If we start with the calendar, and the markers of the world’s reawakening, we can go deeper into joy with the beauty our world possesses. I will single out two examples which have brought joy to my own life, one of colour and one of form.
I have never seen it actually remarked upon, but it is clear that the earth did not have to be beautiful for humans to evolve; we could have had a planet which perfectly well sustained us with air and water and food and shelter, without offering us aspects of itself which also lift the spirits and catch at the heart. For example, for a substantial part of the time that life has existed, the land surfaces of the earth were very likely to have been just one colour, the colour of the plants which from about 450 million years ago began to cover the ground, gradually becoming taller and forming forests. They were green, and so the earth, almost certainly, was green too. Many shades of green, perhaps. But green. For maybe 300 million years, give or take the odd epoch. Yet then the time came when some plants began to use insects instead of the wind to move their pollen around, and evolved reproductive organs with brightly coloured petals to advertise their presence and catch the insects’ eyes, just as the magnolia did – and in a great outburst of beauty, flowers were born, and exploded in size and shape and colour and number. While the ancient seed plants without flowers, like the conifers and the cycads, now total only about a thousand species across the world, there are more than three hundred and fifty thousand plants whose reproductive systems are floral.
The emergence of flowering plants was one of the great revolutions of life on earth, but it didn’t have to happen, and certainly, nothing said it had to happen before we came along: we might well be living happily – in so far as we can live happily at all – in an all-green world still, and perhaps we would not miss what we had never had. As it is, most of us take the existence of flowers wholly for granted, save for the occasional perceptive soul such as the novelist Iris Murdoch, who had one of her characters say (in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, in 1970): ‘People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.’
They very well might. It is a peculiar property of the earth that it offers us beauty as well as the means to survive, but it is also a wondrous property, and it greatly moves us – as behaviourally modern humans, anyway. Hence over about forty thousand years we have steadily formalised our appreciation and our celebration of it, in what we have come to call art, from Lascaux to Leonardo. Until, that is, the last century. In the last hundred years or so, with the advent of modernism, a new artistic philosophy for an industrial age (and also for a world whose optimism had been irreparably fractured by the First World War), many of our society’s high cultural elites have consciously rejected the primacy of beauty, seeing its veneration as outmoded and complacent, and holding that the true purpose of art should be to challenge preconceptions; and they have largely forgotten all about, or simply ignored, where beauty comes from in the first place, which is the natural world.
In more recent decades the process has gone even further, and beauty has become suspect. I spent the middle years of my life watching a novel notion take shape in my culture, and gather force: the undermining of the idea of excellence. My early years were lived in a world where the worth of excellence seemed to be taken for granted by everybody across the political spectrum: it was a cornerstone of the post-war meritocracy, as indeed it had been a cornerstone of European civilisation since classical Greece. But things have changed. In the last quarter of a century two opposing political visions have prevailed in two different sectors of our society. In economics, the vision of the free market, the vision of the Right, has carried all before it; while in social policy, the key idea of the Left, that of egalitarianism, has won no less signal a victory. Yet this is not egalitarianism as in equality of opportunity, a political concept at least as old as the American Declaration of Independence in 1776; this is a new egalitarianism, as in equality of outcome. The key idea is that there should be no more losers – not hard to sympathise with that – but therefore the corollary is that there should be no more winners, either. In anything. No more excellence. No more elites. So a concept, say, which has been central to European poetry since the troubadours of Provence began it all in the eleventh century, the praise of feminine beauty, more or less ceases to be valid, because it is seen as offensive to women who may not be thought beautiful, or it is seen as patronising to women who may have many gifts other than accidental beauty. If not invalid, at the very least such praise becomes questionable. Quite suddenly. Just like that. Petrarch should try singing the praises of his Laura today, and her beautiful eyes, and see if he gets published.
I am not making a stand against this development. I am not even suggesting it is wrong, or bad. I am merely saying that it has undeniably happened, and it is noteworthy. Beauty has in some quarters become bound up in ideology, it has become associated with privilege, it is seen as the plaything of those who have greater advantages, and I have found myself wondering (only in idle moments, of course) if the day might not come when to express open and unqualified admiration for an orchid, say – I mean for its beauty, its elegance and its glamour, all qualities many orchids undeniably possess – might be thought inappropriate . . .
Probably not. But there is no denying that the veneration of the beauty of nature, which Wordsworth made the fount of his philosophy, has largely ceased to figure in high culture since modernism contemptuously swept it aside; and modernism’s triumph was of course comprehensive, in painting and sculpture, in music and in poetry. In the early part of the twentieth century, for example, there was a substantial group of English poets collectively known as the Georgians who wrote extensively about nature and were read by large audiences; some were quite good, some were not, but all except one were consigned to lasting oblivion by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922 and the modernist revolution which followed (the exception, of course, being the wonderful Edward Thomas, who was anyway very much more than a ‘Georgian nature poet’). We retain the legacy of those attitudes. So beauty in general and the natural beauty of the earth in particular have gone largely unsanctioned as objects of relevance by the cultural elites of the twentieth and now of the twenty-first century, and we hear little of them from those quarters; and yet, of course, many ordinary people who do not feel they must be aligned with prevailing cultural modes of thought have been drawn to the beauty of nature as much as people ever were, and I am one of them. Let me tell you about a wood. Five times in the one week, I went to this wood. Five separate trips, on five successive days. And each time, after the first time, I stopped at the gate, I paused before entering. I savoured the moment. It felt like the minute before sex, with a new lover who is making ready – the elevated heartbeat, the skin-prickle, the certainty of impending pleasure – but it was even more than that, it was the anticipation of a sort of ecstasy, at beholding what the wood contained, hidden in its depths, which was something truly exceptional, as exceptional as a crashed flying saucer, I found myself thinking . . . Each time I stopped at the gate I said to myself, I know what is in there . . .
It was a blue.
It was a blue that shocked you.
It was a blue that made you giddy.
It was a blue that flowed like smoke over the woodland floor, so that the trees appeared to be rising out of it, a blue which was not solid like a blue door might be solid but constantly morphing in tone with the light and the shade, now lilac, now cobalt, a blue which was gentle but formidably strong, so intense as to be mesmerising: at some moments it was hard to believe it was composed of flowers. But that was the beauty and the joy of the bluebells, their floral richness and their profusion, a dozen blue bell-heads nodding on every stem, a hundred thousand stems pressing together in every glade until it ceased to be plants, it was just an overwhelming incredible blueness at the bottom of a wood.
