Living With Water

Swimming, walking, trespassing along the River Churn, Gloucestershire to Wiltshire

Field Notes

The name Churn is pre-Roman, thought to have its origins in the ancient Celtic language spoken by the Dobunni tribe who controlled the area before the first-century Roman conquest. A first tributary of the Thames, the Churn rises at Seven Springs near Cheltenham in the Cotswolds and flows south, passing through Cirencester, through the Cotswold Water Park and joining the Thames at Cricklade. In addition to flowing to the Thames, the Churn was a feeder river to the Thames and Severn Canal and was once a major trade route between London, Bristol and the global economies of empire.

The Churn is my ‘home’ river, I’ve known it for over forty years. I played in and around it as a child growing up in Cirencester, watching the watervoles, paddling and fishing for snotty dogs and minnows, shooting along it on tractor inner tubes where the flow ran high at the water meadows. This page is an informal set of field notes, unedited, gathered initially for a commission to journey from the Churn’s source to its confluence with the Thames.

Charlotte Bates and Kate Moles, academics based at Cardiff University, invited me to contribute to the monograph Living With Water (MUP, 2022), which brings together sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, artists and poets to explore the way water binds, immerses and supports us. They write, ‘ drawing from international research on river crossings, boat dwelling, wild swimming, sea fishing and drought impacts, and navigating urban waters, glacial lagoons, barrier reefs and underground rivers, the collection illuminates the ways that we live with and without water and explores how we can think and write with water on land. Water offers a way of attending to emerging and enduring social and ecological concerns and making sense of them in lively and creative ways.’

For the book, I swam-walked (and inevitably trespassed) slowly but surely and probably not in order, refracting this experience through a series of interlinked poems, exploring ideas of belonging, invasion, migration and movement.

The book, Living with Water, is now available to purchase here from Manchester University Press.

April 24th 2021, Rendcomb to North Cerney

An idyllic day, I began by visiting the source of the Churn (some say the source of the Thames) with my partner, two children and our dog. My littlest child crouched down to watch the ‘lice’ wriggling in the water close up. We jumped on the stepping stones. We cleared some litter from the area - some cans, cellophane, a barbecue charcoal bag.

I looked over the road where the Churn ran under the A436 – the headwaters empty initially into a pond by the Severn Springs pub that is currently closed – fenced off (like so much of this river) and weedy.

Got back in the car and drove to Rendcomb – parked beyond the Post Office on the Chedworth road and took the footpath down in the valley. The scene was almost a cliche, softly bucolic with the newborn lambs frolicking on the slopes and the sun shining so brightly in a clear sky. A very warm day – but a cold wind when it blew to remind us that cruelties of April are still with us. My mum joined us from her home nearby – to have had her and my immediate family - almost my whole family - with me on that first day of swim-walking the river was a source of heartfelt and unaccustomed joy.

The first place I was able to access the river was beyond the lamb field after the electrified fence came to an end. In Conigree Wood, where the young wild garlic carpeted the floor, I climbed over the waterfall - a Romantic construction of surely manmade stone and boulders - and swam under the bridge at the old Rendcomb gatehouse. A carved stone Father Thames looked on from the arch of the bridge as I passed below. Walked and swam the river almost to North Cerney. It was shallow in many places - ankle deep - gravelly, irises shooting out of the riverbed. Weeds beginning to grow at the margins. Strong smell of water mint pervading the air. A young deer drinking from the water at the riverbank leapt away over the field at our approach.

Lots of fencing, barbed wire along each bank and at intervals bisecting the river itself. Much of the river bank on the upper reaches of the Churn is not a public right of way, but private farmland, Rendcomb College grounds and Bathurst Estate. Felt appropriate to be walking this forbidden riverbed on the same day as the mass trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932 for which around 500 walkers did a walking protest to secure their right to access open country. Today all around the UK, groups and individuals have been taking action for the #RightToRoam and to prevent the criminalisation of trespass.

We left the river and climbed the hill up and over to North Cerney – picked up a climbing rose and a blue lily from a house selling them along the way and stopped at the Bathurst Arms for a drink and crisps for the kids. Very busy - only the second Saturday of opening after lockdown. Huge wigwam decorated with a papier-mache zebra, peacock wall hangings and garlands of fake flowers. We sat by the river and the children played in the shallows.

