MAY 2021.
I am sulking. Arms folded, and despite the cloudless sky, a face like thunder.
‘I don’t know why you’re angry with me,’ Jeff says, the map hanging uselessly in his hand. ‘It isn’t my fault.’
We’re looking over a five-bar gate into a valley just south of the village of Rotherfield in south-east England. ‘PRIVATE LAND’ shouts a sign on the gate. ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.’ Somewhere below us, the map indicates, the Rother rises.
‘I’m not angry at you,’ I snap.
But I am, a bit. Not just because he’s taken charge of the map, as I knew he would if I invited him along, but because he’s a law-abiding citizen. I want someone to egg me on to climb over the gate or duck through the fence, because I lack the brazenness to do it alone. This, of course, is the real reason I’m annoyed.
“…I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river,” writes Alice Oswald’s walker in Dart. That’s how I envisioned my river journey beginning. I would stride across the undulant hills and wooded ghylls of the High Weald – a lone enraptured female – to find the Rother bubbling out of the primordial clay. From there, I would follow the valley it has carved over millennia to the sea, 35 miles east. In going with the flow of the river, perhaps I would rediscover my own.
But we can’t get to the source, so the whole plan is doomed. When Jeff suggests we start the journey further along, I refuse, and we drive instead to a staggeringly posh country pub and drink white wine in the brittle sunshine.
I wasn’t myself then. I was emerging from a deep and dark depression that had begun a year earlier and although the darkness was lifting, I was still fragile. My light, like that of a flickering candle, could go out with the slightest blow. But the idea of walking the Rother persisted.
There’s something comforting in the linearity of rivers. As Olivia Laing puts it: “A river has a certainty with which it travels that makes it very soothing, particularly for those who’ve lost faith with where they’re headed.”
Perhaps that is what drew me to the river in the first place. It was the spring of 2020 and, buckling under the weight of the pandemic and the climate crisis, I felt as if the world was falling apart. And yet, each day, the sun rose, the birds sang, and the trees burst into bud. Everything carried on as usual. I tried to do the same until one day, I couldn’t.
MAY 2020.
I am running by the Rother, taking my ‘daily exercise’. Running has always kept me sane and given me focus, but on this day, with no warning, I run out of purpose. It is like hitting the wall in a marathon.
I slow to a walk, my legs shaky, my breathing ragged. There’s a gap in the rushes where the riverbank drops down to a grassy apron. It’s meant for anglers, but there’s no one there so I sit, drawing my knees up to my chest and staring out at the water. The thick-stemmed yellow water lilies boast sturdiness, anchored by roots spiralling down into the darkness of the water. I feel insubstantial, as if I could just drift away like pollen. A cuckoo calls from the stand of trees on the far bank. Warblers flit and dart among the whispering reeds and insects shimmer in a shaft of light penetrating the shade of a weeping willow. The sweat dries on my back. My breathing slows. Eventually I feel calm and walk home.
I return to the river almost every day after that, getting to know my ‘patch’ as thoroughly as my own back garden. It becomes my sanctuary and solace. Sometimes I run or walk alongside it, sometimes I kayak or swim. Other times I just sit and watch or spill tears into its poor-to-moderate-quality-rated water.
There’s a term: topophilia. It describes the emotional, affective bond a person can feel for a place, a bond that grows with familiarity. It might be farfetched to suggest that the feeling is mutual, but the more I immerse myself in the life of the river, the more it seems to reveal itself to me. Moorhen chicks scuttling after mum in the shallows like clockwork toys. Dragonflies mating mid-air. Two jackdaws sitting side by side, like a pair of polished shoes.
“Every time you notice something,” Kathleen Dean Moore writes, “every time something strikes you as important enough to store away in your mind, you create another piece of who you are.”
The first time I see the iridescent blue streak of a kingfisher, I can scarcely believe my luck. But then I see another, and another, until sightings become commonplace. I’ve lived a mile from the Rother for almost a decade, but all this time, it seems, I’ve been looking but not seeing, listening but not hearing.