They make a remarkable phenomenon, bluebell woods: you enter and are amazed. They are one of the specialities of the natural world in Britain – the home of the flower is the damp Atlantic fringe of Europe and we have more of them than anywhere else – but of course they are not just a speciality, they are a glory, one of the two supremely beautiful habitats of my native land. In a countryside razed by the farmers in the Great Thinning, denuded of its former wealth of living things, they offer a miraculous, and perhaps the most magnificent, survival of abundance; the very profusion of the flowers, packed tightly together over wide areas, and always in descriptions prompting words such as sheets, carpets, swathes, is a major part of the attraction. But for me, it is not the key part, for the same effect can sometimes be seen with sheets of snowdrops, or with carpets of wood anemones, or with swathes of ramsons (wild garlic), all of which are stunning yet would not draw me back, I am sure, for five days in a row. The key attraction is something else. It is the blue.
When people interested in aesthetics discuss beauty nowadays, and try to get to the heart of it, it seems to me they seldom stress colour; they tend to put much more emphasis on harmony, as in harmony of proportion, certainly in areas such as architecture or the human form. I fully see the force of this and would in no way dissent from it; I would only say that for me personally, colour in nature has an allure which is compelling, and the more striking the hue, the more exceptional and wondrous a place the natural world seems to be. Sometimes this can be very simple, as with the large copper butterfly, which died out in Britain in the nineteenth century, was reintroduced to Woodwalton Fen in Cambridgeshire in the twentieth, and sadly, died out again; but you can see it (and I have) in continental Europe. The large copper male bears four wings of the most lustrous bright orange. Nothing intricate: simply that. The purest, most saturated orange you can possibly conceive of; indeed, it may be more than you can conceive of, which is perhaps the source of the delight when you eventually set eyes on it, as your sense of what the world can contain is suddenly enlarged. In fact, nature’s ability to generate colours and colour combinations you have never seen before is endless, and that is part of the thrill, part of the joy of the beauty of the earth. If, as seems likely, for 300 million years the land was just one tone, green, then look at what we have now: there are those 350,000 and more species of wild flowers, as well as 200,000 butterflies and moths with painted wings and above a million other insects, 10,000 birds, 10,000 reptiles and 7,000 amphibians, virtually all of them using colour to differentiate themselves, not to mention perhaps 8,000 species of brilliantly bright coral reef fish. Could we ever list all their colours?
We would start, of course, with the eleven basic colour terms in English (ordered hierarchically according to the Berlin-Kay hypothesis): the black and the white; the red, the yellow, the green and the blue; the brown, the purple, the pink, the orange, and the grey. But that doesn’t remotely get it. What about the scarlet, the russet, the violet and the olive? The crimson, the sulphur, the indigo, and the emerald? What about the magenta and the turquoise, the ivory and the aquamarine, the lavender and the maroon, the coral and the mauve? As the gradations become more refined, so they seem to stretch in a line into a misty distance of subtlety – terracotta, lime, amethyst, fawn, jasmine, tawny, amber, cerise, butterscotch, mahogany, teal, beige, oyster, cerulean, ox-blood, fulvous, vermillion, tourmaline, gamboge – not just glowing singly but in heart-stopping combinations, in their patterns bold and patterns delicate, in their stripes and their spots and their cross-hatching . . . All of them, and so many more which we do not even have names for, are there in the natural world. Colour is its ultimate abundance.
They are there, of course, for a reason: they are functional. They have evolved through Darwinian natural selection purely to enhance survivability in their host organisms in a whole series of ways, from making them conspicuous to making them blend into the background, from making them frightening to predators to making them desirable to potential mates, from making them appear fit and dominant to making them appear poisonous . . . Yet for us this, the instrumental side of it all, which is fascinating, had to be uncovered by science, by evolutionary biology. It is not what we humans, possessed of an aesthetic sense, instinctively take in when we look at a creature like the Jersey tiger moth; we do not see that its black and cream striped forewings are camouflage to break up its outline and its blue-spotted crimson underwings are there to be flashed in the startled face of a predator to give the moth an extra millisecond to get away: we just see that it is gorgeous. And so with flowers, and butterflies, and birds, and other organisms without number: they have their colour functionality; we have our joy in them.
It is part of our great fortune in finding ourselves on a planet that did not have to be beautiful for us to evolve on it, but turned out to be beautiful beyond what, in a monochrome world, we might ever imagine. Let me take just one example of a group of organisms I do not think we could invent, in their sheer colour diversity: the wood-warblers of North America. Although unrelated to the warblers of the Old World, such as our chiffchaff and willow warbler, these have co-evolved to occupy a similar ecological niche, as small insect gleaners of the treetops; yet whereas our birds are by and large plain-looking, dun creatures, mainly brown and olive-green – they do their signalling by song rather than appearance – the fifty or so warbler species of America display a range of flamboyant colour and patterning which is quite unparalleled (at least, with the male birds in their springtime breeding plumage). It can often be seen as variations on a theme, such as a black throat with this or a striped back with that, and the colours of this and that are intense – rufous, gold, sky-blue, dove-grey, flaming orange, navy, chestnut – juxtaposed in plumage arrangements which are often startling and make an incredible feast for the eyes. After my first, astonished experience of them, a few years ago, I asked a leading American ornithologist, Greg Butcher, then director of conservation for the National Audubon Society, and a plumage expert, how even natural selection could have produced such scarcely conceivable variety. He said: ‘Well, first there was selection for colour; then there was selection for difference; and then the palette was allowed to wander’ – which I thought was a charming idea. And how that palette has wandered! To give a single detailed example, the magnolia warbler, the breeding springtime male, has a grey crown, a white eyebrow, black cheeks, and a yellow throat – that’s just his head – and then a black back, white wing-patches and a yellow belly marked with thick black stripes. And he’s far from the most spectacular: witness the golden-winged warbler, or the prothonotary warbler, which is even more golden, or the black-throated blue warbler, or especially the blackburnian warbler, which below its wings of black and white has underparts of such powerful, passionate orange that American birders have nicknamed it the firethroat. They are fragments of a rainbow, these birds, pieces of a painting, they seem like elements of a great meta-species; their coming, when they migrate from their wintering grounds in Central and South America to breed in the boreal forests of the USA and Canada, represents what is most exceptional, of all that is exceptional, about America’s spring, and I have thrilled to see them, even in New York’s Central Park, where I once watched an American redstart, one of the most exquisite of them all, a giant black and orange butterfly of a bird, hovering round the trees a few yards from the tourist-thronged Strawberry Fields memorial to John Lennon, shot dead outside the Dakota Building across the road.
No, we could not have invented America’s warblers: it is nature we need, to come up with such endless diversity of tint and tone. And yet, breathtaking though it is, I think I am drawn most of all to the intense single colours the natural world sometimes offers, such as the large copper’s saturated orange or the pure white of some waterbirds such as egrets, fresh snow against the background of a greeny-brown marsh, or the lipstick scarlet of poppies, or the purple flash along the flanks of rainbow trout, or, indeed, the blue of the bluebells in the wood to which, that springtime (it wasn’t very long ago), I returned for five days in succession.
