“I went to Wales because the place is stiff with magic …”

Roger Deakin, Waterlog

You know it’s going to be a good weekend when it starts with whiskey at 2am. I don’t even like whiskey but there never was a time like the present.

No time like the present.

That phrase was turning in my head a few weeks ago, when I sat up in bed and said “fuck this, I’ve got a month left in my thirties. I want to go on an adventure every day.”

Joel, still half asleep, murmured something irresolute, but not unwilling.

That day, we went climbing in Ban-y-Gor, a disused limestone quarry perched in a slice of woods in a nature reserve above the River Wye, just on the English side, facing Wales across the valley.

There is online disagreement (a tautology, if ever there was one) about what the name means.

‘Boundary Hill’ was one reasonable suggestion, slapped down by a chippy user who pointed out that Welsh names were around long before the English border. (If you have a confident assertion as to what the Welsh name “Ban-y-Gor” means, please write me a letter and pop it in my pigeon-hole.)

It’d been awhile since we climbed and the first days back on rock are usually hard so I was pleasantly surprised to feel strong: stronger than usual.

All those panicked I’m-turning-40-and-must-stay-in-shape work-out classes at my gym paying off.

We climbed a first, then a second and then a third climb without knowing the grade because I forgot the guidebook (aging, you see).

My son read the book he’d brought to the crag, in between giving the climbs a try. He did well and I was reminded that he’s getting closer to teenagerdom and will be a fully-grown broad-shouldered man before I know it.

We pulled apart a rotisserie chicken like ravening beasts and coiled the rope at 8:30pm just as the sun sank behind the woods on the opposite side of the gorge.

The moon, almost full above the Severn, marked the way back east upland to the Cotswolds.

A good start to my last month as a thirty-something, I thought with satisfaction.

—

The next day, lust for adventure undimmed, I proposed a walk to the local swimming pool several miles away, for a dip.

Joel gave me a look that said ‘please leave me alone and stop tormenting me with your midlife angst’ but acquiesced because he loves me and because it was the day before his birthday and he knew I got him something good.

We took an unorthodox route that almost landed us in a lavish back garden. We backtracked by way of a leap over a river and a shimmy through a nettle-adorned hedge, where I inculcated my son in the rewarding art of Right to Roam. Another satisfying adventure.

The next day, I gave Joel a break and took myself off alone on a solitary cycle in the sunshine to a far-distant estate with gardens I’d heard about north of Oxford called Rousham. They don’t allow children under 15 so the no-kids rule keeps the place blessedly peaceful. There are no dogs allowed, nor is there a tea room or any of the other usual National Trust tat. It’s a welcome change.

The only thing that pierced the peace was the occasional Oxford-Banbury local train, away across the water meadow of the River Cherwell.

Otherwise all was birdsong.

The estate has a mix of formal gardens and woodland that spills down to the river banks.

There were sculptures round corners and buried in scrub like an Edward Gorey dreamscape. A lion munched the spine of a horse, curved in frozen, wide-lipped alarm. An abandoned garden fork, with four deadly prongs, lent the underbrush an air of menace. The call of a falcon pierced the sky, and murmured cooing buzzed from a pigeonnoir with a faded 1685 etched into its doorless walls.

From the depths of a mixed hedge of privet, holly and snowberry, a weathered Athena surveyed visitors.

I lounged down to the banks of the Cherwell, basking in the sun, with the place entirely to myself.

A haze of insects above the river created an optical illusion, moving more swiftly as a unit than any individual arthropod.

Like a murmuration, I thought, but of mayflies and midges.

A damselfly lumbered past, awkward, working hard. An electric blue dragonfly, wings an invisible blur, put it to desperate shame.

A mother duck, clinging to the shadows along the bank, trailed four ducklings upstream, and a translucent yellow spider avoided my eyes and fled to the far side of the bench.

