Following the river, I got here. Not waterborne as I might have liked; it’s not a day for the canoe. Instead I looked at the map, for new places where the river touches the land. How many find country by looking near roads? But roads go where we wanted them to: the river goes where it has always gone.
One place caught my eye, a place called Spring Woods. Not for spring like the season, but for a series of springs rising on the river’s northern bank, away from roads on a bend where the Welland leaves Stamford, thins, and starts to slink.
It’s a weird morning. The air is silvered by a quickening mist and a sun so diffused I can look straight at it. Briefly it seems to sink as the mist boils over it, as if it’s setting, not rising.
The sun’s gone as I set out. The river’s below, brown and messy-banked from rain. This path alone is a find: winter-dead trees stand either side and entwine above. Like walking through a ribcage. Underfoot leaf slime, speckled with brilliant red berries. Apparently this is an old Roman canal; I struggle to picture it.
In trees stripped of vegetation, details. Up high, a fist of branches clutches a huge nest. Big sticks, so a short list of suspects. Heron maybe; red kite or buzzard probably. Over the tiny river, into Cambridgeshire, pylon silhouettes merge with those of trees against the sky – a complication of orderly ladders and disorderly branches, horrid if you look hard.
The river nudges the path. I drop to the bank. Trees wigged with emerald lichen, stick morasses, river-sluiced mud. Brown water.
I don’t know what I’m looking for, so I listen instead. A quiet place on a still day. No traffic, no noise. But something. A crackling. Not the pylons. Organic. A rustle. Like an animal in undergrowth, but persistent. I look at the water; less flow than ooze.
Then I see. An island of reeds, and they’re thrashing. Furiously. The river doesn’t know what to make of this impediment, so flows around, through, against, revealing subtle power through this odd, hypnotic little disturbance. I’d never seen or heard anything like it. It’s what I remember as I go back, following the river.
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