It was the blue which drew me back. I know I am more drawn to blue than to any other colour. Let me give some examples, leaving bluebells for the moment to one side. Two other blue flowers also move me greatly: one dark blue, one pale. The dark blue is the cornflower, prominent among the plants exterminated from the countryside by Farmer Giles with his unkickable herbicide habit. I have seen far more of them in Normandy than I ever have in England; in France les bleuets are held in special affection, as they are the flowers associated with the French soldiers who fought in the trenches in the First World War, the Poilus, just as in Britain the scarlet poppies remain the symbol of their English equivalents, the Tommies. The particular aspect of cornflowers which attracts me is that they seem to glow, such is the depth of their colouring – it is indigo, really – but to glow with dark rather than with light, almost as if they are throbbing with darkness and shedding it; and when I got to know them, in mid life, this quality suddenly triggered in me the memory of a forgotten poem I had read and loved as a teenager, which actually articulates the precise idea, hypnotically, almost as an incantation. It is D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Bavarian Gentians’:
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom,
ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Lawrence asking the flower to lead him down to the underworld may be seen, if you wish, as prefiguring his own death (the poem was written near the end of his life when he was ill with the tuberculosis that was to kill him), but the truly lovely invocation of ‘blue darkness’ saves it from any hint of the morose or the morbid. And whenever I see cornflowers now, they glow with that added layer of meaning for me, which Lawrence’s poem has infused into my mind: they too might be torches to the underworld.
But if cornflowers are about darkness, the other blue flower I love, the harebell, is right at the opposite end of the spectrum: it is noted for its pallor. In fact, the paleness of harebells is part of their attraction, which is about delicacy. Occasionally confused with bluebells – they are of similar size, but whereas the blue-bell is a hyacinth, related to irises and orchids, the harebell is a campanula or bell-flower, distantly related to the daisies – they are flowers of the end of summer rather than of the springtime, and while the bluebell’s massed ranks are overpowering and unmissable, harebells can be overlooked. Sometimes you find them in small clumps; often they’re just in ones and twos. Skimpy, skittish things, they are altogether frailer plants than bluebells; while the latter, growing in the rich damp soil of a woodland, have a fat sturdy stem which is bursting with sap, harebells, which flourish on dry open ground – I first got to know them on sand dunes – have a stalk which is just a wire. The bell-like azure flower on top of it could be made from tissue paper; it might have been cut out and pasted together by a child in primary school. This frailty means that it picks up the slightest puff of wind, quivering and nodding and catching the light in a continuous flicker. Christina Rossetti wrote:
Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth . . .
The frailty and the flickering are among the points people notice immediately about the flower: a light show in the wind, a friend of mine once said.
(Christina Rossetti, by the way, was not the only nineteenth-century woman poet to refer to harebells; there is also a hare-bell poem by the American Emily Dickinson, Rossetti’s exact contemporary – they were born within a week of each other in December 1830 – which is so unusual and forceful, especially in the shock of the minor but unmistakable erotic charge of the opening, that I cannot resist quoting it:
Did the Harebell loose her girdle
To the lover Bee
Would the Bee the Harebell hallow
Much as formerly?
Did the ‘Paradise’ – persuaded –
Yield her moat of pearl,
Would the Eden be an Eden,
Or the Earl – an Earl?
It might take a bit of deciphering, but what Dickinson is saying with her characteristic compression is that things which are cherished because they are pursued, may be cherished no longer, once attained.)
The deepest attraction of the harebell, however, is not so much the flickering light show as it is the combination of its colour with its timing. Its flimsy, pale sky-blue stands out because when it appears, at the end of the summer, much of the life has gone out of the landscape; the grasses have yellowed and browned, the birdsong is silenced, the swifts have departed and the trout no longer rise. There are flowers in bloom, such as the pinkish-brown hemp agrimony, and harsh yellow ragwort, but somehow they are part of a palette of exhaustion. The calendar says what are you complaining about, it’s still summer, but I’ve always felt that summer really ends about 15 August, and after that it feels like post-coital depression in the natural world – a sort of in-between nothingness before the arrival of autumn, with its own sharp identity. Into this time of melancholy (for me, at least) pops Campanula rotundifolia: on heaths or dunes, grasslands or hillsides, the translucent blue bells catch the wind, catch the light, and catch the heart, with a colour which somehow seems to speak of the future rather than the past, even though everything around is starting to fade; they give the landscape a last flare of life at the point when the year begins to wither and die.
Both of these blues draw me powerfully, the pale defiant one and the dark pulsating one, yet neither can compare with the bluebells, for there is another blue which goes beyond and has a quite electrifying effect on me and I imagine on other people too, and which the bluebells contain, in their shade-shifting: it is the extreme, dazzling blue which nature very occasionally offers, a tone in which the basic colour intensifies itself more than any other colour seems able to, so that it becomes one of the most remarkable visual phenomena of the natural world. I think of it simply as brilliant blue. The exemplar of it, for me anyway, is the blue of the morpho butterflies of South America, but it can be found in Britain in two other organisms besides the bluebells, both winged, one of which is a butterfly of our own, the Adonis blue, something of a morpho in miniature: it has the same lustrous brightness, the same glossy radiant sheen, on a much smaller scale. The seven blue butterfly species found in Britain are all pleasing, in fact, and one of the most attractive is the common blue, Polyommatus icarus, with wings of an iridescent lilac, which I feel is probably under-appreciated because of its dismissive name – were it called the Icarus blue, say, people might cherish it more – but the Adonis blue edges it, in its brilliance. The first time I ever saw one, I was called over by a friend: the butterfly was resting on the turf, wings upright and closed, showing only the spotted brown undersides, and I crouched down and looked, heart beating, as he touched it with his fingertip, and there was a tiny explosion of blueness.
The other species is the kingfisher. The key point about kingfishers is that they bear two blues. One is the glowing greenish-blue of the folded wings, the colour seen in standard illustrations of the perching birds: it makes a striking and splendid contrast with the rich chestnut-orange of the underparts. But it is the other blue which takes your breath away. This is the blue of the kingfisher’s back, and it is the blue you see in real life, rather than on the painted teapot or the greetings card, because your first sight of the bird is almost certain to be of it zooming away from you, and when its wings are outstretched, the back feathers are exposed and there it is.
It’s a blue so bright it appears to be lit from within.
It’s brighter than the sky.
