what happened on the Sally in the Woods Wild Swim

What with all the recent rain lately, I'd been anxiously watching the Avon's water level on the Environment Agency's website. It'd been in the blue (flooding possible) zone for days, and was still up there but descending slowly. 

Sunday morning level is right in the middle of this graph

 Sunday morning was cool and cloudy, but with great cracks in the sky where the dawn was breaking through. As I got the Moggy's roof bars ready for the canoe, a young fox scampered past. The sun suddenly found a gap in the houses at the end of the road, and lit up the tops of all the plane trees; all the local woodpigeons began cooing at the same moment.


The day was trying hard to be summery, and I appreciated it.

With the canoe and passengers on board, we headed to Warleigh, and were early enough to wander round the pumping station, after gaving warily at the weir. 

a photo from a previous time at Warleigh with the river in spate
(I foolishly failed to take a pic yesterday, but this is pretty much the same as it was, level-wise)

 The water was high, and brown with sediment; the drop in level below the weir was far less than usual, maybe two feet or so, rather than the usual seven or eight, and the flow over the weir itself was too great to allow for walking over it. "I don't think it would be a good idea to do the swim in that," I said; "it would be fine until something went wrong, but it would be too dangerous to arrive at the weir from upstream and rely on getting ashore. Still, let's see what the others reckon."

They reckoned the same. So we walked and paddled up the canal to Dundas, to see if the river there was safe for a swim off the pontoon.

It wasn't. "How fast do you think the current is?" asked Sarah. I watched the water, inagined a bicycle travelling at the speed of the water. 
"Eight miles an hour," I said. 
"Holly thought five. I thought it was more like ten," said Sarah. She was probably the closest. I was erring on the low side, to counteract any natural tendency for overstatement that I may have...

So we did some synchronised rocking instead, to the tune of "Row, row, row the boat gently down the stream."

Back at Warleigh for our picnic, we met some cheerful young folk who'd come along for the swim and had joined in a group also there who'd jumped in below the weir and been swept down to the ferry steps, where they scrambled out. It sounded great fun- and indeed, looked like it too, when they did it again a short while later!

Sallying, fourth

Sunday saw the latest swim along the Avon, from Dundas Aqueduct to Warleigh Weir. We called it the Sally In The Woods Wild Swim, because it's quite wooded along this valley, and there is a place called Sally in the Woods, just up the hill from here. Something to do with a Civil War skirmish, apparently. And it's a neat name.

We came along with canoe, dog, picnic and numbers. And on the pontoon, we met Tanya who had come along independently, intending to swim this stretch of the river on her own. There she is, on the right of the group picture. Very intrepid.

Mal and Brendagh embark in the canoe

Finally, I got to swim rather than canoe. It was rather a challenge; I'm a slow swimmer at the best of times, and everyone else in the water was both young and very fit. As they drew progressively further ahead, I admired the purple loosestrife that flowers abundantly on the banks. And the conkers weighing the chestnut branches down over the water. And the yellow globes of water lilies. And then I admired them all over again. I had plenty of time to.

A kingfisher broke cover, flew down the river a hundred yards, then crossed over and arced round behind me, evidently concluding as it went that I was a fish too large to catch.

Half way along, there is a rather daunting bank of reeds stretching right across the river, and trailing weed too. It tangled my arms as I tried to swim through it, and I tried not to get too panicky. It was an unpleasant sensation. I found that it was easier if I went through on my back, sculling with my arms. You may thank me for that tip, one day.

Towards the end, I was getting extremely tired and a bit crampy, and started looking for somewhere to get out; but instead, I gratefully accepted a tow from the canoe. Around the corner and in the distance, people were jumping out of trees and generally messing around in the river. We had made it!

Sally in the Woods - the swim that sort-of-wasn't...

What is it about weekend expeditions? You go to bed and it's a lovely evening, moon shining, promise of fair weather to come; then wake up in the morning and hear the rain thundering on the roof and think, "O no! I'm going to get horribly wet."

Thus it is this morning. And thus it was last Saturday, when we had planned the Sally In The Woods Wild Swim.

Sometimes, though, you've just got to get on with things and hope for the best. And the best often ends up happening, and is made even better by its being plucked unexpectedly from the jaws of anticipated misery.

And so it was last week.


I picked up Mal and Gina. And Pig. Mal wasn't swimming because she'd got a nasty deep dog bite in her leg. Gina was showing how keen she was by already being in her wetsuit. Pig was a dog. And still is, for that matter.


