Marsh marigold flowers, orbs of sunshine yellow, are held on stems just above the water. Caltha palustris, the goblet-shaped flower of the marsh, named Mary-gold or marigold, is a great buttercup with kidney-shaped leaves. Some here are submerged and the river Tern is still rising over them.
Beery and slow, the Tern rises above the celandine banks and spills into woods of alder and willow; it rises up the buttresses of oaks fattened like bells from centuries of flooding; it rises over fields and forces through bridge arches pulling the rug from under the earth; and its bubbles trail towards the confluence with the Severn like flowers of light. On this, the brightest, warmest day of the year so far, there is a darkness in the backwaters of the swamp. Under leafless trees, some standing gauntly, others fallen half drowned, the marsh marigolds reclaim an ancient place that belongs to a time before rivers and the land they flow through were so engineered.
Rising from the slough is an idea, older than the deer park at Attingham, older than the name Tern or Tearne: the Welsh Tren, means strong, powerful, a river that wanders, braids and pools; a river at liberty. This is a waterscape that should hear the slap of a beaver’s tail and the splash of elk; it has rewilded itself, conjuring ghosts from rain and the boggy corners of a watershed drained, farmed and built on for centuries. And yet the strong river gathers an unstoppable flow, finds the old eel channels and pooling places and, despite the loss of creatures it once had, recreates its own world and time for when they return.
This Tern, unlike the one that loiters in its surly ditch from Market Drayton to Atcham for most of the year, is the reason we should abdicate our responsibility and set rivers free. Floods are a form of ecological restoration, reinvigorating the moors and making gloriously anarchic swamps where animals and plants that remain part of the river’s memory can be brought back, this is what the marsh marigolds say, shining above the rising waters.