With the help of apps and guidebooks, I start to learn how to read my environment, teasing apart the tangled mass of bankside vegetation into its constituent parts. Vetch, purple loosestrife, meadowsweet, wild carrot, yarrow. I get to know the trees along the banks – tall poplars whispering in the back row, alder and willow with their feet in the water, hawthorn shedding blossom like confetti. I learn to distinguish between the song of a reed and a Cetti’s warbler by the latter’s operatic opening phrase. It always makes me want to conduct.
There’s plenty I don’t see. A rural waterway like this should be home to water voles, water shrews and otters. It used to be. The collected notes and drawings of a local naturalist, Ted Catt, were recently published. The book includes Catt’s observations over six decades, spanning the late 19th century to post-World War Two, and features not just otters and water voles, but red squirrels, lesser woodpeckers, corncrakes and wrynecks. The book is a wonderful record of local natural history, but it’s also a reminder of what we’ve lost. What we’re still losing.
At least the ecological crisis – and the value of nature – are being talked about more widely now. But the discussion still puts us – humans – at the centre of things; it’s always about how we have a responsibility to make things better for the next generation of humans, rather than for all species. And when the benefits of ‘reconnecting to nature’ are extolled, you can be sure the benefits will be for us, not for the planet as a whole.
The misguided belief that we can plunder and shape nature to our heart’s desire is what got us into the planetary mess we’re in. It also plays a role in the story of the Rother.
This river has been shaped by human history, quite literally. Old maps of the river’s route show that ‘my’ stretch of the river didn’t even exist until the early 17th century.
When I stand over the Rother on New Bridge, facing north, I look out across a low-lying, flat landscape to the curved mound of the Isle of Oxney. The name seems an oddity for a landlocked cluster of villages, but this really was an island once, and the waters that lapped against its shores were the tidal reaches of the Rother, which extended as far inland as Bodiam – more than 10 miles west of here. These waters were navigable, carrying goods and people to and from ports along its length.
By the 11th century, though, the practice of inning – land reclamation – had grown apace. Clay, carried from the High Weald by the river, had gradually accumulated along the Rother’s marshy delta, slowing the flow of water. Ditches and dykes were dug to drain land for farming and sluice gates were installed to control tidal flow. The area – known as the Rother Levels – was considered so fertile it was protected by law. But nature struck back. In 1287, a huge storm hit the south-east, wrecking the harbour at Romney and blocking the Rother’s outflow to the sea. The river forged a new route to the sea at Rye, to the southeast.
The Rother was to undergo one further change of course. In 1635, the river, which had always flowed north of the Isle of Oxney, was rerouted to the south in response to landowners on the Levels complaining about the hefty price they were paying for land that was ‘drowned’ half the year.
For the first time, it flowed through my parish, Iden. It still does. So when I revive my plan to walk the Rother, I decide to start closer to home.
October 2021.
Jeff drops me off in Salehurst. I feel buoyant as I set off from the church, following a shaded sliver of a footpath, slippery with leaves, downhill. Rosettes of hart’s tongue fern spring from mossy beds on a crumbling wall and a rotting tree stump leaning against it has become a vertical community of tiny inkcaps – like a shanty town on a steep hillside. Spindle berries glow lipstick pink in the almost-bare hedge on the other side.
At the foot of the hill, I meet the river. A small weir sends the water hurrying east between banks crowded with trees and scrub that thin further from the banks, giving way to fields. These linear strips of woodland, called shaws, are common on the High Weald, edging streams and steep hillsides – landscape features that saved them from the plough. I must cross, rather than follow, the river here and head south, squelching across flooded grassland to regain the bank.
Barely a mile further on, I’m faced with a hip-high red and white barrier to which signs are attached with cable ties: ‘Path Unavailable.’ ‘Footpath closed.’ My skin prickles with injustice. Why is it so difficult to walk along a river? I haven’t seen a soul since I left Salehurst – so after a shifty glance around, I climb over the barrier.