By the time we got to Claverton, the day was brightening up considerably. And people began arriving, in dribs and drabs. And finally we walked up to the Dundas Aqueduct. By this time, the only swimmers present were Gina and me; everyone else was a walker; and I needed to paddle the canoe, really. So, just Gina. Who decided, quite sensibly, that she didn't want to do the swim on her own. So she and I paddled the canoe together.
It was a good paddle down the river. The current seems sedate along this stretch, but really moves along at a fair old lick. Especially as the water was a little higher than usual. You'd hardly notice; but when we got to Warleigh Weir, the canoe tried to edge itself over the weir when we came alongside it, so we had to do a bit of smart manoeuvring to avoid going over it sideways.

This is a useful link to the Environment Agency's river level monitoring service, by the way. It shows you the current level of the Avon at Bradford on Avon, which is just upriver of Warleigh.


And then we got down to the serious business of the afternoon, which was picnicking.

And Gina and I finally did get to swim. Look! That splash is me, going in!


We're planning to do another swim on Sunday 24th July. Be there or, well, don't be there!

swimming towards the equinox

ready for the off, at the Dundas Aqueduct

It's been two months now since our first go at swimming along the Avon, when Mal ended up being the only swimmer. And it was getting to feel a bit late in the season. Still, you never know, do you? So I set up a Facebook group and sent out invites, and most people responded with regret that they couldn't make it, and expressing the opinion that we were brave.

It's always worrying when they say that sort of thing.

And Mal got on the grapevine too, and got some rather more enthusiastic responses.

-and suddenly it was Sunday morning, and I was looking out of the window at a grey and windy dawn and thinking how cold the water was going to be.

Still, you've just got to get on with it, haven't you?

I'd already collected the canoe from Long Ashton when Mal phoned.

"I've got a huge picnic," she said. "We've got absolutely everything. From vaseline to vodka."

"Good. I've picked up the canoe, and I'm heading down there now," I said.

I like to be early.


View Larger Map

The little lane down to the Claverton Pumping Station was parked up with hippy wagons from the canal boat people, and with the cars of visitors to the pumping station. Still, I managed to park next to the canal, and got the canoe ready. I think that the canoe is an essential part of the swim, to carry the swimmers' gear and to provide support in case something goes wrong. I hoped to get the chance to do at least some of the swim (it didn't turn out that way, but so it goes).

And then I had a coffee and spent a while shaking hazel nuts down from the trees along the lane. They were big and ripe and surprisingly uneaten by squirrels, and I wanted to make the most of them.

Then Mal and Adrian arrived, and then Barbara and Mike with their canoe. And then more and more people appeared, until there was quite a party on the towpath and cyclists had to ping their bells to get past.

gathering by the K&A at Claverton

And the wind had dropped and the sun looked very much as though it was likely to come out too.

So off we went, along the canal towpath to the Dundas aqueduct. There is a useful flight of steps there, dropping down to the river bank, and a pontoon next to the Monkton Combe School boat house.

Barbara and Mike bring their canoe down the steps

Paul prepares to dive in

And the people who were going to swim got changed, and Shanti and I got the canoe into the water. She had offered to help with the paddling.

And away we went. A party set off along the river bank, where a footpath is indicated on the map. The footpath parts company with the river just before the weir at Warleigh, but we hoped to sort out that problem when we got there, maybe by ferrying them in the canoes.


The water was indeed a bit cold. Or so I was assured by the swimmers. I was quite comfortable in the canoe. And it was a lovely afternoon. The surrounding woods were becoming deeply autumnal; conker trees drooped over the water laden with conkers; a kingfisher darted ahead of us; buzzards soared high above, and occasional mobs of rooks and jackdaws tumbled by.

The distance along the river is about a mile and a quarter. The current is barely noticeable, unless you are going against it in which case you realise that it is actually quite strong. The swim takes about an hour.

A little over half way there, Katie was getting too cold and tired to carry on swimming, so we helped her to a place where she could scramble up the river bank, and she got into some warm clothes and the Useful Blanket, and carried on along the bank, looking vaguely Middle Earth-ish.




...and then we were there!


...the walkers turned up a little while later; they'd ended up by the old ferry steps below the weir, but someone had kindly allowed them to go through their garden to get to it. They seemed a little wary about walking across it, not having seen it before. But Mary got the hang of it pretty quickly...

And it was time for that picnic.



...there are some more pictures here

swimming in the Thames

With the gearbox newly installed in the car, it seemed only proper to give it a good run.

So I took it down to London, and managed to pick up Richard somewhere along the way. We headed out to Oxfordshire, and took a walk along the Thames. It was extremely hot, and swimming in the river seemed a sensible thing to do.
"There's a place just here," said Richard as we descended to the river bank from the bridge "-or there's a nice place a bit further down."