This is not on any colour chart I have ever seen in a paint shop, and I feel that, as with the large copper, many people seeing this for the first time might have a sort of elated experience, which is that their sense of what the world can contain is actually expanded. That was certainly the case with my son Seb, when the two of us went for an evening walk while on holiday in Normandy, when he was seventeen. We were strolling along the side of the river which runs through the Perche, the Huisne, at an isolated spot near one of the many Percheron Renaissance manors, in this case the Manoir de la Vove; in the gathering dusk its fairy-tale towers stood out against the evening sky. The river ran between high banks and as the gloaming deepened, a blue light suddenly shot along the dark water beneath us and Seb pulled up sharply and exclaimed: ‘What was that?’ I told him; he was fascinated. It was a moment Seamus Heaney captured precisely with a line tossed off in a song of haunting music:
I met a girl from Derrygarve
And the name, a lost potent musk,
Recalled the river’s long swerve,
A kingfisher’s blue bolt at dusk . . .
Seb’s is not a generation which looks at the natural world, but the blue bolt at dusk stopped him dead in his tracks.
As did the bluebells with me. In that wood, in that spring not long ago, for five days in succession I was struck dumb by the beauty of the earth. For five days I went back purposely to look at that colour, that living colour, because when I accidentally came across it, it was at its peak, and I knew that soon it would fade. Day after day after day after day after day. And I told no one. I think I was . . . what? Ashamed? No, not at all; but I am influenced by prevailing cultural norms as much as the next person, and I suppose I felt that declaiming about five successive days of bluebell-peeping would be regarded as eccentric? Or something? Yet I was drawn back there ineluctably, to glut my senses on colour. Without telling a soul. It felt almost like being part of the underground . . .
For if the beauty of nature is not high in official cultural favour, as we set out into the twenty-first century, it still holds its magnetism for countless unpolemical minds, with a force which strongly suggests it is rooted in our underlying bond with the natural world, and that culture is being trumped by instinct. That is certainly the case with me. I do not care a fig that modernism may have cast beauty aside, and that the legacy of the rejection may be with us today; to me, the beauty of the natural world retains its joy-giving power and its importance undiminished by artistic, cultural, or philosophical fashion – indeed, its importance is increased immeasurably by the fact that now it is mortally threatened.
And as for blue, and its special attraction for me, I think this is instinct trumping culture too; I know I am drawn to it beyond other colours, but I cannot see that I was socialised to be so in the course of my own life. If we accept that the human imagination was formed by our interactions with the natural world, over the fifty thousand generations, then I think that my blue-love is in there somewhere; that I probably have, planted within me, in the genes, a bond with a colour which was for our wandering ancestors the most predominant hue of all, stretching over their heads so far and wide that eventually they called it heaven.
•
The beauty of the earth, of course, goes far beyond colour. It is found just as much in form, both in its landscapes and in the life it hosts: in the harmony of vistas, the majesty of mountains, the intimate charm of valleys, and the changing light of the sun upon them all; in the killer grace of leopards, the elegance of antelopes, the dash and fire of falcons, or the poise, as I have said, of wading birds. I admire all of these, but there is one form, one type of landscape feature in particular whose beauty has given me joy, and that is rivers. Not just any rivers, though: a specific group of rivers, in a specific place, whose beauty is such that, to me, it almost seems to reach beyond the material world into the realm of the ideal.
I start from a point of prejudice in their favour: I have loved rivers all my life, or at least since I was entranced, at the age of eight, by the first threatened species I encountered, those gnomes of BB’s Folly Brook. Their amiable watercourse with its unending murmurings and plops and splashes, its weirs and watermills as it swelled and widened, its hidden anchorages and overgrown islands, was very much the fifth main character of The Little Grey Men, especially when Dodder, Baldmoney, and Sneezewort, accompanied by their lost and now found brother, Cloudberry descend it towards the sea, desperately seeking a new life, in the book’s sequel, Down the Bright Stream. Ever after, I have been unable to see a river, any river, without a quickening of the spirit – if I cross a river on any journey I want to know its name, and if at all possible, stop on the bridge and gaze into its currents – and yet, this is such an automatic reaction that as I have got older, I have wondered if perhaps this fascination too may be hard-wired, if this too may come from long before my childhood, from the hunter-gatherers; if perhaps the story of the Folly Brook may have switched on a pre-existing longing, one which was already there, deep in the tissues.
For although we may increasingly take them for granted the more urban and enclosed our lives become, rivers constitute one of the key elements of human existence. They did not have to be: just as we could have easily evolved on an earth without flowers, so we could have done on a planet without flowing water, and it takes an effort of the imagination to register what a singular phenomenon that actually is, eternally changing and eternally the same; we need Heracleitus to remind us, that no one steps into the same river twice. But being such notable entities, and being there in our evolution from the beginning, rivers in due course became for humans part of the very nature of things, and I remember the thrill of recognition I felt when I first saw this truth nobly expressed by Norman Maclean, the American professor of English and fly fisherman whose autobiography became a celebrated Hollywood film. ‘Eventually,’ Maclean wrote, ‘all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.’
So rivers are as much a part of where we come from as the sky is; but there is a discrimination to be made. They divide into two distinct categories: the giant rivers of the world, and all the others. The giant rivers seem to me to be a separate sort of creature from the rest, not only geographically, but also in our cultural responses to them, for they are much more than scaled-up streams; as water bodies on which voyagers may travel for thousands of miles, they are really lengthwise oceans. Go to the encontro das aguas, the meeting of the waters near Manaus in Brazil, where the Solimões and the Rio Negro unite to form the Amazon, their brown and black currents flowing separately side by side, and you will find that the Amazon has a horizon, just as an ocean does, and indeed, the giant rivers of the world defied exploration more than the oceans ever did: Europeans found the far side of the Atlantic long before they located the source of the Nile. It is the giant rivers, of course, which in early history most exercised the human imagination. Many of the first great civilisations coalesced around them: Egypt with the Nile, Mesopotamia with the Tigris and the Euphrates, India with the Indus and the Ganges, China with the Yellow River and the Yangtze. These stupendous watercourses were miraculously life-giving, but they could be furiously life-threatening; they could bestow riches but they could destroy in anger – the deadly Yellow River most of all – and the peoples who depended on them naturally made them deities to be worshipped, thanked, and placated; even in the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot, who grew up in St Louis on the banks of the Mississippi, could not help but see his colossal childhood waterway as ‘a strong brown god’.
I have felt that awe of the Mississippi too, and of other giants such as the Niger, from the air at Timbuktu a great green ribbon of rice paddies snaking through Mali’s yellow-brown semi-desert, at its surface the bearer of enormous painted canoes, the pirogues, symbols of its own enormous dimensions. But awe is not the same as love; and the rivers which I have loved have without exception been the others, the lesser ones, those on a human rather than a superhuman scale. How lame is English, for once, not to have separate names for them! French does it, naturally; a giant river is a fleuve, a lesser river a rivière, but in English they are pitifully lumped together, so the 2,900-mile-long Congo and the 85-mile-long Avon of Shakespeare are categorised by the same term. Let me be clear, then, that henceforth, in speaking of rivers, it is the Avons I mean, not the Congos; it is the Avons which have captured my heart.
