Waterlog

by Roger Deakin

  I woke to the beginnings of a fine day and bathed in the lake off my peninsula, swimming through lingering miasmal mists rising off the surface. Thoreau describes Walden Pond at such a moment: ‘As the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.’ It is a marvellously unconscious evocation of the kind of scene Courbet loved to paint, of women undressing to bathe.

  Searching the map, I had seen some promising upland streams, a waterfall and a tarn, so I hiked off uphill through the bracken. There is so much of it in the Rhinogs that the sheep all carry it around on their coats like camouflaged soldiers. I watched a ewe standing between two big rocks the shape of goats’ cheeses. They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones. He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape. By grazing the moors and mountains they keep the contours – the light and shade – clear, sharp and well-defined, like balding picture-restorers constantly at work on every detail. The black oblongs of their pupils set deep in eyes the colour and texture of frog skin are like the enormous slate coffin-baths you see in the farmyards here; seven foot slabs of slate hollowed into baths. Quite why the farmers made such things is a puzzle, when there are natural baths and pools in every stream inviting you to ‘wash away the night’, William Morris’s phrase for the morning ablutions of his questing knights in The Water of the Wondrous Isles.

  I climbed up a cribin, or moel, a rounded rocky outcrop commanding a view of the valley, and settled down in a warm sheep hollow. Every tree up here has a hollow the size and shape of a sheep, the roots exposed and polished by generations of them hunkering down. I sat perched on the first of a series of tumps rising in succession up a ridge, their rocks rounded by cushions of turf. I was level with the tops of hawthorns, rowans and ashes that grew on the slopes and grassy hillocks. There was birdsong everywhere; the rising notes of pipits, like the turning of a rusty wheel, the mew of the buzzard as it spun into view. Redstarts flew from tree to tree, taking the line a slack rope would take slung between them. Economy in flight is what makes it graceful. Look at the swift, which hardly seems to move its wings at all, or the planing buzzard, ascending a thermal. The redstart flaps its wings just enough to get from A to B and always lands on the upward beat, under full control. Birds always land rising, coming up to a branch or ledge, never down.

  I removed my boots and stretched out to enjoy the sun. The hollow-sounding ground was still damp and my glasses, left lying on it, soon steamed up. With my face close to the turf I observed a faint mist rising from clumps of tiny flowers peopled with tiny insects: yellow tormentil, stonecrop, sage, thyme, sorrel, bell heather, foxglove, innumerable grasses, mosses, twayblade and heath bedstraw (now rumpled bedstraw) where I had been lying.

  Wandering further on amongst these tumuli, I came upon the entrance of a cave, with a dozen steam genies twisting out of it where hot sun played on its wet, peaty floor, well manured by the sheep that must squeeze in and shelter there. I got my head and shoulders in, and waited for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dark, then used the reflected sunshine in my watch, a tiny sun dancing about the walls, to see how far it stretched into the hill. The cave had filled up with centuries of sheep-shit and ran for at least fifteen or twenty feet in a perfect five-foot arch of slate, with the rotten remains of wood protruding from the walls. I could have entered on all fours, but there was something unappealing about the idea of crawling in wet sheep-shit. Was it a slate mine, a lead mine, or a tomb? There was a stone circle not half a mile away.

  I found two more cave entrances close by, both nearly blocked with loose earth, guarded by brambles, thistles and foxgloves. This was Rogue Male country, practically unmapped, and unfrequented. I made a mental note that I could go to ground here, as the nameless protagonist of the thriller goes to ground in Dorset, in the event of some future political or personal crisis, living on berries and mutton, and communing with the weasels. Here, too, was a roofless, circular, stone-walled chamber and three more tunnels running into the hill from higher up. They were much easier of access, five feet wide and four feet high, well lined with slates which now dripped on me as I crept in and explored. Practically brushing my cheek, a wagtail flew off a nest of five pale speckled eggs hidden in a sage plant and a hart’s-tongue fern near the entrance. I crept in some twenty feet until the shaft ran off to my right in utter darkness and I lost my nerve and retreated gingerly, suddenly fearful of the rock-fall that clearly hadn’t ever happened in several hundred years.