One of the great sadnesses of my life in recent years has been the absence of family - most of them are now dead and those that remain are hard to get to. At home that evening, I reflected that perhaps my strong attachment to place is a kind of family and a precaution against grief, a holding close to permanence.

1st May, Seven Springs to Coberley (and back)

Over the hills past the rapeseed fields that are now in raucous flower, through the beechwoods and on through Birdlip, tipping my hat at the Celtic queen as I passed. An attempt to park at Slack Cottages by the farm with huge industrial silos. Back onto the road to park on the verge. Just me and the dog today.

It’s only a stone’s throw as the crow flies between Seven Springs and Coberley but the same distance on the river, negotiating barbed wire, fallen trees, brambles and a *lot* of nettles takes its own sweet time. As my brother - lifelong Churn fisherman and dweller on its banks - says, the river is on its bones, badly in need of rain. Surely, I think, we must be in drought.

Below the Seven Springs pub there is a bridge over the river, connecting the public footpaths. I divert and head downriver walking the shallow riverbed and am soon met with four strings of barbed wire fencing off land and river. I climb through.

Ankle height stinging nettles, cow parsley, ground ivy and hogweed coming through on the banks. Before long, in a couple of weeks, you probably won’t be able to get the banks here, it’ll be completely overgrown. 

In the distance I can hear something like shooting – clay pigeon shooting? Wrong season? Not my speciality… In a field over the way, the farmer is spraying the land. Two buzzards are circling overhead on the thermals. It’s May Day, getting warmer by the hour.

Up near the bridge, there is a bit of rubbish – an old agricultural sack, a couple of cans in the water, a piece of polystyrene. Otherwise, it’s quite untravelled. In the space of walking two hundred, three hundred metres, I come across barbed wire blocking progression and natural barriers created by fallen trees – one in particular must have fallen down some time ago and is now blocked up by branches that have come downriver in the wreckage of winter.

Brimstone butterflies, large whites. Pheasant.

Following deer desire paths along the bank, river shoes filled with gravel and mud, ankles tingling from the nettle stings, bogged down in beds of irises below the old poplars not yet in leaf. A creepy derelict shack.

I fall in the river – stepping onto what I thought was a gravelly area of the riverbed I fall into mud up to my knees – laughing at the silt, the chalky, silty mud. And just before I fall l am thinking about offerings and I a, thinking about Cuda and whether this has been a place that people came to thousands of years ago and then I fall in the water, a bit like an offering, a bit like a sacrifice.

Inside St. Giles church at Coberley – the tomb of Lord and Lady Berkley, the tomb of a child tucked in nearby on the floor. And the tomb of a young man dressed in civilian clothes.

There is a map of Coberley on the wall by the font. Made in 1989 – it says this map presents a view of the parish and those things ‘we think should be preserved’ – and it’s lovely. Lots of different residents were involved in it – a map of the parish, with information and key landmarks like roads, the school, the Seven Springs Inn and the Churn; then it’s got other things like the skylarks, squirrels and poppies and adders and pheasants and herons and rabbits and The Needle Hole and Hartley Farm. Columbine’s Grave. Tom Tit’s Bottom and an arrow pointing on to Cirencester 10 miles away.

On the verge of the field on the return walk to the car, there are yet more nettles, dock dandelions – big lion’s heads basking in the sunshine today at the edge of the ploughed field. There are soft nettles and last year’s pine cones caught on the branches of the trees that have fallen over winter. There’s my dog, barking away at a feeder for the pheasants – I think he thinks it’s an animal

Lords and ladies going over.

It’s a different kind of landscape to my home further south on the Cotswolds - the hills here are somehow bigger in dimension, somehow longer maybe, and there’s so much limestone churned up in the fields, broken and gleaming white on the fresh turned soil.

Walking the borderland between cultivation and wildness – on the wild side of the old stone wall the land leads down to the infant Churn. Last year’s weeds are still there, tottering above the green of the brambles that are now returning, looking like bones – last year’s white bones.