The reason is, I think, that they are not there to be feared and placated, the smaller rivers, they are there to be befriended; and having my strong sense that all rivers are special anyway, like all butterflies are special, and that their individual differences are simply a magnificent bonus – as are their names – I have spent much time river-befriending, and always been rewarded, and I have fallen in love with many of them, from the Hodder, astonishing you that Lancashire, cradle of the Industrial Revolution, can contain such a jewel, to the Dysynni, dark and brooding and isolated under Cader Idris; I have loved bully-boy rivers such as the Helmsdale in Sutherland and sweet shy rivers such as the Lyd in Devon, and in particular, small rivers with literary associations, like Housman’s Teme, or the Taw and the Torridge of Henry Williamson (and of Ted Hughes, too), or Dylan Thomas’s Aeron (he and Caitlin named their daughter Aeronwy), or Seamus Heaney’s Moyola, flowing down from the Sperrins into Lough Neagh, the river of the ‘kingfisher’s blue bolt’ song quoted above, ‘pleasuring beneath alder trees’.
They are all sources of delight, but the rivers which have given me joy, joy as I have tried to define it – the group of rivers whose beauty is such that it sometimes seems otherworldly . . . well, they are elsewhere. But not in some Shangri-la. You can find them on a map. Although it’s a fairly uncommon one. You might have to order it. It is ‘the 10-mile map’ – the British Geological Survey’s geological map of Britain, at the scale of 10 miles to the inch, which shows the country not in terms of administrative regions, or landscape features, but of the underlying rocks. The various strata are variously coloured, for differentiation rather than resemblance (although the dull terracotta which marks the Triassic sandstone of the Wirral where I grew up is remarkably similar to the stone itself), and what excites me whenever I unfold it is the brilliant band of green splashed diagonally across England from the south-west, at bottom left, to the north-east, at top right.
It is the chalk. The green on the map represents the soft white rock of the chalk hills, stretching from Dorset up through Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Berkshire, then into the Chilterns, and on to Norfolk, Lincolnshire, and the Yorkshire Wolds; it is formed from the remains of trillions of tiny marine organisms which filled the warm seas when the dinosaurs ruled on land, and whose shells settled on the seabed when they died; it is pure calcium carbonate, and is one of the great givers of beauty and wildlife richness. Often referred to as downs or downland, the chalk hills epitomise the tender charm of the southern English countryside. Their form is gentle and flowing (like the contours of the human body, it has been said) and quite unlike the paternalistic craggy dominance of the granite mountains of Wales and Scotland. Even more, they host incomparable bio-diversity, from the flower carpet of the short-cropped downland turf filled with scented wild thyme and horseshoe vetch and milkwort and fairy flax and orchids in abundance, to the butterfly parade of dark green fritillaries and marbled whites and silver-spotted skippers and blues galore, and to the birdlife from stone curlews to skylarks: on the chalk grassland of Salisbury Plain, for example, there are fourteen thousand pairs of skylarks, even today, and in spring they pour down a shower of song which seems as much a part of the air as the wind . . . But most of all, the chalk gives us its waters.
If I had to single out something to represent the beauty of the earth, one aspect alone, it would be the chalk streams of southern England. Their loveliness is dreamlike. They are small-to medium-sized rivers, but anglers long ago christened them the chalk streams, and such they have remained. Anglers have been their champions, their guardians, and their celebrants, fly-fishermen most of all, as they are regarded as the perfect trout streams, and in the literature of fly fishing, which is substantial, two of them occupy pride of place, the Test and the Itchen, both in Hampshire: on them Victorian anglers developed the technique of fishing the dry fly, which became almost a cult. A few more are celebrated in these writings: the Frome and the Piddle in Dorset, the Wylye and the Avon in Wiltshire (not Shakespeare’s Avon but the one which flows through Salisbury), the Kennet and the Lambourn in Berkshire, the Chess and the Misbourne in the Chiltern Hills. Although there are many more smaller streams, including numerous rivulets you could leap across – the Environment Agency has counted 161 of them in total on the chalk belt running up the country – it is this handful of medium-sized rivers whose beauty sets them apart.
Their most striking aspect is the water itself: it is the cleanest and clearest river water on the planet, the customary epithet being ‘gin-clear’. It is of a clarity to take you aback: the river bottom, which often in chalk streams is a lustrous golden gravel, is so perfectly visible it is as if you were seeing it through a single pane of polished glass. The reason is the geology. Because the chalk is permeable, it allows rain to soak through it to underground reservoirs or aquifers, and simultaneously filters it; when springs return the water to the river, all the impurities have been removed: the water is immaculate. This process allows for the chalk streams’ second key characteristic, their constancy of flow. When rain runs off the land directly, as into so-called spate rivers, the water level can rapidly rise and fall; but because the chalk streams are spring-fed, their level is unvarying and their flow is stately, never sluggish, never torrential, with an elegance all of its own (the Test is like the Loire in miniature).
Thus, there is a beauty of essentials. This is further enhanced by the life the chalk streams are filled with, from the profusion of aquatic wild flowers above, led by the ranunculus or water crowfoot, the buttercup decorating the surface with its white stars and emerald leaves, to the fish underneath, such as that most vivacious and animated of fish, the brown trout. Salmo trutta. The salmon’s junior partner. Exquisite, with no need to be gaudy like something from the tropical coral reefs: this is the restrained splendour of the north, boreal beauty, streamlined beyond the dreams of art deco. Ever watchful, ever on the alert. Eternally a-quiver, holding position in the flow (‘On the fin’, anglers say). And so marvellously visible in the gin-clear water, rising to take the upwing river flies on the surface, above all the mayfly, the largest and the prettiest, butterfly-sized and muslin-winged, living most of its life as a larva in the gravel of the riverbed and then hatching in late spring to mate and die in a single day. Thousands of them. The males perform a courtship dance, gathering in swarms and bouncing up and down, twelve to fifteen feet in the air; the approaching females are grabbed, and inseminated, and then lay their eggs in the river and expire in the surface film. And when that happens on any sort of scale, especially in the evening, the trout go mad: they attack the dying insects in rocket-like surges, rising to lacerate the surface in paroxysms of greed. Splash after splash. A watercourse pulsing with life and death.
