Waterlog

by Roger Deakin

  We were a couple of hundred yards from the other shore, and just congratulating each other on giving the slip to the coastguards when they suddenly appeared from nowhere, bearing down on our little unofficial combo with a determined air. For a moment things looked tense and we saw a loudhailer being tuned up for maximum embarrassment. Their opening salvo came as something of a relief: ‘Oh my God, not you again!’

  ‘It’s all right, we’re on our way back now,’ we said quickly, and apologised for any inconvenience we might inadvertently have caused. They were remarkably good-natured, giving us a slightly tongue-in-cheek telling-off, the nautical equivalent of letting you off with a caution. A few weekend high spirits were in order.

  By now I was beginning to savour the notion of the hot bath Brian had mentioned might be available back at his place. My fingers and feet were feeling numb, and a triathlon swimmer had told me, one windy morning on a lake near Leicester, that water conducts heat away from the body twenty times faster than air. Thinking of warm towels, bath salts, and a hot tap opened to full throttle, I swam on with renewed vigour through the moorings off Polruan and clambered ashore on the rocks just below the cottage, where I fancied I could already see steam curling from the bathroom window.

  In Polruan, swimming is taken seriously; the harbour has claimed the lives of too many inhabitants over the years, some of them young and high-spirited, returning late at night in a borrowed dinghy, having missed the last ferry after a night out in Fowey, or upset on one of the powerful waves that sometimes drive up the harbour in a storm. People are constantly crossing and recrossing the water in all weathers, so there is a natural reason to be a confident swimmer, and the village school has a long tradition of teaching every child not just to swim, but to swim strongly over a distance.

  Every year at the end of June, the ten- and eleven-year-olds in years five and six swim across the harbour. Many of them swim both ways. The day is chosen by the teachers and the harbourmaster to take advantage of a morning high tide at about ten o’clock. At the appointed hour the children, well-greased with Vaseline, start from the Polruan quayside at the ferry landing-stage. The quay is packed with younger children from the school, parents, villagers and holidaymakers, all cheering like mad. Each child has their own attendant rowing boat for safety, and the harbour is cleared of traffic for the occasion. The older children from the school, who may have done the swim the previous year, are sent on by ferry to the other side to supply moral support. As each child touches the harbour wall on the Fowey side, a great cheer goes up. Some are ferried back, and some turn straight round and swim back to Polruan, where they are greeted by redoubled cheering, wrapped in towels and whisked home shivering for a hot bath before the traditional gathering for hot chocolate and cream buns at the Singing Kettle. The distance at this point is about 500 yards in open water which can get very chilly out in the deep channel in the middle. The young swimmers train at Liskeard pool, and in the harbour with their parents. By the time they come to do the harbour swim, most can swim a mile. It is hard to imagine a more nourishing educational experience; this is quite literally a rite of passage.

  Next morning it was raining. Over breakfast in the Lifeboat Café, I was studying the map of the Land’s End peninsula for signs of holy wells. This was to be a day of amateur anthropology. What better way to spend a rainy day than poking about wells? The more I travelled and swam, the clearer it was becoming that, as I had suspected all along, our relationship to water is a great deal more mystical than most of us admit. How much of the ancient folk-belief in the healing powers of water still existed? There are holy wells all over the country, but since the advent of mains water supplies in the 1920s and ’30s, many of them have been forgotten. However, this end of Cornwall still seemed adequately supplied.

  I went first to Madron, two miles out of Penzance, and found myself standing, dripping, by a holy well in a sallow thicket, tatty with lichens. Tits sang in the rain everywhere, or at least whistled. I had trudged a muddy path through undergrowth bowed down by the rain, then plunged down a dark corridor of gnarled blackthorn to emerge in a place where three streams converge, then apparently disappear into a small boggy pool the colour of vinaigrette. Christian mothers brought infants here to be baptised in the little stone baptistry a few yards along the path. A long-suffering sallow by the pool seemed to carry the world’s woes on its slender limbs. It was festooned with all manner of tokens silently crying in the rain; a yearning choir of pilgrim voices. Finding so much stuff, so many things, hanging at eye-level in a wood, my first thought was of the gamekeeper’s gibbet, another living relic of our former lively dialogue with the deities.

