3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Roger Deakin's "Waterlog"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Deakin’s wonderful Waterlog.

“The warm rain tumbled from the gutter in one of those midsummer downpours as I hastened across the lawn behind my house in Suffolk and took shelter in the moat.” Thus begins this magnificent amphibious travel journal – an account of Deakin’s “long swim through Britain.” His moat is where the journey first suggests itself, and where it begins. It’s where he’s bathed for years, “swimming breaststroke for preference.” He says he’s “not a champion, just a competent swimmer with a fair amount of stamina.”

Deakin is inspired by John Cheever’s classic short story “The Swimmer” (The New Yorker, July 18, 1964), in which the hero, Ned Merrill, decides to swim the eight miles home from a party on Long Island via a series of his neighbours’ swimming pools. Deakin says, “One sentence in the story stood out and worked on my imagination: ‘He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the country.’ ”

Deakin’s journey curves across the country, too: Hampshire, Cambridge, Norfolk, Wales, Worcestershire, Dartmoor, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Argyll, Jura, Northumberland, Essex, Kent, Somerset, London. Deakin travels to all these places and more. Everywhere he goes, he seeks out places to swim – beaches, bays, rock pools, rivers, streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools, aqueducts, flooded quarries, canals, even drains. The older and wilder these places are the better. “In wild water,” he says, “you are on equal terms with the animal world around you: in every sense, on the same level.”

The book unfolds in thirty-six chapters, each chronicling at least one of Deakin’s swimming excursions. His first trip, on April 23, 1997, is to the Scilly Isles, where he plunges into the frigid waters of Great Popplestones Bay:

I stripped off and ran naked in the water, screaming inwardly with the sudden agony of it. It was scaldingly cold, and the icy waters kept on tearing pain through me until I got moving and swam a few frantic strokes as children do on their first visit to the deep end, then scrambled out breathless with cold; a mad moment of masochism. So much for the fabled caress of the gentle Gulf Stream. I climbed straight into my wetsuit and swam comfortably out again into the amazing clear water in a flat calm, crossed the little bay, marvelling at the brightness of everything, and swam back again. The sand was white and fine, and shone up through the water. Small dead crabs floated amongst the thin line of shredded bladderwrack and tiny shells oscillating up the beach. The silence was disturbed only by nature’s bagpipes, the incessant gulls. I climbed out onto the rocks that glinted gold with quartz and mica, stripped off the wetsuit, and laydown to dry in the sun. Spread out next to me, it looked like another sunbather.

Deakin’s descriptions of his swims are superb – vivid, sensuous, evocative. Here’s one from Chapter 3 (“Lords of the Fly”). He’s in Winchester, searching along the banks of the River Test for a once-popular bathing place called Gunnar’s Hole. He eventually finds it. Its motionless surface is entirely covered by “a classic duckweed lawn.” He writes,

The massive concrete walls of the pool were in surprisingly good condition, and, on the basis that stolen fruit always tastes sweetest, I climbed through the concrete river inlet sluice to drop in silently at the deep end. Sinking through the opaque green cloak was like breaking the ice. I laboured down the hundred yards of the pool, mowing a path in the lawn which closed behind me as I went. Moorhens scampered off, half-flying over the billiard-baize green. The water beneath was still deep, but no longer the ten feet it used to be below the diving boards. It had silted up to between five and seven feet. Reaching down, I felt soft mud and ancient fallen branches, and sensed giant pike and eels. 