I discovered the chalk streams thirty years ago from walking alongside the River Chess in the Chilterns, and as I began to explore them and to realise what they were, I was astonished, first at their phenomenal, head-turning beauty, and then at how minimally they seemed to be appreciated, outside the culture of angling. In fly fishing and its literature, these rivers were given their due, but beyond that, they might have been on the moon. Poets did not sing them. Painters did not paint them. Writers did not write about them, even nature writers who wrote about many aspects of the countryside, unless they happened to be fishermen too, like Viscount Grey of Falloden – he who remarked that the lights were going out all over Europe – who wrote as lyrically about the Itchen as he did about birdsong. The chalk streams seemed, and still seem, to have no place in the national consciousness. To me, they stand without question alongside the bluebell woods – these are the two supremely beautiful features of the natural world in Britain – but I have no sense that people widely share this view, or that they share my feeling that rivers like the Test and the Itchen are great national monuments which should be cherished as much as our medieval cathedrals.
It seemed remarkable, that they were so disregarded; but I didn’t mind. I knew what I was looking at. I felt as if I were in on a secret that only anglers knew about, and I began to devour the literature (books like Harry Plunket Greene’s Where the Bright Waters Meet or John Waller Hills’ A Summer on the Test) until at one stage I became a near obsessive, travelling to see them all. For example, I have followed the courses of all the principal tributaries of the Test – the Bourne Rivulet, the Dever, the Anton, the Wallop Brook and the Dun – driving down lanes, peering over bridge parapets, walking by water wherever I could. And gradually, as I got to know them, I began to understand what was truly exceptional about the chalk streams – even, to employ the much abused word, what was unique. It wasn’t just about beauty, it was more than that. It was about purity.
I would contend that the archetype of pollution, as a modern phenomenon, is the polluted river. Not that the pollution of standing water bodies, or of the oceans, or of the land, is one whit less to be concerned about; but somehow I feel we have in our minds, when pollution is spoken of, a primary image of flowing waters that have been dirtied or defiled – an image we do not like. Large-scale pollution is fairly new, in historical terms, and is a very much more recent environmental difficulty for the earth than deforestation, say, dating back less than two hundred and fifty years to the Industrial Revolution. In that initial explosion of no-holds-barred capitalism, rivers were the natural world’s first victims, being brought into bondage by the first factories, to provide power and to take away waste. They continued to be sullied and despoiled until the widespread collapse of manufacturing industry in the West in the 1980s, since when, not a few have been cleaned; but throughout the nineteenth and the major part of the twentieth centuries most factories and industrial complexes, and most industrial towns and cities in the western world, had an associated river, which was filthy. Many millions of people will have seen such a water-course. (Now large-scale manufacturing has shifted eastwards, and it is China which is taking river pollution to new heights: alas, poor baiji.)
Yet I do not think people are indifferent to this, even if it does not affect them directly; I think we instinctively find polluted rivers very unpleasant, as a concept as much as an empirical experience. I suggested earlier that we may have an attraction to rivers which lies deep in the genes, a part of the bond of the fifty thousand generations, and if so, then the attraction is clearly to rivers which flowed long before large-scale industrial pollution arrived to blight the earth; to rivers which were pure and could themselves be purifiers, since they could take away human wastes and not be polluted by them, when our numbers were small: these rivers were truly worthy to be cherished. If, then, there is an image of a river buried somewhere in our tissues, and I think there may well be in mine, it is clearly of a wholly untainted one, almost of a Platonic ideal, one that we long for; and thus to see a river despoiled causes distress, even if we can’t quite say why.
But what, in the modern world, could ever match the internal image of purity? What, in mere material existence, can approach the ideal? We might travel the globe over and never find it, and that is very probably what happens with most of us; unless, that is, we chance upon the chalk streams. They come as a shock. For suddenly, the ideal is real; the internal image is matched. It is hard to convey the faultless nature of their water. Indeed, in A Summer on the Test, John Waller Hills, early twentieth-century Conservative politician and fisherman, wrote that one day the water of the Anton, the Test tributary, seemed to him ‘unimaginably pure’. It is not only purer than you have seen before, or purer than you would see anywhere else, it is purer than you would allow yourself to expect or even conceive of, and so it begins almost to seem not part of everyday life, but of some ultimate condition; and the purity of the water casts its glow over the river as a whole, as an entity, and the river too seems to be something other than an everyday river, it seems almost to belong to a higher state of existence.
Hyperbole? You could say so, I suppose. But what can I do, other than speak of my experience? Once, on a May morning a few years ago, I came out on to the banks of the Upper Itchen, at Ovington in Hampshire, and the river with its flowers and willows and the serenity of its flow and its dimpling trout in its matchless, limpid water, all gilded by the sunshine, seemed to possess a loveliness which was not part of this world at all.
Yet it was part of it; and there, once again, was the joy.
•
There is one more river I wish to instance, in looking at the joy we may find in the beauty of the earth, but this case is different, for it’s about failure: it’s about where joy might have been but is not. It’s about a dream which in the end could not be realised; yet I feel the story is worth telling, on many levels, not least as the river is one of the most famous in the world.
It is the Thames: London’s river, and my own, or at least, that’s how I think of it, as I have lived near it for more than twenty years, am fascinated by its history, and ride my bike every week for miles along its towpath, watching its changing waters and its changing moods. It is a handsome as well as a historic river, not least in the part I know best, the eleven-mile stretch from Hampton Court, past Teddington and Richmond to Kew, which runs through a green valley on London’s edge dotted with at least nine great houses or stately homes: this is the nearest thing we have in Britain to the châteaux of the Loire.
Biologically, however, it is no chalk stream. The Thames has suffered from some of the grossest river pollution Britain has ever seen, and two hundred years ago this led to an extinction which bears direct comparison with the current case of the baiji in the Yangtze, that of the Thames salmon. You may not think of the Thames as a very salmony river, yet until the beginning of the nineteenth century it harboured a significant population of Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon, of the great ocean-wandering fish which came back to breed; and although there appears to be no historical basis to the often repeated story that London apprentices got so tired of being fed salmon they had it written into their indentures that they would be served it no more than once a week, there is no doubt that salmon catches from the Thames were substantial, with as many as three thousand fish a year being taken to Billingsgate market, and individual netsmen frequently making sizable hauls: on 7 June 1749, for example, 47 fish were taken in a single day below Richmond Bridge. There were big fish, too, with several records over 50 lbs, while 16 lbs was a good average. It was a solid, self-sustaining salmon run, dating back thousands of years.
Yet in the blink of an eye – in historical terms – it was wiped out. Compared to other cautionary tales of extinction, such as that of the dodo or the great auk, the story of the disappearance of the Thames salmon is unknown to the general public, but it is as egregious an example as any of the terminal effects of mankind’s activities on living things. It was extremely rapid, taking little more than twenty-five years, and pollution was its cause.