  There was no sign of these tunnels on the map, and I was content for them to remain a mystery. Indeed, it was infinitely preferable to me that they should not be on the map, and never should be. This was one of those magical places the people of northern Greece call Agrafa, ‘the unwritten places’. They are the remote and secret places in the Pindos mountains, bordering Albania and Macedonia, that were deliberately left off the map by the inhabitants so as to avoid the imposition of taxes by the occupying Turks. Borrow would certainly have gone and knocked on the nearest farmer’s door and demanded to know the full history of the earthworks. No doubt his curiosity was laudable, but it also often seems impertinent and condescending. He would ask total strangers what they thought of their landlord, whether their parents were still living, or about their religion. It says much for the civility of the Welsh country people that they always seemed to give him straight answers.

  I had been following a tributary river of the lake uphill and now came to a meeting of the water. I took the left fork and followed a delightful little rushing brook about four feet wide that ran steeply over a series of waterfalls between two and ten feet high. It ran alongside a south-facing stone wall that acted as a sounding board for its song, a continuous chord composed of the deep notes made by the spouting of water into stone hollows and the descants of the shallower rapids. Thus serenaded, I cooled off in a pool below a waterfall, so shaped that I could lie facing the morning sun with the cascade on my shoulders. By angling myself further back, I could get the full, icy force of the water over the back of my head, a sensation more often associated with warm water and the hairdresser’s chair, and utterly exhilarating. Behind the curtain of water I saw the secret green lushness of liverwort. The view over the whole bowl of mountains was magnificent, and I hadn’t seen a soul all morning. Wedged in the rocks were some old split hazel fencing stakes or wattles, eroded almost to a wafer by the stream. Just the knots and sinews of the wood remained. I retrieved a half-melted chocolate bar I had left to solidify under the water and soon dried off in the warm sun.

  My next swim was about a thousand feet up, below the mountain succinctly known as Clip, in the comparatively balmy waters of Llyn Eiddew-mawr overlooking the vast estuary sands of Porthmadog. The tarn must be half a mile long, and it was perfectly clear, with a brown peaty bottom shading into invisible depths. The sun had been shining on the water all day, and I swam across and back very comfortably, having warmed up on the ascent. By now it was tea-time, and I lay on the bank eating nuts, dates and biscuits, wondering if the tarn had ever contained the ‘afanc’. This is a creature that reputedly once lived in the Welsh lakes. It was considered by Borrow to have been the crocodile, and by others to have been the beaver. Myth has it that Hu the Mighty, the inventor of husbandry and a leader of the ancient Cymru, drew out the afanc from the water with his team of four oxen and banished it. Certainly there would once have been beavers in Welsh lakes, and, at one time, crocodiles. Musing by just such a lake as this on his walk, Borrow felt sure that if its depths were searched, ‘relics of the crocodile and the beaver might be found’. ‘Happy were I,’ he says, ‘if for a brief space I could become a Cingalese, that I might swim out far into that pool, dive down into its deepest
part and endeavour to discover any strange things which beneath its surface may lie.’ I had swum out far, but I had not dived down. The afanc was possibly some kind of plesiosaur, a fifteen-foot creature resembling a crocodile, one of whose fossil skeletons was discovered in the summer of 1844 at Kettleness on the Yorkshire coast. It is now built into the wall of the Whitby Museum.

  I hiked downhill along one of the enormous stone walls, some up to eight feet high, that thread across this rugged country. Their only logic seems to be aesthetic. Only the longer ones appear to do much, like mark a boundary, or keep sheep in or out. These walls are reputed to have been built by French prisoners of war from Waterloo, and enclose wide ‘fields’ on the hillsides and tops, perhaps sixty or a hundred acres at a time. The work must have been immense. Maintaining them is a life’s work too. I couldn’t help thinking of the hernia unit at the Harlech General Hospital. It must be a busy place on market day.