"How much further down?"
"About forty minutes"

"Forty minutes there and back, or forty minutes there?"
"Forty minutes there"
"OK, I can handle that. It's a nice day for a walk."

We passed some places that would have been likely contenders for swimming if they hadn't already been baggsied by herds of cattle, which stood up to their bellies in the water, occasionally sticking their noses in and snorting. The calves formed their own little coterie of disaffected teenaged calfness, under a hawthorn tree on the river bank. We steered well clear of them- Richard is not really a cow person.

Time passed.

"I wonder if I got the distance right?" said Richard presently. "When I'm running, it takes about half an hour, and I reckon I run about 1.3 times faster than I walk. Or maybe 1.5 times. What do you reckon?"

"I'd say more like 1.2," I said, being a sedate sort of runner myself.

"We'll time it, " he said, taking off his watch. Richard's watch has, of course, got a stopwatch on it. Goes with the territory.

"I'll run to that tree there, and when I get there I'll raise my arm. You stop the clock, then start it again when you start walking, and we'll be able to compare."

So that's what we did. It was a very fiddly watch, but I got there in the end.

"Fourteen seconds, and thirty seconds", I pronounced, when I'd caught up with him.

"Hmm, about twice as fast then. So it's further than I thought."



Red kites called out and circled above the meadow. A girl galloped by on her pony. She put me in mind of a gaucho, riding across the pampas. If gauchos were young girls and the Argentine pampas had Didcot power station slap bang in the middle, you simply would not have been able to tell the difference, on this breezy hot Saturday morning.


We finally found a place where you could slip into the water. There were a few narrowboats and cabin cruisers not too far away, but not too close either. and their crews were obviously having a bit of a lie in.




Richard slid down into the water and edged out. The bottom was a little muddy but firm beneath that, then shelved deeply and suddenly. He launched out. I followed. We swam to the other side, and under a great hanging willow where a swan was busily nibbling the leaves. If you were careful, you could scramble out, using the roots in the bank as steps. The river bed underfoot felt quite horrid; crunchy but fragile stuff that felt as though you were treading on small creatures; and great bubblings of marsh gas whenever it was disturbed.

It was cool and peaceful under the tree. Someone had had a bonfire there. It would have been a good place for a late night party, we agreed.

Monnow

This is the weather for bimbling, and bimbling was what I did on Saturday, after handing Katie over at Checkpoint Chav, deep in the West Midlands motorway network.

So I headed for the Malvern Hills, which manage to look even more dramatic in close up than they do from the M5, whence I usually hail them in passing. I didn't try going up and over the top, though, as I'm being kind to my gearbox. It is surprisingly easy to get along without using third gear, but even so, you can't be too careful...

...and then through Herefordshire, and to the flanks of the Black Mountains, and Llangua, on the bank of the Monnow. Unusually, the village is on the east bank but is in Wales, with Herefordshire and England on the West bank. The border follows the river, and the river, in these parts, follows its inclinations. As far as Monmouth, anyway.

The church stands on its own, some distance from the village. It's very small, but, on this hot summer afternoon, bustling with activity; there was a wasps' nest on the bellcote, and the wasps were zooming to and fro in a piratical manner.


A buzzard drifted by. I walked along the river, admiring the big brown trout that glid silently through the brown water in the shadow of the trees. Sand martins flitted in and out of their nests in the sandy bank at the river's bend. A kingfisher swooped away from its branch as I approached. A train passed invisibly, on its way to Abergavenny from Hereford. There was an outbreak of bleating from the local sheep.

I slid into the river and swam gently against the current for a while. The water was just cool enough to be refreshing and welcome after the heat of the afternoon. Then I got my camera and balanced gingerly back into the water for the photograph up there at the top. Then I splashed out onto the opposite bank, inadvertently trapping a huge shoal of tiny trout in the shallows; the water frothed furiously as they tried to evade me. So I circled round, and shooed them back out into the deep water.

variable damselflies

Out and about for Midsummer, we rumbled through Bath and down to Farleigh Hungerford, to go swimming in the river. There's been a swimming club there for some time, and there are some nicely rudimentary changing cubicles into which we entered, brushing through the overhanging branches, to find an owl pellet on the bench inside. We were the only ones using the changing facility; lots of people were dressed as for swimming, but were industriously stoking away at barbecues and gaz stoves, cooking Sunday lunches of singed meat, the smell of which hung in the air. A large party of East Europeans threw a beach ball around, and managed to carry off that singular look which I had thought only the British can really manage- looking pallid and unhealthy in bathing gear.

In the river, though, all was peaceful, apart from the wild insect sex that was happening among the variable damselflies. I went and fetched my camera, wading in up to my neck to get this picture and hoping to heck that I didn't fall over.