I love that passage. That “Moorhens scampered off, half-flying over the billiard-baize green” is brilliant. Here’s another one, this from Chapter 11 (“Salmon-Runs”). Deakin is in Dartmoor, swimming across the River Dart estuary:

I had crossed to the centre of the wide bay from the Coastguard’s Beach. A little group of surfers clustered waist deep, waiting for the big grey rollers that surged out of the open sea, breaking on a sandbar. I threw myself in with them and swam inland. I felt the incoming tide lock on to my legs and thrust me in towards the distant woods along the shore. Each time a frond of sea-lettuce lightly brushed me, or glued itself around my arms, I thought it was a jellyfish, and flinched. But I soon grew used to it; seaweed was all around me, sliding down each new wave to drape itself around me. I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved, jostled from behind by the swell. Then, as the tide rose higher, the sandy estuary beach came into focus. The woods reached right over the water, and began accelerating past me. I found I was moving at exhilarating speed, in big striding strokes, like a fell runner on the downhill lap. It was like dream swimming, going so effortlessly fast, and feeling locked in by the current, with no obvious means of escape. I was borne along faster and faster as the rising tide approached the funnel of the river’s mouth until it shot me into a muddy, steep-sided mooring channel by some old stone limekilns on the beach. I had to strike out with all my strength to escape the flood and reach the eddy in the shadows. I swam back up to the limekilns and crawled out on the beach like a turtle, but couldn’t resist dropping back into the muscular current for a second ride down the channel. 

I can practically feel that seaweed “sliding down each new wave to drape itself around me.” Deakin’s writing brims with the physical experience of wild swimming. That “I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved” is inspired! At times, it almost seems that Deakin is part fish. But there are limits to what he’s willing to tackle. He loves the water, but he also fears it. We see this in Chapter 23 (“Orwell’s Whirlpool”), where he considers swimming the channel between the Hebridean islands of Jura and Scarba. The channel, called the Gulf of Corryvreckan, contains a menacing whirlpool. Deakin writes,

The whirlpool was clearly visible, three hundred yards offshore towards the western end of the gulf. Inside its circumference was a mêlée of struggling white breakers, charging about in every direction, head-butting one another. Outside, the surface was deadly smooth. The neatly-folded swimming trunks in my rucksack felt somehow irrelevant as I stood by the shore, feeling a very tiny figure, unable to take my eyes away from the epicentre of the vortex. It seemed scarcely credible that a swimmer could have made this crossing from Jura to Scarba.

Deakin wants to swim it. He says, “The whirlpool and the gulf were the quintessence of the wildness of Jura.” The whirlpool both fascinates him and scares him. He decides not to swim it. “I had to face the fact that I wasn’t going to swim the Corryvreckan, at least not on this occasion.” He leaves Jura with his spirits “more than a little dashed.” He resolves to return one day and try again.

Deakin’s spirits soon revive. In one of my favorite parts – Chapter 31 (“A Mill-race”) – he travels to Norfolk in search of a pool on the River Bure. The pool is called John’s Water. He finds it near a solitary mill cottage by a twin-arched red brick bridge. “A vigorous mill-race sped through one of the arches, darting its turbulence far out into a wide black pool which whirled evenly between dense banks of weeds and watercress.” Deakin sheds his clothes, dons his trunks, and wades into the icy water. He writes,

The fine gravel bed was shallow at first, then shelved deeper into the mill-pond. I plunged in and was soon out of my depth, swimming with the eddy up towards the mill-race where it spouted from the bridge. Then I launched myself into it and shot downriver into the weed-carpeted shallows. I swam on, in water that reached halfway up my thighs if I stood up, much as ice reaches halfway up a champagne bottle in a bucket. The river was embroidered with such vivid green braids of water buttercup that I half expected to meet Ophelia lying on the bottom, garlanded unseasonably in its white flowers. I was swimming down an ice-floe, but it was so clear, so sweet, so lush that I soon warmed to the cold and paddled and waded back up through the eddies, gathering watercress as I went. This was of the best crops of wild, untutored cress I had ever seen, let alone picked. It banked up along the dusky river like green cumulus clouds. I circled the pool twice more, shooting the rapids of the mill-race, crazed with the opiate cocktail the brain and body must have sluiced into my frozen veins.

I love that “champagne bottle in a bucket” image. Deakin’s words call up pictures. He’s a great writer – active, direct, specific, vibrant, sensuous. Waterlog is his masterpiece. In future posts, I’ll explore it further. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Lawrence Osborne’s splendid The Wet and the Dry.