, arms swinging, my silicone cap whipped off to allow the cool breeze to dry my hair. Up ahead I fancied I saw Roger saddling up and heading east towards Bulcamp Marshes, his next stop, and where I planned to go in a few weeks after some other Waterlog assignments a bit further afield.

  I stuffed my wet things back into my rucksack and ate the by now pancake-flat sandwiches Keeley had made me for the trip, watching over the lake as it settled back to normal following my intrusion. Farm vehicles buzzed around behind me, but I lay back and zoned out, taking a few moments to meditate on this strange swim before getting back on the bike.

  I felt an enormous sense of calm, the same way I’d felt after ‘going big’ at Hell Gill. This was a proper, lengthy effort and I’d survived it unscathed. Back in Halesworth I drank tea and ate cake sitting outside in the last of the day’s sun, before perusing the shelves of the local bookshop. Waterlog sat proudly in the travel section. I gave the uncracked spine a quick nod.

  ‘Not many left now, Roger,’ I thought. ‘Not many left now.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  November

  River Isle, Somerset – Hambridge, Somerset – Bulcamp Marshes, Suffolk – The Rhinnogs, Wales

  I could hear the River Isle deep down to my left, hidden behind a steep, thick wall of nettles. Up ahead the sound of the A303 grew louder with every step. After accompanying me on my ill-fated Malvern swim, Tom had joined me in Somerset for a dual dip close to where his parents live on the edge of the Levels. And as we tramped through wet grass along a beaten-down footpath, it appeared I had once again sold him a dud.

  ‘Are you sure this is right?’ he asked, the roar of an HGV drowning his voice out as I caught a glance of the brown, murky river in a break in the stingers.

  I consulted the map and then read Roger’s description of his visit to this supposedly remote West Country river:

  ‘In a wild stretch of the River Isle, a mile upstream from Ilford bridge, I stumbled on the perfect swimming hole. It was marked as a fishing spot by a little wooden square pegged in the bank.’

  Neither of us could see a wooden square pegged into the bank or anything approaching a ‘sudden pool ten feet wide’. In fact, the only thing we really noticed, aside from our feet getting damp, was the sound of the arterial road cutting a swathe through the countryside. A road which Roger makes no mention of.

  I scanned the OS map again. We had definitely come upstream from Ilford bridge, and were looking at a stretch of river ahead of a small copse, the shade from which Roger surmised was the cause of the water’s iciness.

  After finding the River Dove not to be quite up to my predecessor’s billing, I found this situation infuriating. The A303 was not a new phenomenon. It was once a key route through ancient Wessex and it’s been a main road since 1933. It was here in the late 1990s; it’s just that Roger didn’t mention it.

  Once again I had to remind myself that I wasn’t dealing with a guidebook. But such an omission left me wondering about his motivations. Did he want to present England as a pastoral idyll whenever a city was miles away? Because that really wasn’t the case. Then again, was it my fault for projecting my own visions of a place onto the map without having been there?

  I tried to shut out the noise as I ducked into the woods and found a suitable place where I could get in easily. Tom was staying on dry land, wrapped up in a navy Berghaus waterproof with a woolly hat to match, and I was getting fully togged up again, the cold of November not conducive to spending a decent amount of time exploring what I had to admit, now I stood above it, was a wild river, even if it was one that flowed next to one of the UK’s busiest roads.

  I hung my clothes on a handy alder, its small branches ideal for my T-shirt, jumper and jeans. I turned from my makeshift wardrobe and made tentative steps into the river. It was waist deep and fast moving, shelving quic
kly and leaving me no choice but to swim against the current. The traffic noise was drowned out by the gurgling sound of the water rushing over a gravel beach about a hundred metres upstream. I swam hard and struck shallow ground, half wading, half crawling my way through the brownness before striding out at this handy rest point.

  This could conceivably have been Roger’s chosen spot. There was a deep pool and a gravel rill, as he described, although the fishing spot was long gone. The beach was carpeted in crisp brown leaves, the trees still clinging to the last of their adornments despite the attentions of a fast-moving wind.