The path is narrow and overgrown with brambles that catch on my jacket and tug at my boots. It divides the river, on my left, from a broad ditch on my right, and climbs steeply under the cover of trees.
You move differently when you’re trespassing. A strange self-conscious mix of furtiveness and nonchalance. One moment, your brain is concocting an excuse as to what you’re doing there in case you get caught, the next you’re defiant – how dare someone claim ownership of the earth beneath our collective feet? There’s an upside to stealthier movement – you get to see more: a nuthatch scurrying down the fissured bark of an old oak, a rabbit disappearing into the brambles with a flick of white tail.
Just as I’m congratulating myself on sticking to my planned route, I come to a veritable cliff. The land beyond it is a good three metres away, and below me, lies the footbridge in a broken heap, as if it had jumped.
I am not turning back. I clamber and slide down into a muddy channel between the river and ditch, smearing the seat of my trousers in wet clay. Before using the handily exposed tree roots to pull myself up the other side, I take a look at the river – and wish I hadn’t. It trails muddily and listlessly between high banks where the pale stalks of reeds blacken towards the waterline like hair roots that need retouching. I can’t imagine how it will ever make it to the sea.
The path resumes beyond the broken bridge; small, twisted oaks tunnel overhead, closing out the light so that I don’t notice the river twisting away. When I reach the next red-and-white barrier, I climb over and emerge on to a shorn field, pheasant feeders spaced around its perimeter, with woodland beyond. Not all the leaves are brown. The oaks are rusted, but the hornbeams and hazel wear lemon and lime, the field maples, custard and flame.
My boots crunch over stubble as I follow the field border to where the tops of cars whizzing past beyond the hedge reveal the road. I can hear the chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck of fieldfares and the distant duet of pheasant bark and gunshot.
When I re-join the river, its character has changed again. Businesslike, contained, between broad, grassy banks mown short and lined with caged saplings. I have a habit of anthropomorphising, or at least communicating with non-human living things that (allegedly) can’t understand. I apologise to trees if I accidentally snap their twigs. I wish swallows luck as they gather on telegraph wires to fly south. But I reprimand myself for attributing the ebb and flow of the river to capriciousness. The amount of water in it, the strength of its flow, the depth of its banks – its very direction – are all firmly under human control. I understand perfectly what Olivia Laing meant when, looking out at the Ouse she wrote: “For the last ten years, I’d laboured under the impression that this view was almost natural, and now I felt a fool.”
At Bodiam, a beautiful stone arched eyebrow of a bridge carries the road over the river. It is clogged with traffic – human and motor – for the fairytale castle. The smell of woodsmoke mingles with car fumes and, having encountered no one else on foot all day, I feel strangely uncomfortable with this brush with civilisation and continue.
Looking at the Rother flowing passively through the broad, flat valley bottom, it’s hard to imagine that it once held such power over the land. Nor, when I reach the next road crossing at the small village of Newenden, that this was once a busy port, complete with market and 16 taverns.
I don’t make it all the way to Iden. As the light drains out of the day, it seems to take my strength with it, and I call Jeff for a lift. There’s a warm, orange glow in the window of the one remaining pub but I wait by the river and let the dusk swallow me up.
When you walk somewhere you’ve been before, it’s not just your steps you retrace but your memories, as if they are trodden into the very soil. Memories of encounters and experiences – this is where we got in the river in our underwear and swam, that hot July day – here’s where a barn owl floated over as I was dragging my kayak up the bank in the fading light. But there are memories of feelings and thoughts, too.
“We all have these inner atlases,” writes Richard Mabey in Nature Cure, “irrational and hopelessly out-of-scale charts of landmarks, benchmarks and reference points.” We ‘superimpose’ these onto real maps. I can never pass the bend in the river where I sat down that May afternoon without remembering the anguish I felt.