For centuries, London’s river had received waste material but had been powerful enough to flush away whatever the inhabitants of the growing city threw into it, and thus it remained more or less ecologically sound. However, a point eventually came when it was overwhelmed. After 1800, as the Industrial Revolution took off, London’s population began a mammoth surge, rising from 960,000 in 1801 (the first national census) to 1.6 million in 1831 and 2.3 million in 1851. Two aspects of this boom were fatal for the salmon of the Thames. The first was the vast increase in the amount of sewage going directly into the river, especially after cesspit overflows and house drains were allowed to be connected to the public sewers (which until then had essentially been drainage ditches) in 1815. London’s human waste, its ‘nightsoil’, which for centuries had been collected by cart and spread on the land as manure, began to pour into the river just as the population exploded, and the process was given a further savage impetus by the contemporary invention of the water closet.
The second was the burgeoning industrialisation of the capital and the consequent discharge of toxic effluent into the river from the factories mushrooming along or near its banks, not least from the new gasworks which were built in increasing numbers after gas lighting of London’s streets began in 1807. The waste discharge from gasworks was of exceptional toxicity, containing a cocktail of noxious substances ranging from carbolic acid to cyanide. With raw sewage slushing in on the one hand and lethal contaminants on the other, the Thames in London started to turn into a great poisonous, stinking ditch.
But there was a third contemporary development which told against Salmo salar tamesiensis, as we might call our beast: this was the building on the river, upstream of London, of pound locks and their associated weirs, to facilitate navigation of heavier and heavier loads to and from the industrialising city. It happened quite quickly. Teddington Lock, which immediately constituted a new limit for the tidal Thames (historically, it had been Staines) was built in 1811, Sunbury in 1812, Chertsey in 1813, and Hampton Court in 1815. These locks and their weirs became formidable barriers to migratory fish trying to get upstream; they also changed the whole nature of the river as the water built up, deepened, and slowed behind them, and the natural gravel shallows in which salmon could spawn silted up and disappeared, or were dredged away.
The salmon were doomed. They could not live in the filthy water; it was much harder to swim up the river out of it; and even if they could, they could not breed. Their headlong demise is graphically illustrated in the melancholy record of salmon taken at Boulter’s Lock, Maidenhead, by the Lovegrove fishing family between 1794 and 1821. In 1801, 66 fish were caught; in 1812, 18; in 1816, 14; in 1817, 5; in 1818, 4; in 1820, 0; in 1822, 2; and that was it. George IV particularly sought a Thames salmon for his coronation feast on 19 July 1821; none could be procured. The last Thames salmon is believed to have been caught in June 1833, cited (although with no location given) in William Yarrell’s A History of British Fishes, published in 1836.
There were no more for a hundred and forty years. After the fish disappeared the pollution of the river continued to worsen, until it finally became insupportable: in July 1858 a heatwave made the smell from the Thames so hideous that Parliament at Westminster was compelled to stop sitting. This famous episode, known as ‘The Great Stink’, led directly to the construction of the modern London sewer system by the engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette. Bazalgette shifted the problem away from central London by building giant interceptor tunnels on either side of the river – the Thames embankments were built to house them – which carried the capital’s sewage eastwards, about a dozen miles downstream of Tower Bridge, to outfalls at Beckton, on the Essex side of the river, and Crossness, in Kent.
But although this relieved Westminster and the City of the worst of it, it merely transferred the pollution somewhere else; the outfalls were not sited far enough downstream for the ebb tide to flush the untreated sewage right out to sea, and it returned on the flood. This massive ‘plug’ of nauseating filth in the lower river proved mortal to any fish in its vicinity. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth the situation continued, and after the war years if anything worsened, until in 1957 a survey carried out by the foremost authority on British fish, Alwyne Wheeler of the Natural History Museum, proved an astonishing point about the fish of the tidal Thames: there weren’t any.
Between Kew in the west and Gravesend in the east, Wheeler established, there were no viable fish populations. This survey severely jolted the public conscience, and after a couple more damning scientific reports on the chemical and biological state of the river, what should have been done years before was finally carried out: from 1964 the Beckton and Crossness sewage works were cleaned up and the effluent from their outfalls treated before discharge, so that its micro-organisms were no longer capable of sucking all the oxygen out of the water, which had been its most damaging characteristic. The effect was virtually immediate. From the mid sixties onwards, fish started to reappear in the river. They were monitored by Alwyne Wheeler, who had the bright idea of asking the power stations along the banks to check on what was being trapped in their cooling water intake screens. Starting with a tadpole fish (a member of the cod family), species after species began to turn up – lampern, sand goby, roach, barbel, John Dory – until by 1974 no fewer than 72 species had been recorded. And then the incredible happened: on 12 November 1974 an 8 lb 12 oz salmon, a hen fish 31 inches in length and four years old, was caught in the intake screens of West Thurrock power station, near Dartford, about sixteen miles below Tower Bridge. Wheeler himself examined it and identified it that day; and that day, the dream was born.
I often cycle up the towpath on the Surrey side of the river from Richmond to Teddington Lock, and cross over, to return down the Middlesex side; and as I push my bike over the foot-bridge I gaze at the weir, the weir that marks the limit of the tidal Thames, and I see in my mind’s eye the flashing silver fish, shouldering its way upstream, driven by the imperious urge to reproduce, driven up and over that foaming barrier, leaping for life . . . what a creature the salmon is! What would you not give to have it back in your river! Would that not offer you joy? Many people thought so, when Alwyne Wheeler pronounced his identification: the gates of possibility seemed to swing open. There was huge excitement, enormous publicity – here was the first Thames salmon for 141 years! – and people’s thoughts almost immediately turned to what might be. Was the river really now so clean that the ancient salmon run might be resurrected? Encouragement was given by two more finds of salmon penetrating further and further upstream: the remains of a 21-inch-long fish found on the foreshore at Dagenham in July 1975, and then – quite remarkably – a fish found dead where the River Mole joins the Thames, at Thames Ditton, on 30 December 1976.
It was remarkable because it was above the tidal limit, that is, above Teddington Lock.
It must have jumped the weir . . .
So the Port of London Authority set up an inquiry to look at migratory fish in the Thames, and when this eventually reported that conditions in the estuary would no longer be an obstacle to returning salmon and sea trout, and there was now a good chance of reintroducing both, and all the stakeholders were duly and fully consulted, and all the relevant committees had met, and all the ‘i’s were dotted and the ‘t’s crossed, in 1979 the Thames Salmon Rehabilitation Scheme was established and the dream became official. I have always thought it a tremendous dream. Rarely can a piece of public policy have enshrined such an exhilarating vision: this legendary, righteous fish, which, with its need for a high dissolved oxygen content in all the fresh water it passes through, is such an icon of aquatic purity, was to be returned to the river as the supreme symbol of the Thames reborn, of a great watercourse brought back to life. This is the fish which speaks to us of Scotland, of Norway, of Iceland and Nova Scotia, of northern wild places which are wholly unspoiled, and London’s river was to host it again. London’s river was to be a salmon river: could ambition be any nobler?