The Traveller's gearbox made horrid noises in third gear all the way there and all the way back, so I tried not to use third gear. Today I must look into replacing the gearbox. Oh dear.

hiraeth, or the past isn't what it used to be

a photo from last year, because I didn't take one this year...

We were up in Skenfrith, in Monmouthshire, to swim in the River Monnow. The river was warm and full of life; mayflies were hatching out and bobbing up and down on the air, and I watched one that had just hatched out, standing on the water surface waiting for its wings to be ready to fly before launching itself up...

It was a good day to be there.

On the way back, I headed across country in a roughly southward direction, because it was shorter than going through Monmouth, and it was a more interesting route.

Of course we ended up going much further and taking far longer than we would have done had we taken the main road. But we were never entirely lost. Well, hardly ever.

The lanes got smaller and windier. We meandered down into a valley, then jinked up a hill and into a cool green wood, and suddenly came upon this church.

It's at Llanvihangel Ystern Llewern, which translates more or less as "St Michael's church on the bend of the river where the foxes live". I thought it looked familiar, and I was right, because the Offa's Dyke path passes through the churchyard, having ascended the slope from the banks of the Trothy below. I had to stop.

I had a little reminisce while Katie and her friend chatted together in the back of the car.

The first time I walked along here I was in my early twenties. I've been this way on foot four times now. Once on my own, thinking how nice it would be to share the experience with someone; I wonder how many people are happy with complete solitude? Once with Duncan and Roz. That was a lovely walk; we'd taken the bus to Abergavenny and camped the night before on a hill looking over to the Skirrid at Llangattock Lingoed, before spending the day walking across to Monmouth. And then once with Richard, getting wetter and wetter on our way to Llanthony; by the time we got there, our feet were so blistered that we hobbled into Hay and abandoned the walk. Not one of the happier trips, but definitely memorable, lying in the tent counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder...

...and the last time, two years ago, when Richard and I sat by a bend in the Trothy and ate our lunchtime pasties under the watchful eyes of a woodpecker guarding its nest.

Some of the older memories are imperfectly remembered or confused, and some are fixed so vividly in my memory that I can smell them. Like that evening at Llangattock Lingoed, drinking Felinfoel beer with Duncan and Roz, and sitting out in the stillness of a summer evening, happy in each others' company. Hard to evoke quite why they are so vivid; but they are. And now Duncan is dead, things are changed, thirty years have passed. And one day I shall have forgotten everything.

But not just yet, thank goodness.

Wordsworth's been there too, I think:

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence-depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse-our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

...those are his words rather than mine. I'm just fumbling to try to express my own feelings. Or even just to put a name to them. This is what I wrote in 2003:

We went off to the Black Mountains again yesterday. The mountains were beautiful, and it was a gloriously hot day, and the children splashed around in the stream below a waterfall, although it was fairly well dried up.

...and then I had to leave early to rendezvous with P---- in a motorway service station. AS we descended the mountain I thought of what Catherine had been saying, as we lounged around munching the food and drinking champagne, about how it doesn't get better than this. What she meant encompassed the children's memories of the day at a future time, as well as our present felicity. She was mildly berated by Charlie, who said that she was setting limits on what is otherwise unquantifiable. But there is some truth in it. It's funny, actually BEING in the moment, and at the same time putting it in an historical context. And it's how I felt as Katie and I descended to the car together, down a long path through pastures where the sheep were sheltering as best they could from the heat, under bracken and bushes. And it was very still and quiet, only the occasional cry of a buzzard, and Katie was scuffing the dust up from the path to make clouds and the sound was very striking in the stillness, and her blue dress stood out vividly against the mountains and she was very happy and I was both sharing the moment and storing it to sustain me during the times in the future when we'll be apart... and I guess maybe she was doing the same, although she was more in the moment and didn't realise it.

It's funny being nostalgic for something even while it's happening. But I also remember long-past picnics and outings with my parents, and how it felt then, and how things have gone since then...

wildness

Maybe I should be writing of weighty matters.

*thinks hard for a bit*

Nope, can't think of anything weighty.

Here, then is a celebration of wildness. We went off to Wales to hunt the Giant Hogweed, yesterday.


We also looked at a ruined castle, buried in the woods. The sunken track running up to the keep was lined by an avenue of ancient and dying trees, some of which had fallen across the track impeding our progress. Younger trees were growing out of the masonry. It was a good ruin. Very ruinous. It's nice to know that there are still ruined castles buried in woods.

And then we went swimming in the Monnow, just here at Skenfrith. It was cold and deep.

...and we ran out of time and failed to hunt down the Giant Hogweed. That can wait for another time.

*shhhh* wildness is weighty, isn't it?