  I could hear the sound of laughing water across nearly a mile of hillside, and could soon see it too, tumbling, white and sparkling, over a ramp of black rock thirty feet high, like a leaking castle. Feeling like a striptease artist by now, I hung my clothes over a bilberry and climbed up the falls to the top. Water was gushing and surging up through a moraine of massive boulders, then sliding down a forty-five degree slab of rock, black where it was wet, and purple where it was dry. Lying back against the sloping rock I let the water flood over me, then swam against the current in a substantial pool lower down. Water rushed about everywhere here, and amongst the remains of a settlement I found a spring inside a kind of stone temple covered in ferns. I went down to drink from it, and felt its atmosphere and power. The sense of a Delphic presence was so palpable, the Oracle might just have gone for lunch. The cottages had been tiny; no more than eight feet square. The walls of one were still standing, and its hearth, too. On the old track that led away downhill was the most luxuriant bed of wild thyme I have ever seen. None of the ruins were marked on the map at all, which only made discovering them the more thrilling.

  I climbed into the river where it ran on through a miniature ravine full of the bright, rich pinks of heather, bracken, stonecrop, thyme, gorse and the little yellow tormentil. I followed it down through a ladder of waterfalls and pools, some of them deep enough to swim, interspersed with straight, high-speed runs between great slabs of rock. Here and there the stream would bend sharply to the left or right and the water would climb up the rock wall and spout into thin air like an eel standing on its tail. Then it merged with another stream, running down an almost parallel ravine, and I slid, scrambled, waded, swam, plunged and surfed through it all until I was delivered into a deep, circling pool. A little further on, a solitary sycamore stood sentinel over a sheep-nibbled lawn of buttercups and daisies by a waterfall and another pool, long and deep, between black slabs of rock, where I swam against the stream and hovered in the clear black water. Here I made my camp, hanging my towel to dry in the sycamore branches. I made delicious tea with the river water, devoured bread, goats’ cheese and pennywort leaves, and fell into a deep sleep, lulled by the song of the waterfall, of Minnehaha, Laughing Water, the bride of Hiawatha, watched over by the dark shapes of menhirs on the hilltops.

  I awoke to the croaking of a raven overhead somewhere, dreaming a nonsense of what E. M. Forster in Howards End called ‘Borrow, Thoreau and sorrow’, and squirmed half out of the sleeping bag like a caddis larva, watched by a curious, timid ewe and her lamb. There was a ruined roofless building by the bank of the waterfall pool and a rounded containing wall with a gate. I realised that this must have been a sheep wash. It would explain the presence of the solitary sycamore providing shade over the lawn where I was encamped, and a gnarled holly overhanging the river as a sign for the shepherds. It might also be the reason why this was the only place I had found daisies and buttercups in the Rhinogs. They belong in the lowland grazing meadows and would have been carried up here as seeds or roots by sheep.

  I leapt straight into the pool like a self-dipping sheep. It was six feet deep, and I swam up to the waterfall and hung there again in the bracing stream like a seagull following a boat. Then I waded a little way downstream through the disordered, foaming boulders to the next pool, in a gorge of gleaming, mossy rock crossed by a bridge of six-foot stone slabs slung across the water like the lintels of Stonehenge. It was the wildest natural jacuzzi. Currents jostled me from all directions and I climbed out stunned and galvanised. I made tea on the gas stove and breakfasted on more goats’ cheese and bread. Although not quite up to the standards of George Borrow, who sometimes breakfasted on eggs, mutton chops, boiled and pickled salmon, fried trout and potted shrimps, it was made special by the place, with its buttercup lawn shaped into an inverted comma and enclosed by a stone wall that retains the ancient, sloping track running past at a higher level, and tapers from five feet to nothing in a way that a modern architect would completely approve. There were surely never any drawings for this, yet the proportions and sense of harmony with the natural architecture of the water, rocks and trees were very fine. Whoever built it had, as Alexander Pope put it, ‘consulted the genius of the place’. It was highly distinctive, like a Greek stage, shaped by years of use and now all the more beautiful for being a ruin and so remote. I had not seen a human soul for thirty-six hours, just sheep and the powerful presence of the Rhinogs, whose peaks that morning were lost in clouds. I could have stayed there for days, walking to the next tarn on the map with an unpronounceable name, and unpronounceably freezing water.