But mental maps are never static – layer upon layer of encounters – sensory, cognitive, physical – build up, deepening our relationship with the landscape and imparting new meaning to it. For almost a decade, I’d known the river as a place on a map. Now I knew it as a place in my heart.
November 2021.
It isn’t a great day for walking. The sky is a grimy pad of cotton wool, pressing down on water the colour of builder’s tea and the washed-out landscape beyond. Swans sail on fields that have become lakes. Jeff is with me, and the plan is to go the whole hog – the sea or bust.
A memory surfaces as we set off along the riverbank from Newenden. A birthday outing in a hired wooden rowing boat that it turned out we were both equally inept at rowing. We bickered about whose fault it was as we tried to extricate ourselves from the rushes and steer a straight course. It strikes me that most of our arguments are about who’s in charge, and slip my hand into my pocket to give the map a pat.
We swing right with the river, into the wind, crossing the Kent and East Sussex railway, along which steam trains still run between Bodiam and Tenterden.
Then we must leave the riverbank to skirt the grounds of a farmhouse and find ourselves alongside another waterway. It’s called Potman Heath Channel on the OS map, but now that I know more of the river’s history, I can see that it traces the old course of the Rother, to the north of Oxney.
The whole landscape feels fluid, impermanent. A wetland has been created between the high bank of the channel and the river. Six cormorants are hanging out to dry on the branches of a fallen tree and there are wigeon, shelduck and Canada geese paddling and preening among the rushes. We pause for a while on the bank, drinking coffee. A flock of lapwings passes over, compact and silent, and there’s the hoot and plume of smoke from the steam train in the distance.
As we approach the next road crossing, it takes me a moment to realise where I am because I’ve never come from this direction before. This is Blackwall bridge, the westernmost point of my usual run along the river.
There were house martins here in the summer, nesting under the bridge. They would dip and wheel, trilling, as I passed underneath on my kayak. I saw more of the river’s wildlife from the kayak than I did from the banks. More when I sat than when I walked. More when I walked than when I ran. But I still enjoy all these different ways of moving through the landscape.
As we walk along this familiar stretch of the river, I realise that there is one thing (other than sentiment) that distinguishes it from what’s gone before. After miles of treeless, featureless banks, the riverside here is replete with vegetation – trees, brambles, dog rose, rushes and reeds. The ruby hips are the only splash of colour now, but in summer, it’s a riot.
If the Rother still met the sea at Rye, we’d be nearly there now. But Rye is three miles further inland than it once was. There’s a sluice, which keeps salt water from travelling upriver. Beyond it, the river slips into something more comfortable, broadening between slopes of estuarine mud where oystercatchers take off at our approach, piping like penny whistles. We – and the river – are going to make it.
The slip of land between the path and the river is carpeted with grey-green sea purslane, littered with driftwood, plastic and fishing debris. It’s low tide and the silty ground is firm, so we walk there, looking for treasures and keeping out of the wind. When the path returns us to the river’s edge, now 15ft below us, two slick heads appear in the water. One is facing our way and, through binoculars, appears to be staring directly at us. The seal’s eyes are huge and dark, like pools, the muzzle is long and straight – a grey seal, not the less common ‘common’ seal. We’ve seen them here before, but not often. In fact, we once stood on the bridge that we’ve just crossed for some minutes, pointing out the seal frolicking in the water below to a growing audience of passers-by before realising it was a lump of driftwood.
There’s no one to point out these two beauties to, so we keep walking until the metalled track gives way to sand. The tide is out but we can still hear the relentless roar of the sea. A gaggle of gulls stand at the shoreline, all facing the same way.
I read somewhere once that a water molecule can remain in a river for anywhere between a couple of weeks and several months, so I have cause to believe that at least some of the molecules flowing into the waters of the English Channel have accompanied me on my river journey.
I can’t decide whether what we are now sharing is an ending, or a new beginning.
Litro magazine, issue 184, 2023