14th June 2021, Siddington to South Cerney

In search of the River Churn on the stretch from Siddington to South Cerney. There is very little public access to river here but I hope I might be able to get in and walk along it, bypassing land-based restrictions.

in search of

hard to find

A beautiful high summer day. After the heavy rains of May, it’s been dry for a couple of weeks and hot, hot, hot. I join the baked mud footpath near The Dog and walk along the Thames and Severn canal, weaving my way through the long grasses and flag iris, past the baby moorhens and the Milk Sheep, eventually reaching the river where it meanders through an acid green field that’s fenced off for grazing.

I pause on the bridge. Soak up the meandering flow over the gravel bed. The water is fast-flowing, higher than I had anticipated.

It is a world of flying things. Common damselflies, beautiful demoiselles. Red admirals, meadow browns, orange tip, small heath. A B52 bomber from some RAF base nearby.

It is a world of barbed wire and fencing. Signs against entry. Private land.

Along the path a family have gathered on the river bank on the other side of the barbed wire and fencing. The smoke from their barbecue rises steadily upwards on this windless day. RnB plays. They eye me nervously through the tall grasses. I wish I could get to where they are.

Dog rose, speedwell, hogweed. The white fluff of the poplar floats through the air. Said to be highly flammable. I imagine tiny fires everywhere, fire flies, wild fires.

Still I cannot reach the river.

Longing.

Onwards.

Finally, a right turn, past the alpacas that the man in the village told me about. A long, green pathway down to the meadows. Buttercups! Red and white clover and I think of my grandfather who taught me how to suck the sugar from the petals. The grass is long, the paths untravelled.

I head for the line of poplars and willow and at last, we find the water! Me and the dog throw ourselves in. Cold water on hot skin. Elation, relief, pure joy! We wade and swim. I watch the dog swim out into a plunge pool, trying for a chew on the reeds before returning against the current, to the place where the gravel rises on riverbed. The water is crystal clear, the banks buzzing with insects. The birds are commonplace: wagtails, crows, blackbirds, wood pigeons. As ordinary to me as home.  

duet:

poplar x wind

Reaching the river…

Bank erosion from more footfall along the pathway that runs through hotel developments and along the Churn.

25th June, Cricklade / Confluence of Churn and Thames to Cerney Wick

I’m calling this the one when I got lost and an hour-long walk turned into a three and a half hour trek…

My circuitous journey along the Churn found me in Cricklade, planning to roam from there to wherever I could reach back downriver on a morning’s walk. I arrive on the High Street and park up as near as I can manage to the spot where the Thames and Churn meet, having pored over OS and Google and GPS last night and this morning. I get out of the car and walk a few metres up the road to where the Thames runs under the bridge. There is a walking group, their leader dressed in a fluorescent tabard explaining something… they move on, I lean over the stone bridge to gaze at the water below and look upriver to where I hope I will be able to see the Churn but all I see are the overgrown banks and a turn in the river.

I follow the walking group, wondering if there’s a footpath that somehow isn’t on the maps – I search restlessly up towards the town but there are no alleyways or pathways off in the direction I want to go. Just old stone houses and plants for sale in cardboard boxes.

I return to the car – I study the maps again. The Churn is off to the right over private land. The farmyard is not far off. I consider the likelihood of getting stopped if I jump the fence, decide it’s minimal and clamber over the metal gate, heading for the corner where I can read the line of the bank through the long grasses and nettles. At first I can’t get a clear view, there’s no chance of getting in. I walk the margin of the field, past a pile of rotting cut grass and suddenly there is a gap in the undergrowth and I can see the confluence of the Churn with the Thames! The Thames is lively and youthful-looking, the Churn is listless and less clean than it is upstream. I feel sad for a moment, feeling the age of the water, an elderly relative reaching the end of their life.

Deciding to walk the Churn back towards Cerney Wick, I take the footpath over North Meadow, a national nature reserve where the Thames and Churn run in parallel either side of the meadow – Churn to the north, Thames to the south. The meadow is thrumming with invertebrates, the grasses are tall and flowering. Afterwards I look up their names: cocksfoot, red fescue, quaking grass, false oat, sweet vernal. The memory of my mum dragging me here to see snakeshead fritillaries when I was a disinterested child passes briefly through my mind. Knapweed, buttercups, saxifrage, ribwort plantain, scabious, meadowsweet, meadow vetchling.