  There were handkerchiefs, bits of coloured ribbon, a pack of cards, someone’s tie, shoelaces, gloves, a skein of a woman’s hair, long and brown, skanks of bladderwrack and kelp, a restaurant bill, strands of wool, an improvised mobile of drinking straws, a star of painted lolly sticks on a silk cord, threaded bottletops, a plait of bracken, hairbands, posies of wild flowers, a size-38 clothing label, even the business card of a Welsh ‘Osteopath, Iridologist, Psychotherapist’ with sixteen letters after his name and a Llangollen telephone number, ‘By appointment’. Pencilled on another piece of card were the words ‘To find the truth and recognise it, and most important to act upon it.’ When Daphne du Maurier came here, she ‘broke off a twig and turned it nine times against the sun’, no doubt for good reasons. I made a secret wish that I would succeed in the most ambitious of the swims I had in mind: the crossing of the Gulf of Corryvreckan. This damp shrine could have been Lourdes, it could have been almost anywhere on the Ganges. The bits of clothing and relics left behind on the tree symbolised the ‘old’ person before their ritual cleansing in the water. The rain fell steadily on all these prayers, these dampened hopes, and they dripped. And three streams kept on disappearing into the well.

  The odd thing about the place was that the streams were running into the well, instead of out of it, like most springs. I glanced at my watch to make sure it wasn’t running backwards. I wondered how all this related, if at all, to the advertisements you see in the back of Old Moore’s Almanack for ‘Lucky Cornish Piskies’. Looking through a copy of this year’s edition, which still looks as if it has been typeset on the original Gutenberg printing press, there are now two contenders for your faith, and money. Joan the Wad claims to be the ‘queen of all the lucky Cornish piskies’. ‘Each charm’, we read, ‘is guaranteed dipped in water from the lucky Saints Well, Polperro.’ Various forms of good fortune are on offer: ‘Lottery win, luck on the horses, bingo, health, job promotion, happiness.’ You can carry Joan the Wad on your person in a variety of forms – charm, brooch, earring or ring – in solid silver or brass. The slick copyline runs: ‘Good fortune will nod/If you carry upon you Joan the Wad!’

  Joan the Wad’s rival spirit is Lowender, ‘The Genuine Lucky Cornish Piskey for your good fortune and happiness’. This hand-crafted charm is ‘washed in the mysterious “Pool of Dozmary” on Bodmin Moor – home of the lucky Cornish piskey’. Lowender is a male piskey, and is available from ‘Merman’ in Bodmin. I thought I might find one or both of them hanging in a tree by one of the wells I visited, or even meet the real thing, but saw only a damp St Christopher.

  I found another of these poor people’s spas at St Uny, where the water springs into the holy well from under Bartinny Hill, the last high point before Land’s End. There were stone steps down to the ferny, echoing well and a piece of cardboard with a written notice: DO NOT DRINK THIS WATER. IT IS NO LONGER SAFE TO DO SO. There was no explanation. Again there was the wise-looking gnarled tree, this time a hawthorn, and the fluttering votive offerings. A pigeon had woven some of them into its nest. I noticed twigs had been broken off the sacred tree as keepsakes, and there were seashells, pearls, necklaces and ancient watchstraps thick with algae. The well was only a few yards down a path from the Iron Age village of Carn Euny, where I was alone with its ghosts. Some of the buried houses are almost complete and I
stood inside one of them looking out past the massive granite lintel across the Land’s End peninsula to the church towers of Sennen and St Just. As I walked up Bartinney Hill the clouds lifted in time for a beautiful sunset over the clearly visible Scilly Isles forty miles to the west. Then a tide of mist began to roll up from Penzance as I waded downhill through thick heather.

