by Roger Deakin
My friend John and I, wearing masks, snorkels and flippers, dropped straight into deep water off some rocks and swam against the current up into the pool. What we saw there astonished us both. About ten feet down in the clear water, dappled with sunlight, lay dozens of salmon, many of them well over two feet long. They turned and nosed off languidly upstream at our approach, disappearing into the clear green bubbling river, or amongst the shadows of underwater rocks. We followed them upriver, then lost them. Coming back downstream in long, effortless strokes, we were ambushed from the left by the sudden shock of the chilly upland waters of the Sherberton Stream issuing into the pool. The unusually cold water, rich in oxygen, was the special attraction of this place for the salmon. John, who has swum here for over thirty years, had never seen this many fish in the pool. He is a geologist, now in his sixties, and during the 1960s and early ’70s, he had his own flourishing Dartmoor tin mine. He still occasionally pans the river for tin or gold, more for pleasure than profit.
Dartmoor has always been rich in minerals. Ashburton and Buckfastleigh once had the biggest tin-mining industry in the world. They were the centre of a huge international trade that stretched all the way to Amsterdam, Byzantium and the Nile, and there is plenty of evidence of it in the river. John showed me the riffles where the mineral stones, sometimes gold or tin, collect in a natural pan. We waded about, looking for obstructions to the flow, like a quartz seam crossing the bed, and searched for tin and gold below them, panning the gravel with saucered hands. The metals are heavier than the rest of the river sediments and sink naturally into these hollows. We found tin nuggets, especially heavy and black, shaped like discarded chewing gum, but no gold. We scooped up haematite, too, named after the blood these dark nuggets of iron-ore resemble. Later on, in a field near the river at his home, John showed me the panning machine he had built in his workshop, a wonderfully Heath-Robinson affair with a rotating perforated steel drum that runs off a belt-drive from his tractor.
John and his family have developed their own river-swimming technique, and each year, before his daughters grew up, John used to take them for a long-distance swim down the river to Totnes. I tried out the novel style nervously the following morning in a fast stretch of the river that runs through fields near their house. John taught me how to swim the rapids, even sliding over the most unlikely shallows, by keeping my head down in the water and breathing through the snorkel. This automatically tilts the rest of your body higher in the water. You wear a wetsuit for protection from bruises, as well as cold, and you look ahead through your mask for fast-approaching rocks, keeping at least one arm outstretched to fend off as necessary. You propel yourself mostly with the flippers.
Seeing a boulder approaching you at high speed, with the irresistible force of the river behind you, is terrifying at first. But by surrendering your body to the current, it is surprising how easily and naturally you are swept down, like the translucent leaves you see dancing underwater in the sunlight. The current urges you along the best course, but you must keep steerage way as you would in a canoe, by swimming faster than the river. You realise why the otter’s tail is called its rudder. Your mask seems to magnify things by framing them; and the sounds of the river, and your own breathing, are amplified underwater. You see churned gravel glittering like tinsel, old bricks with their maker’s name nearly smoothed out, bright green pebbles, dark rusty haematite, a drowned plastic bag pinioned to a tangle of sticks, water shrimps, bands of bright shining quartz, passing fragments of flimsy waterweed, little bullheads dodging under stones, and now and again the shadow of a trout. I swept on through a series of long, narrow, natural pools, steep-sided granite tanks that barrelled the river into deafening violence, hurling me down their gullets over dark submerged forms glimpsed skidding away, on past the wrecks of jammed tree-roots into the sudden calm of a deep pool.
Making my way back along the bank in the wetsuit through a field of cattle, carrying my flippers, mask and snorkel, I met the farmer, who said he had fished the Dart for thirty years. He wore tweed, I wore rubber and stood dripping, but he seemed not to notice, or was polite enough not to say anything, and we chatted away by the bank about otters and salmon for some considerable time. Before the war, he said, a favourite evening pastime of the Buckfastleigh citizens was to gather beside their weir and watch the otters playing. He said it was a good year for salmon and otters; there were more of both than he had ever known. He saw otter pads and prints on the sand here night after night and, only a few days before, he had actually seen an otter bitch and a cub; a rare occurrence. The Dart used to be polluted by dieldrin from the sheep-dip chemicals washed out of the wool at a carpet factory in Ashburton. The drastic decline in otters which began in the 1950s and led to their virtual extinction over most of England and Wales is known to have been caused by this very chemical. To make matters worse, the detergent used to wash the wool began over-enriching the river with phosphate and froth, but at last the river seems to be recovering, and the otters with it.