  I stepped back in and allowed myself to be carried downstream to my clothes, the wetsuit keeping me buoyant. I repeated the process, the back and forth reminding me of the natural flume I’d enjoyed on the River Bure at John’s Water way back at the start of the year. It was a similarly grey day, although that delightful spot had at least been untroubled by the rumble of traffic.

  With the Isle still clinging to my beard, Tom and I drove to nearby Hambridge and a date with a drain. If we had been here eight months earlier, we would have been underwater. The Somerset Levels had taken an absolute battering and been flooded out during the same heavy storms which had destroyed the boardwalks at Burnham in Norfolk, leading to complaints about the Environment Agency failing to adequately dredge the county’s rivers.

  It wasn’t quite at storm levels, but the hefty showers which had streaked across Somerset overnight had left the place sodden. Roads were covered in huge puddles and footpaths were doing their best impressions of bogs. As Roger says, ‘water is everywhere’ across this landscape.

  That was certainly true along the disused Westport canal, now used as drainage and irrigation for the surrounding farm fields. The path was drenched and so were we as a sudden downpour found us pulling hoods from Velcro pouches and standing stock still until it passed.

  Roger swam here in a channel which runs parallel to the old canal. The path turned off towards it at right angles, but a low-slung electric fence blocked our way. Undeterred, we busted out our best commando rolls, caking our trousers in thick mud before vaulting a rickety stile and catching the attention of a herd of cattle in the next field.

  Although Roger’s drain was marked in light blue on the map, on reaching it we found it to be little more than a glorified ditch. If I’d tried to swim in it I’d have been putting in some serious training for the world bog-snorkelling championships rather than enjoying an outdoor swim.

  Instead, I headed back to the canal. After my adventures in the Leeds to Liverpool canal at Gargrave, this dip held no fear. I put on the wetsuit and squelched in. The channel was no more than four feet deep and coated on both sides in blue-green algae. I kept my head high and mouth shut as I swam towards a distant bridge.

  I thought back to the Fenland channels I had swum in. Those were clean and clear, but with no outlet or stream to flow into and plenty of rainwater, this was a filthy alternative. The low scudding clouds and spots of rain made the juxtaposition even sharper.

  Despite this being a scruffy swim, it felt good to have got in. I realised as I pulled myself out and changed in the wet of a Somerset afternoon that I could so easily have chosen to do Roger’s most picturesque swims at Porthcurno, Cowside Beck, Jura, and left out these less attractive dips altogether. But as with anything in life, I needed something to throw that beauty into sharp relief, to accept that it was all about balance. If anything, I was now getting quite an affinity for drainage channels and canals. That sense of ticking boxes, of this being a chore, had been confined to the past, even if I was still religiously colouring my spreadsheet green with every swim completed. I was finding pleasure in every swim. Nothing held any fear. The whole trip was becoming ever more ludicrous and enjoyable with each dip.

  The smell of irrigation ditch still deep in my nostrils, I returned to Suffolk once more, picking out another swim from Roger’s last adventure across his home county. I couldn’t help asking myself why I hadn’t done the five swims Roger tackled from Mellis to Walberswick in one go, rather than choosing to do them one at a time. The likelihood is, though, I would have been flat on my back after the first two swims with a further three to go. This apparently little journey at the end of Waterlog was Roger’s wider trip in miniature. A Herculean feat completed in short order.

  I arrived at Blythburgh with Tim on a bright, cold autumn afternoon, Bulcamp Marshes looking resplendent as we turned down the road towards Walberswick and parked up in a sandy lay-by. Guttural squeals from the nearby pig farm punctured the calm. I made a mental note to stay away from bacon in future as we walked through the shade of Scots pines and out onto a path which tracked along the edge of the rushes, the water far off and virtually inaccessible to all but the most intrepid and foolhardy of swimmers.