  Two miles away at Sancreed I walked up past Glebe Farm in the dusk to a third holy well. The path was overgrown and indistinct, but showed signs of occasional use. The still, clear well, eight steps down into an impressive granite-built grotto, was ‘cleared and kept as befits a holy place’ by a couple who are buried nearby. There are the remains of a small stone chapel, a Celtic cross, and a sacred hawthorn laden with tokens, many of them plaited from the orange day lilies that grow here in abundance. There were more offerings in stone crevices in the walls of the well: coloured sea shells, patterned stones, a horse tooth, the St Christopher, a garlic bulb. All these things were rich with meaning, but a powerful, silent mystery too. No doubt the placebo effect is the pre-eminent healing process at these traditional healing wells, but the mere process of taking control over your own health and doing something to help your condition must in itself be beneficial.

  I had the same sense in these places that I often have inside a country church when I look in the visitors’ book. Apparently lonely and deserted, each well was at the same time crowded with presences. In Cornwall, the religious connection with the sea and Poseidon, as well as the nymphs of the wells, goes back a long way. Graveyards are full of drowned sailors, and at Zennor, west of St Ives, there is a famous carving of a mermaid in the wooden end of a pew. Where English churches imitate the sacred groves of the forest, early Cornish churches, with their ribbed and curved roof timbers, imitate boats or even the skeletons of fish.

  I know another such powerful and mysterious place as these holy wells. Two miles out of Newmarket on the old road towards Bury St Edmunds you come to the Moulton crossroads. In the verge you will see a mass of flowers, some fresh, some plastic, on a little grave. This is the tomb of Joseph, the Unknown Gypsy Boy, reputedly killed in a cart accident at the crossroads during the last century. There is a simple wooden cross bearing his name, and the colours of the graveside flowers on the eve of Derby Day are said to foretell those of the winner. I met a policeman there last year, whose patrol takes him past the grave several times each day or night. He confirmed the story I had heard from stable lads in the town that although there are always fresh flowers on the grave, nobody ever sees anyone putting them there.

  I was left wondering about the nature of the wishes, prayers really, being offered up in these places. I suspected not many of them were simply hoping to win on the lottery. It was pain that I mostly sensed, and grief, but perhaps that was power of the elements, throwing down a month’s rain in twenty-four hours. I had a kind of Stanley Spencer vision of all the troubled souls rising out of the water, beseeching the springgods for redemption. I hope not too many of them telephoned the enterprising Welsh Iridologist and Psychotherapist. These residual beliefs die hard. The new Castle Mall shopping centre in Norwich hardly looks like a great pagan shrine, yet the indoor fountain at its centre has to be cleared of coins every week. In Derbyshire, and all over the country, wells are still dressed with flowers in annual ceremonies that hark back to the Roman Fontinalia, the flower festival in honour of the nymphs that inhabit the springs. And of course, babies are baptised in the symbolic holy wells we call fonts in churches everywhere.

  I drove in the dusk down to Ruan Lanihorne, a village near the River Fal, where I stayed with my friends Olivia and Gary in a rented cottage. Next morning it was raining again, but we were all determined to go up to the north coast near Padstow and investigate the natural rock pool at Treyarnon, in Constantine Bay. We were soon reminded it was holiday-time, driving behind a massed cortège of caravans and Dutch motor-homes, slowing to walking pace every hundred yards in the Cornish lanes to squeeze past each other. I’ve noticed the motor-homes always have bicycles hooked on the back, presumably decorative. Traffic calming was invented by the Cornish in about 1450. Wales or Wiltshire may be sleeping giants, but Cornwall is a sleeping policeman. In Cornwall, what looks like road-kill usually turns out to be somebody’s swimming trunks, or a towel, spreadeagled and mangled by the tyres of a thousand mobile motor-homes.

  At Treyarnon we parked next to a VW camper with a blown exhaust and a ragged blue tarpaulin over a roof-rack piled with surfboards. Painted across the back was the legend, ‘One Hundred Per Cent Funky’. A thumping sledgehammer base threatened to dismantle its rusting frame. Through the steamed-up windows a group of surfing dudes could be dimly perceived in attitudes of extreme relaxation. The harder it rained, the more determined we were to go through with our plan, and our bedraggled little swimming party in bright blue and yellow Gore-tex clambered down the low, stepped, slate cliffs to the big tide-rinsed natural swimming pool.