On the map the footpath runs by the Thames, as if nobody could wish to walk by the Churn, but a path has been cut through the sward to the northern edge. The dog bounds through the grass, leaping deer-like, like only a vizsla can. I am delighted to find the river there.

Two women, Emma and Lucy stop me to ask directions back to Cricklade and we end up chatting – they have taken up the Thames Path challenge for SANDS, the stillborn and neonatal death charity.  I warm to them immediately and intuitively, all of us women who’ve had children nobody else can now see. They point me in the direction of the lane and off I go.

The river runs alongside the old Cirencester/Swindon road – hard to believe it was such a busy route when I was a kid. Now it’s more like a lane where van drivers park up and people stop their cars to speak on the phone. Me and the dog crack on, past the old iron way markers, stopping where we can to peer at the river through the fence. It is a free flowing again, vigorous and rich with life. I’m glad to see the white and yellow flowers of the water crowfoot trailing prettily along the surface.

The A419 roars alongside us.

A broken down stile and another meadow. We jump over and find our way to the river where the gunnera and reeds are abundant. We disturb a drake and a plume of beautiful demoiselles rise into the air as the dog plunges into the water. I throw off my trainers and follow him in. Calf deep in the cooling Churn.

I am a few kilometres from where I walked last week and I decide to see if we can make it to Cerney Wick rather than circling back round to Cricklade over north meadow. We clamber over a bone dry leat from an old mill and climb up by a reconstructed red brick bridge at Latton Junction where the Thames and Severn and North Wilts canals once met. I follow the canal path all the way to Cerney Wick, gazing longingly over the barbed wire to my left and the fields full of long grasses and ox-eye daisies. I can see from the intermittent line of willows where the Churn runs and I cannot go.

Checking the map again at Cerney Wick, I can see that it’s just another half mile or so to connect up to the exact spot I arrived at a week ago. I decide to press on, past the charming roundhouse and disused lock, until I reach a fork in the path and turn left. Lake 6 and the exclusive holiday apartments are up ahead. I feel so conflicted about them – necessary for the local economy, providing funds for wetland management - but I hate their gated-ness, their exclusivity, their hubris.

We follow the turn of the path around the lake and arrive at the wooden bridge over the Churn. I go down to the water to run my fingers through it. A trout lingers in the shallows below the bridge and I want to reach out and stroke it (but don’t), as if it were a child of my own.

12th July, Baunton to Cirencester

This evening I head to the river as the sun is brightening. I know the territory well here where the Churn runs closely in parallel to the Whiteway, an old Roman road. It was my birthday two days ago and it feels right to return to my home place today. Without need of maps, I walk instinctively, following paths laid down in the bones of my childhood and fused now into long term memory. The ossification of water.

A tiny back moorhen duckling sounds the alarm at our approach. The river runs smoothly over the reeds of summer, through banks of forget-me-not, convolvulus and thistle. My brother, who lives a short way from here upriver, had warned me off getting because of agricultural run-off and extensive recent crop spraying but the water is shallow anyway. No chance of a swim. Although the health of the river is improving, there’s a discernible difference in the quality of the water on this stretch to the higher up areas that are flanked by meadows and grazing land.

Over the fields, past the cobnuts emerging tentatively from their husks and the elder now setting tiny perfect green spheres of fruit. Meadow browns and painted ladies flutter among the grasses. Through the woods, over the field with the Churn to my right. The clover and buttercups are fading now.

Following the cow path

cow dung

dock

down to the watering place.

 I take the breeze block step over the barbed wire fence and into the corner of the water meadow. Head for the stretch of river I know the best of all. But there is a strange man there with his dog throwing a stick in the water. Clearly he lives here, seems surprised to see someone else, has the air of someone at home…

I walk on to the next meander, take off my shoes and walk along the riverbed. Brambles hang down, elegant ash shading the water, overhanging hawthorn haws budding.

I have cut my leg and am bleeding badly. I walk out of the river onto the meadow which is sparkling with small white wave and white plume moths. I find a large, pristine white feather. The grass is squeaking – shrew? Vole?