With so much twenty-four-carat water everywhere, there’s a tradition of wild swimming in all the towns and villages that fringe the moor. At Throwleigh and South Zeal, they have always bathed and learnt to swim in a remote natural pool in the valley of the Blackaton Brook, which runs between steep banks of gorse and heather from the Raybarrow Pool at the foot of Cawsand Hill. The tiny waterhole was already naturally dammed by boulders, but enterprising swimmers gradually enlarged it by building the rocks higher. I heard about it from Mrs Amy Harvey, then nearly ninety, who had lived on Dartmoor all her life, and swam in this bathing hole throughout her childhood during the 1920s. She had written me a moving letter full of vivid recollections of the place, which is still popular with the village children now.
At Peter Tavy they have their own village swimming hole in the Colley Brook: a secluded mill-pool to which the bathers have added stone steps and a life-belt. I also visited the charming village swimming pool at Chagford, fed by the River Teign, with an outdoor café. It is fringed with trees down one side and – the last thing you expect to see on the edge of Dartmoor – a vigorous hedge of bamboo. The pool is filled from the river by a fast-flowing mill-stream that flows alongside it. These days, the Health and Safety people make them put chlorine in the water, but Pam, who lives in the cottage opposite and is the keyholder, doesn’t like to put too much in because it spoils the fresh taste and smell of the clear river water off the moor. Pam’s eighty-seven-year-old father-in-law, who helped to dig and build the original pool in 1947, comes down every day in the season and makes tea.
Okehampton used to have a river-fed pool a hundred feet long which was owned by a syndicate of swimmers, but has since been filled in. People who grew up swimming here in the ‘ice cold water’ remember the strict pre-war caretaker, Mr Wallers. He would open the baths at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning so people could swim before going on to shiver in church or Sunday school. He then closed up for the rest of the day. This is what Dartmoor Puritanism is all about.
Rivers rise everywhere on the moor. In the peat beneath Great Kneeset, five rivers have their beginnings: the Taw, Tavy, Teign, Torridge and Dart. But of all the Dartmoor rivers, the Erme is the most secretive. It rises in the long shadow of Hartor Tor and flows south through Ivybridge into a farm landscape around Holbeton so hilly that everyone gets an aerial view of their neighbour. Fields, barns and hedgerows are tilted at all angles like the counterpane of an unmade bed.
I had been curious about the Erme ever since first hearing Mike Westbrook’s The Cortège, a large-scale work for jazz instruments and voices in which one movement, ‘Erme Estuary’, is a response to the place where he and Kate Westbrook live. It ends with a long, other-worldly solo on the electric guitar. But the estuary was all too real, and none too warm, as I swam across it on the rising tide two days later, seeing it for the first time on a visit to my musical friends. I had crossed to the centre of the wide bay from Coastguard’s Beach. A little group of surfers clustered
waist deep, waiting for the big grey rollers that surged out of the open sea, breaking on a sandbar. I threw myself in with them and swam inland. I felt the incoming tide lock on to my legs and thrust me in towards the distant woods along the shore. Each time a frond of sea-lettuce lightly brushed me, or glued itself around my arms, I thought it was a jellyfish, and flinched. But I soon grew used to it; seaweed was all around me, sliding down each new wave to drape itself about me. I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved, jostled from behind by the swell. Then, as the tide rose higher, the sandy estuary beach came into focus. The woods reached right over the water, and began accelerating past me. I found I was moving at exhilarating speed, in big striding strokes, like a fell runner on the downhill lap. It was like dream swimming, going so effortlessly fast, and feeling locked in by the current, with no obvious means of escape. I was borne along faster and faster as the rising tide approached the funnel of the river’s mouth until it shot me into a muddy, steep-sided mooring channel by some old stone limekilns on the beach. I had to strike out with all my strength to escape the flood and reach the eddy in the shallows. I swam back up to the limekilns and crawled out on to the beach like a turtle, but couldn’t resist dropping back into the muscular current for a second ride down the channel.