  Roger had come here immediately after tackling the long sweep of the lake at Heveningham Hall, arriving to catch high tide and swim in just a pair of shorts, claiming ‘there was no need for a wetsuit’ owing to the brackish tide being warmed up by the mud over which it flowed. He’d been here in September, and although I found it hard to believe these claims in the cool of November, I knew deep down that I couldn’t, in all conscience, get in wearing the wetsuit with the sun beating down as it was.

  After hacking through the trees and tramping across flattened reeds, Tim and I emerged on a grassy peninsula which stuck sharply out into the marshes, narrowing to a metre-wide point about a hundred metres from the woods. I splashed my hand into the water and kept any thoughts of the cold to myself. Having been cosseted by neoprene in Somerset and at Heveningham, getting in and staying in was going to be a tall order.

  Despite the low sun and total lack of cloud, it was a nippy afternoon. A light breeze ruffled the water as I began to pull off my clothes. I tugged on boots and gloves for some cursory protection as Tim watched behind me. We’d decided to go in one by one. I stepped off the bank into a foot of dark water, Roger’s warnings about submerged wooden posts dotted across the marshes fresh in my mind. I could see one just a few feet away. I grasped at the water around me and felt nothing except for the cold creeping up my hands and along my arms. The mud beneath my feet was slippery rather than deep, a pleasant change after the gloop of the Fens and Somerset Levels. I let myself slide a few feet before dropping in.

  I got the immediate sense of being an idiot for having thought I could trust Roger when he said the brackish water here was warm. Of course it was, to a man who swam in a moat opposite his farmhouse every day, but not to someone who’d swum in a wetsuit consistently for the previous two months. I tried to keep going, but after a minute the internal screams grew so loud that I stood up, knee deep and turned back to see Tim shaking his head in disappointment.

  ‘Just you wait, pal,’ was my immediate thought as I dropped my shoulders back under and swam the final few feet to dry land.

  I handed Tim my gloves and boots and enjoyed the wince on his face as he donned them and made for the water. His traditional hollering and hooting echoed out over the peaceful marsh. Doubtless even the pigs would have paused when they heard his hearty swearing, before taking up their squealing again.

  To be fair to Tim, he waded out a lot further than me before sinking under, giving a thumbs up as I shouted warnings about hidden posts beneath the still water. But soon he was back next to me, shivering and struggling to get dry.

  This was not the dreamy re-creation I had expected, although the surroundings were beautiful, especially on such a perfect autumn day. But it was handy to remember that despite having tracked Roger all over the country for more than two years, I still hadn’t developed his capacity for long, cold-water swims. My stamina was still lacking, and nothing was going to change that now.

  The end of my Waterlog trip was now well within reach. It had taken me two and a half years to do what Roger had managed in roughly eight months.

  But before I could nose my bike up the track to Walnut Tree Farm from Mellis Common and slip quietly into my pr
edecessor’s hallowed moat for the final swim of this long journey, I needed to go west. Far west, through the English borderlands and to the Rhinnog mountains of North Wales.

  This rather gaping miss from my itinerary had hung over me all summer. Those vertiginous cwms and burbling streams were only ever going to be welcoming to naked skin on the sticky afternoons of June, July and August, and I had merrily spent that time skipping around Dartmoor, criss-crossing the West Country and pottering around Yorkshire on Roger’s trail. Whenever I had remembered the need to bathe in those Welsh waters I had suppressed guilty thoughts of failing to make time for them. Usually these came when I was floating on my back in a cool river or ploughing out lengths on an early-morning swim in Brockwell Lido.

  Now, though, autumn was fast becoming winter, and if I left it any longer I’d either be breaking ice or waiting another six months for a modicum of warmth, my journey edging into a fourth year.

  Getting to the Rhinnogs was going to be a challenge, its lower reaches miles from the nearest town of Harlech. Beyond that, the weather was going to make a long camping trip like Roger’s, an unappealing schlep, one which I didn’t much fancy undertaking.