That this did not happen, even after thirty years of trying and the expenditure of a colossal amount of thinking, of devoted effort and of cash, is one of the saddest things I have witnessed in all the struggles to shore up the natural world against the depredations we have made upon it. Yet the first part of the recovery programme was a big success. Its aim was to prove that fish could pass down to the sea through the once impossibly polluted estuary and successfully return back through it. They did, in eye-catching numbers. Smolts – juvenile fish six inches long – stocked in the tideway (that is, below Teddington Lock) were eminently able to come back after a winter or two winters at sea, being captured in the salmon trap specially installed at Molesey weir near Hampton Court. In 1982, 128 returning fish were trapped; in 1986, 176; in 1988, 323; and in 1993, the peak year, 338. This was the period of newspaper headlines about the returning Thames salmon, which reached a climax with the first rod-caught fish, a six-pounder taken by Mr Russell Doig from Staines, in Chertsey Weir pool on 23 August 1983. Mr Doig won the silver cup and £250 prize offered by the Thames Water Authority for the capture, which had earlier been claimed by at least two other anglers, but not awarded (draw your own conclusions . . .). He was pictured in a TWA photo with his rod and his fish (the fish looking stiff from the freezer) in a boat in front of Tower Bridge. It was a staged but unmistakably telling image, which shouted London and shouted salmon, and as such was priceless publicity; yet in so far as it reflected the clean-up of the tideway, the message it was giving out was a true one.
However, the tideway was only half the story. The salmon were returning to spawn. But where? There were no suitable sites left in the main river. After an intense decade of trials, the best potential spawning ground was identified in the upper reaches of a chalk stream tributary of the Thames in Berkshire, the Kennet; attention focused on the gravelly bottoms of an isolated stretch of the Kennet known as the Wilderness Water, where stocking with fry – baby salmon – was begun. Yet from the Wilderness to Tower Bridge was seventy-five miles of river, and this second long passage, above London, proved much harder for the fish to negotiate, each way, than had the seventy-five miles of once polluted estuary, between London and the sea. As soon as stocking began on the spawning grounds, rather than in the tidal river, the number of returning salmon dropped dramatically. Not the least of their problems was that between Teddington Lock and the Wilderness Water were no fewer than thirty-seven weirs. Even though some fish might jump some weirs, from the point of view of the salmon’s supporters, choosing the Wilderness meant that every one of those weirs would have to have a fish pass installed. And so, over a period of fifteen years starting in 1986, this was done at a cost of several million pounds, the money mostly being found by the Thames Salmon Trust, the charity set up specifically to raise it. This seems to me an astonishing and very largely unsung achievement, which climaxed with the opening of the last fish pass to be built on the Kennet, on the weir at Greenham Mill, Newbury, in October 2001.
Even though the experimental restocking of Thames salmon had been continuing for more than twenty years, it was not until this moment that a proper self-sustaining salmon run once again became a real possibility. And yet it has not emerged. No fish, as far as is known, have to this day – thirteen years on, at the time of writing – swum all the way down to the sea after being stocked as fry in the Wilderness Water, and then swum all the way back up and bred in their ‘home’ stream, which was the whole point of the exercise – bar one. A single salmon is known at least to have made the journey each way. It has a name, or, rather, a number. It was found in the salmon trap at Sunbury weir on 14 July 2003 by Darryl Clifton-Dey, the Environment Agency scientist who was running the Thames salmon scheme, a cock fish weighing twelve-and-a-half pounds; it was estimated to have spent two years at sea, and was recognised as a ‘millennium baby’ – one of ten thousand tiny fry stocked in the Wilderness on 9 June 2000. Darryl and his colleagues put a small radio tag on it bearing the number 00476, and released it; and the following November, on the 28th, they picked up its signal in the pool below the weir at Hamstead Marshall – weir number 37, the gateway to the Wilderness Water – thus proving, to their great delight, that the arduous spawning journey for Thames salmon is indeed possible. Even if it hasn’t happened.
But 00476 and the proof of his odyssey – had he gone to Greenland? – were not enough. For another eight seasons the Environment Agency persevered with stocking salmon fry in the Wilderness, but no breeding was observed and only the odd fish returned to the lower Thames each summer; and at length, after the stocking of 2011, the Thames Salmon Rehabilitation Scheme was brought to a close. It had lasted thirty-two years.
Having followed it fairly closely for more than two decades, I have thought a great deal about its failure, about the reasons for it, and about the lessons to be learned.
There is no doubt that over the years of the scheme, circumstances moved against the fish and fresh problems arose, two in particular. One was that the increasing amount of abstraction from the river by water companies to supply their customers in hotter years was making the flow often insufficient to tempt salmon upstream from the estuary, something which may worsen further with climate change; the other, more immediately serious, was that in London itself, Joseph Bazalgette’s ageing sewer system was increasingly discharging raw sewage into the river when heavy rainstorms filled the pipes completely, which led to rapid deoxygenation and mass fish kills. This latter phenomenon has become known as ‘London’s dirty secret’, and in September 2014 the British government authorised a solution for it, the building of a new £4 billion ‘supersewer’ to intercept all the rainfall discharges, which is due to be completed in 2023. Will that help salmon back to the Thames? Perhaps.
The lessons, for me, are about our limits. We grow used to wildlife conservation success stories, of endangered species miraculously brought back: in Britain we have the sea eagle, the lady’s slipper orchid, the large blue butterfly . . . further afield we see the American bison, the Arabian oryx, or what about the Mauritius kestrel, there were only four of those left at one stage and now there are hundreds of them . . . we know we are wrecking nature across the globe, but those of us concerned with conservation have generally tended to feel that if conservationists direct their efforts at saving a specific species, with a fair wind and enough funding, they can usually succeed. Well, not always. The principal lesson of the Thames salmon story, for me, is that we can sometimes damage the natural world too severely for it to be repaired.
Yet more than the lessons, more than the reasons for the failure, what I take away from it is the sadness. It was a dream, perhaps with a hint of the Romantic about it, but an eminently practical one – assuredly it was an inspiring one – and to watch it die is a heavy weight on the heart; although, maybe it is just the project that has died, and not the dream. Certainly, crossing the footbridge over Teddington Lock, pushing my bike, I still see him in my mind’s eye, the silver shadow below bulling his way upstream towards the tumbling water of the weir; and then I also realise something more about the beauty of the earth, as he leaps, that it is found not just in colour, not just in form, but in life itself.