Earlier, we had all picnicked on Mothecombe Beach together, to the west of the estuary, and Mike and I had swum in the bay. It was a Private Day at the beach, which meant that only bona fide local villagers from Holbeton were allowed access, and then only to one side, leaving the other free for the private enjoyment of the Mildmay-White family, who own it. The whole of the lovely Erme estuary might have been re-christened the Baring Straits, since all the surrounding land was originally purchased in the 1870s by the two cousins who controlled Barings Bank: Edward Baring and Alfred Mildmay-White. Mothecombe is a private beach, and the estate charges the public for access via a man in a small wooden ticket-office at the top of the cliff path. The wild beauty of the coastal estate was evidence of sensitive management.
Mike had come round by the cliff path to our rendezvous at the limekilns, and we stood gazing across the estuary. A dense unbroken canopy of English rainforest flowed down to the water everywhere. It was an almost tropical scene, with six or seven egrets decoratively arranged in an oak, or flying with their long legs outstretched. I had seen them the previous summer on the Arne peninsula in Dorset, where they have even begun to nest. They are now a regular feature of the south coast of England, no longer confined to Spain, Portugal and North Africa. As the tide advanced, we stood listening to the sucking of millions of tiny worms in their mudholes. On the far shore there stood a single boathouse, reflected in the mud, half-hidden in the woods.
As I changed on the beach, we witnessed a scene like a cameo from fifty years ago. A mother, grandmother and a little boy caught crabs in a net baited with chicken from under a rock the grandmother had known as a secret crabbing place from her own childhood. What I found so inspiring about this vignette was the element of continuity that it shared with Mrs Harvey’s story of the Blackaton Brook bathing hole. Two generations later, the crabs were still under their rock, and the village children were still swimming in the wild pool.
On the way home, we passed a reed-bed alive with the free improvisation of a sedge warbler ensemble, performing solos like earthy, uninhibited saxophones. Westbrook clearly felt at home with them, quoting the birdbook description of their ‘irresponsible song’ with approval. We stood on a wooden bridge watching a procession of seaweed carried up by the tide. It created the curious illusion that we and the bridge were moving like a boat through the water, back out to sea.
12
THE RED RIVER
Cornwall, 17 July
IT FELT UNTHINKABLE to be this close to Cornwall, with summer well under way, and not to return. After my taste of Cornish swimming in the Scillies and at Marazion in the spring, I was in the same position as the dreamer in Fauré’s song ‘Après le Rêve’ (‘After the Dream’), who awakes, and only desires to sink back into sleep in the hope of re-entering a delicious dream and continuing its bliss. My Scilly swims, and my memories of past summer bathing in Cornwall, were all so delightful that all I wanted to do was subside into the idyll of its sparkling seas again. And so I had crossed the Tamar Bridge and returned, heading this time for the luminous sandy bay, backed by tall dunes, that stretches along the north coast from St Ives to the lighthouse at Godrevy Point.
The mouth of the Red River at Godrevy is outlandish in a dozen ways. In its unassuming way, it embodies Cornish history. It is one of the few special places around our coast where you can swim in fresh water and look straight out to sea, and an ocean horizon. It was low tide, and I swam in the wide pool created by the rocks that form a dam before the river spills over them onto the beach. I floated twenty feet or so above sea level, with a panoramic view of Hayle Bay all the way to St Ives. I like to imagine Godrevy derives its name from some medieval hybrid of the French rêve and means ‘God’s Dream’, but I know it’s a hopeless conceit. It does suit the wild beauty of the place, though, on a glinting, sunny day.