  A tall, solitary figure was changing into his trunks on a table-top rock below, covering his clothes with a mackintosh. Then he dived and swam with a beautiful black retriever. Gary and I went in too, and the retriever, called Moll, we discovered, swam over to greet us. She looked magnificent in the water and moved with instinctive grace, snout just clear of the surface, tail out as a rudder. The pool was forty feet across and up to six feet deep, full of mussels, sea anemones, limpets, starfish and barnacles. As Moll swam alongside us, it struck me that there is hardly an animal that hasn’t the capacity to swim. Even cats will swim if they have to, and hedgehogs, hares, squirrels, moles, stoats and deer all take to the water from time to time. Recently I watched a cock pheasant swim across my moat when it accidentally ran across the lawn and on to a floating patch of duckweed it mistook for more grass. Giraffes are about the only mammals that can’t swim, because their long necks upset their balance and they capsize.

  At Newmarket, there are several elaborate open-air equine swimming pools, and all the trainers now regard swimming horses as an essential part of their routine. It tones up the animals and improves their fitness and breathing. It might, in fact, be much better for horses to swim their races than to run them. This is exactly what the Thais do with elephants. Elephant swimming races are major national events in Thailand, and the champion animals are heroes every bit as famous as Red Rum. One of the current champions is Hai Pok, a twenty-five-year-old elephant, who was recently cheered on to victory by crowds lining the banks of the Moon River, to the north-east of Bangkok. He beat the other elephants by swimming 260 yards over the river and back again in just over two minutes. He then narrowly outpaced two students in a one-way swim across the river.

  In The Descent of Woman, Elaine Morgan argues that the elephant, like the whale, evolved as an aquatic creature. In water, weight was no hindrance, and size a positive advantage to the conservation of body heat. Elephants still instinctively use their trunks as snorkels when crossing over the beds of deep African rivers, and their baggy, almost hairless skin suggests that their layer of subcutaneous fat was once bulky enough to fill it out more smoothly, like that of their nearest mammal cousin, the sea cow. Elaine Morgan quotes the case of an elephant that went for a two-hundred-mile island-hopping jaunt in the Bay of Bengal. The journey took twelve years to complete, and some of the hops from island to island were across at least a mile of open ocean.

  The writer and naturalist Robert Burton has suggested that the hallmark of a truly aquatic mammal is that it ‘progresses not by paddling but by movements of the tail or sinuous movements of the body’. Whales, seals and sea cows obviously qualify, but Burton points out an interesting line to be drawn between otters and mink, noticeable when the species are compared swimming underwater. Mink swim with a dog-paddle, and are not in the same league for speed and agility as the otters, which swim by flexing the tail and lower half of the body up and down like a whale, rather than side to side like a seal. They also have their main sense organs – eyes, ears and nose – on top of their head
s, like the hippopotamus, a sign of true aquatic adaptation. The only dog I could think of that shows any sign of true physical adaptation to swimming is the rare Portuguese Water Dog, which has webbed back feet. It very nearly became extinct, but is now being bred again. Moll was obviously enjoying her swim very much, and when she eventually came out and shook herself all over us, it was raining so hard we scarcely noticed, and we promptly dived back in.

  The magical thing about tidal pools is that the water is naturally renewed by the moon twice a day and has a chance to warm above sea temperature in sunshine. The summer before, I had swum in another famous rock pool at Dancing Ledge, on the Dorset coast near Langton Matravers. Miles from anywhere at the bottom of the steep rolling downs, you climb through an old quarry and scramble down a bit of cliff on to a spectacular wide shelf of pocked grey-brown rock with a deep oblong pool cut neatly out of it. It was originally dynamited by Eric and Geoffrey Warner, the brothers who jointly founded Spyways, an extinct prep school in Langton Matravers where Derek Jarman began his education.