Before heading back towards the footpath I want to find the river again – no need for a divining rod when you have a dog like mine. He finds it through the high grass and reeds … but it is time to go, I need to clean up my leg.

17th July Cowley to Coberley

A morning slo-mo stroll (due to the leg - see above) from Cowley to Coberley or, what I like to call, the one when I couldn’t find the river: on this stretch the river runs over private farmland and I could catch only tiny glimpses…

An evening wade up the Churn from the wildlife reserve at the edge of City Bank and on where the river runs parallel to Victoria Road and through the Beeches Car Park to the Abbey Grounds, Memorial Gardens and on to the sluice gates by what used to be called Laffords petrol station (Texaco now?). It was a soft, golden evening - quiet around the place as the world seems to be on holiday or at least laid out in recovery from the last eighteen months of plague trauma.

The river was high summer shallow, crowded out in places by plantlife, a river that no longer seems to be cared for in the way it was when I was a child. In my search for the mother / Cuda on the water, I found my own body feel the pull of mother custodian, carer of the churn. In the weeks since my last walk in the river I visited Corinium Museum in search of Cuda but found nothing - perhaps she doesn’t wish for discovery. Instead I re-discovered the mother goddess cult of Corinium, the stone reliefs of goddesses holding babies, bread and fruit, often accompanied by three hooded figures, or Genii Culcullati (check out this fascinating recent blog by Sarah Lewis on Genii Culcullati at Corinium). And I was fascinated to discover inscriptions on coins or staters are the first examples of writing in Britain and evidence the first named people in the Cotswolds - language, exchange, carving out / of / inscribing self.

Tonight’s Churn was a river of shape-shifting trout, gunnera, bridges, rosebay willowherb, a heron taking flight over a pizza van along the A417. I walked through the clean reaches that run behind the houses of Watermoor and on through familiar territory, my memory flooding with images of end of term swims across the Abbey Grounds lake, past the ‘egg’ cold store in the park and the C12th Spital Gate, fishing for minnows and sticklebacks with a net, cooling our feet on a hot summer’s day by the sluice gates at the top of Gloucester Street, the time when we were still trying to get rid of American signal crays with our nets. The river was prettier than I had expected it to be, the Watermoor stretch was clean but the stretch along Memorial Gardens had been fly-tipped with building materials and fencing and cans and bottles. The difference between families living their lives in homes that back on to the river and older people who have forgotten they ever cared?

This was the longest continuous stretch of the Churn that I have been able to access and it felt like home.

Later, I drove home under a crescent moon to whispering Bob Harris's Country Show, the combine harvesters baling in the fields by headlight.

Baunton to Perrotts Brook, 2nd December

A winter Churn. Baunton to Perrotts Brook. Tying the knot on my journey along the River Churn before year’s end with this last little fragment of river that I hadn’t yet done. A stretch running through scrubby meadows criss-crossed with leats and stone remnants of the old mills. Crab apples, sedges, sloes, a rowing boat thrown over a ditch, roe deer, pheasants, vast arable fields, a thundering flyover and at the end – an apocalypse of trees, felled on the banks of the river to make way for… what? It was not the end to the adventure I’d imagined.  

It only occurred to me as I was walking that by doing this walk, this way, I was returning to the place where I started this journey in spring and also to my brother’s house on the river. The Churn was always ‘his’ - the place where he fished, a river he seemed to know a lot about, we were meant to walk it together this year on a sunny weekend in May, but in the end he was busy. There must be something in my subconscious walking towards the sense of family I dearly crave, but what poetry has taught me this year and what this project has shown me is that I carry family and home with me. It sounds like a cliché. But it’s true. This river is my family and it’s fluid, in the same way the water runs, I belong here just as much as anyone else and I have found comfort in Cuda and the idea of Cuda. Whether she’s an iron age goddess, a Roman deity or something that was made up by an archaeologist taking a punt….it doesn’t matter. I’ve found meaning in that, some kind of empowerment. That’s been a real gift.

#LivingWithWater #RiverChurn #RiversofGloucestershire #Cuda #Dobunni