  9

  THE LOST POOLS OF THE MALVERNS

  Malvern Hills, 17 June

  NEXT MORNING I drove out of Wales through the Black Mountains to the Malvern Hills in search of springs and open-air pools. I had read of the Malvern Festival, where, during the 1930s, the impresario and producer Barry Jackson used to première George Bernard Shaw’s plays, ferrying in as many as sixty London drama critics at a time, by the trainload, and even planeload. Shaw would come for two or three weeks in August to walk in the hills, and swim daily in the spring-fed pools. Bathing was one of GBS’s passions, and as a change from the cold Malvern water, he would often take the cast for drives round the hills or over to Droitwich Spa, where he would duck into the warm brine baths before driving back for the evening show at Malvern, with the salt still in his beard. The actors must have dreaded the drive home; Shaw was an appalling driver, with a dyslexic habit of treading on the accelerator of his Rolls-Royce when he meant to brake.

  Nowhere else in Britain has anything like the profusion of natural springs Malvern enjoys, and in the nineteenth century the town was deliberately developed as a spa. It rises up the east side of the steep range of hills in terraces of fine Victorian villas, each set in its own spacious garden. To me, prospecting the maps for likely dips, it had all the signs of a swimmer’s paradise. Malvern’s springwater was famous from at least as early as 1620. Even then it was being bottled, long before Jacob Schweppes began selling the Holy Well water in 1850. There are over sixty springs and wells around the steep green hills, but a great many of them turned out to have become derelict or disused since the 1940s or earlier. Inspired by tales of gondoliering and night-bathing in the pools, I tramped along the ridge path that leads to the summit of the Worcester Beacon, where you used to be able to have tea at the Beacon Café before it was burnt down by vandals a few years ago. During the festival, there had been donkey rides up these tracks. I had hoped to look down from above and spot the swimming pools glinting from below, but they were nowhere to be seen. Although one, at the Dingle, still survives as a sunken garden, none is any longer in use. High and dry on the Malvern Hills, I consoled myself with thoughts of Shaw in his tweed knickerbockers and his friend Elgar striding up here, and of the poet Langland, who wrote Piers Plowman as he gazed out over Worcestershire in around 1377. In the opening lines of the poem, Langland had impressed in my imagination a powerful notion that his Malvern foothills must be full of promising swimming holes:

&n
bsp; On a May morning on a Malvern hillside . . .

  As I lay and leaned and looked on the water

  I slumbered and slept, so sweetly it murmured.

  All that I found in Malvern was an indoor ‘leisure pool’. Forced to abandon all hope of bathing in the lost pools, I went instead in search of the miscellaneous spouts, pumps, fountains, wells and springs that abound here. The first surviving spring I found flowed into a stone trough from an iron pipe beside the road up on the beacon. This was the Chance’s Pitch Spout, and I joined a queue of three or four other men with assorted plastic flagons waiting to fill them. As we talked, I was reminded what sociable places wells, pumps and springs have always been. Turning on the tap at home is a far less rewarding social experience. Sipped from cupped hands, the water tasted very pure, with none of the dreadful taste of iron or sulphur I associate with spas, and it was cold; it tumbles out of the hill at a steady forty-seven degrees all over Malvern.

  My next spring was in a little fenced hollow in a field at the bottom of a slippery downhill scramble through a wood on the western slopes near the British Camp Hotel. Here I found myself face to face with a pair of foxes, who seemed quite as surprised as me. The dog fox scampered off, but the vixen and I just stood looking at each other for fully two minutes. I wasn’t going to move before she did, even if we were there all morning. Then she turned and dragged herself away, towing her paralysed hindquarters after her. I stood for a long time by the living spring, too shocked to move, looking at the rank, parted grass where the dying fox had disappeared, wondering how long she could survive.