The river’s metallic gleam went deeper than metaphor. Where the Red River is concerned, ‘The Cornish Heritage’ means cadmium, copper, zinc, lead, as well as arsenic; all the toxic heavy-metal by-products of the deserted tin mines upstream. If you haven’t ever taken a dip in dilute arsenic, or half a dozen other poisons, this is the place for you. Yet in this dazzling sunshine, the river could hardly have looked purer or more innocent of pollution. It burst out of its quiet, lazy post-industrial valley in the kind of blinding white-water rapids normally reserved for mountains. You felt there should be salmon leaping restlessly in the spume. It overflowed its rocky dam and leapt out to sea over the beach in a sweeping S, past rock pools freshly fed by the tide. On its journey across the wide strand, the Red River reinvents itself at every low tide, pencilling a delta like the winter twigs of a big tree in the fine slatey sand, streaking it into subtle shades of grey and yellow. It could have been the Nile, or the Rhône filtering through the Camargue to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
I climbed out of the pool and followed the river down the beach to the sea’s edge, with the curious half-ticklish sensation of damp, corrugated sand in the arches of my feet. The sun was audibly frying the bright green Chinese-restaurant seaweed that fringed the rock pools, frosting them with salt, the grey stone acned with little moon craters gouged out by centuries of limpets. I swam out to sea, deafened by the waves as they broke over me, on into the rolling, buoyant water beyond for a short excursion, then back through the surf to the river.
In the days when tin mining was in full swing, the river really did run red, stained by the iron in the washings and tailings. The mines were drained by a system of ‘adits’, more or less horizontal tunnels which emptied into the river. Water from deeper down the mine, full of dissolved metals, was pumped up to their level, then flowed on to poison everything downstream. But now the river looks clear, and hurries down a bed that was artificially straightened by the miners with bundles of coppiced sticks to accelerate its flow and separate the surface deposits of the metal by ‘tin streaming’, the Cornish equivalent of gold panning. It is about ten feet wide and two or three feet deep. But then you notice something odd about it: there’s no waterweed, nothing green at all. Even today, this is still one of the most polluted rivers in Britain, even though, since the closing of the mines, it is slowly recovering.
For years nothing lived in the valley but miners, from Camborne to Godrevy, but recently, to everyone’s delight, a few brown trout have been discovered in the Red River in its higher reaches, as well as eels, sticklebacks and, in the peat pools of the valley, dragonflies. None of the snails, water shrimps, or other little creatures that usually live in rivers have appeared. That is because they normally live on the bottom in the silt or gravel, and it is still intensely contaminated. Looking at it, you would never guess the place is a kind of early Sellafield. All along the floor
of the valley the tailings from the mines have been piled up in a moonscape which was completely bare of any vegetation all through the last century, but is now recovering.
The final collapse of the tin-mining industry recently led to equally dramatic red-river pollution on the south coast near Falmouth. In January 1992, Restronguet Creek, where the Carnon River flows into the lovely Carrick Roads, suddenly began to turn dark red. In the space of two months, over 10 million gallons of intensely contaminated water poured down into the sea via the hapless little creek.
You might imagine that the story would have led to some reddening of official faces too, but you would be wrong. It is a classic parable of how shaky the laws on pollution remain in Britain. When the price of tin and pyrites on the world market tumbled in the late 1980s, the South Crofty Mine Company decided to close down their big mine at Wheal Jane, north of Falmouth. Once its pumps were switched off late in 1990, groundwater in the mine began to rise into the shafts and workings, dissolving and flushing out the poisonous metals that eventually burst forth at the beginning of 1992. Besides copper, zinc, cadmium and arsenic, they included a good deal of iron, which is what turned Restronguet Creek rust-red as the toxic flood bled iron hydroxide into the sea down the Carnon River. Apart from the odd ragworm, there is no animal life to catch the eye of the naturalist here; no crabs, no lobsters, no cockles, and certainly no oysters.
As Wheal Jane headed for closure, everyone knew what could go wrong, but they couldn’t agree what to do about it. The way the law stands, the owners of a mine are responsible for it as long as it’s occupied, but the minute they abandon it they are absolved of all consequences. After a good deal of dithering, the Department of the Environment agreed to help fund a £14 million filtration scheme by the Environment Agency to try and improve matters. In other words, a private commercial company was allowed to leave a legacy of serious, lasting pollution for the rest of society to deal with at public expense. The polluter, meanwhile, walked off scot-free. The original principle proposed by Friends of the Earth, that the polluter should pay, seems to have sunk without trace, but the government has now introduced a law requiring written notice from the owner six months before a mine is planned to close. Since the mining industry in this country has all but closed down already, this might be construed as bravely closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.