The birdsong was impeccable: song thrush, wagtail, nuthatch, wren, spotted flycatcher. In a minute, Merlin picked up twelve different tunes.

I launched myself into a patch of grass where an albino slug ambled through clover, antennae dancing in and out.

My presence was probably saving it from all those hungry birds in the trees, I thought.

A migraine, circling for days, stalked my brain from one temporal lobe to the other. It watched from the fringes of consciousness—but, when I laid by the river, it retreated.

To spend a day lost in thought is the greatest adventure.

Closing my eyes, I’m in great danger of staying here all day.

Two American couples rounded the corner and the peace was broken.

One of them, peevish, requested a stop.

“What if you don’t come back for me?”

“We’ll come back for you.”

“Well, as long as you’re coming back for me, go ahead and take your time.”

He sank to a bench near me.

I thought about engaging him in conversation but wasn’t at all sure what I’d say.

Hey, how about that dumpster fire of a country of ours.

I felt guilty when I got up and left the albino slug to its fate.

—

That weekend, we packed the cars with children (ours) and went to Somerset, where the flat lands around Glastonbury are laced with hidden waterways, weirs and swimming holes.

Joel’s friend Harry lives in a very grown-up house, decorated with considered collections of antique books, decanters and wooden tea chests. A delightful retreat from the world of parenthood, where there are no crumbs under the dining table and the bathrooms are blessedly free of mouldy underpants, smears of poop and discarded loo rolls (until we visit, at least).

We went to swim in the sea at Ringstead Bay, where a hang glider cut a neat loop in an updraft above a two million pound house of plate glass nestled on the cliffs.

“If you haven’t peed outside you haven’t lived,” remarked my son at one point, streaked in sand and salt.

I must be doing something right, I thought with pride.

Coincidentally, I’m re-reading Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, an old favourite. It is a particular early edition I never had in my collection and always wanted: rarer than hen’s teeth because its full text is no longer in print.

Current printings expunge mention of certain controversial swim spots where access is contested.

I read it years ago because my ex had a copy of this early edition of which he was so precious that he made sure to extract it from my shelves when we split (and because he knew I wanted it and refused to give me a moment’s gratification).

I am a big fan of cold water swimming. In Waterlog, a character warns of the dangers of too much warm water bathing, lest one become like the latter Romans, soft and decadent. I grew up paddling in ponds and rivers in upstate New York, and progressed to the Irish Sea.

These days, I dip in the river at the end of my garden regularly, as Deakin did in his moat. My Belarus-born great-grandad was part of a group of old country men called the Polar Bears who used to swim in winters off Brighton Beach in Brooklyn.

Cold water is in my veins.

The ex who clung to his copy of Waterlog loathed a cold water dip and luxuriated in hot baths for hours. The irony of this was definitely lost on him.

Years passed and I thought of Waterlog from time to time as a gap in my bookshelf that I must fill. Once, I sourced it online but then accidentally sent it to my old address in London. Whoops.

Anyway, when I saw that exact same early edition in the window of the second-hand bookstore near me last week for a queenly sum of £2, I knew it was meant for me.

I knew it because no one in my vicinity wants this book, and I know that because I eavesdropped on this conversation between a couple at my local breakfast spot that went like this:

“So, do you like beaches? Are you a beach person?”

“Well, yeah, if it’s like a private beach with sun loungers. But a crowded beach where you have to lay out a towel? No.”

If you’ve read Waterlog, you’ll know this cosseted conversation is its antithesis.

Anyway, Roger and his merry aquatic adventures accompanied me on some phenomenal swims this month: the River Brue near Glastonbury and the sea in Dorset, that most superlative of English seaside counties, where plesiosaurs flip out of the cliffs with astonishing regularity and the bracken is lush and still distinctly Jurassic, peppered with groves of elephant grass.

We also went in a river I shan’t name that Roger strongly recommends—with good reason because it is pristine and lush—where we got a stern telling-off from an old busybody for launching from private property.

This spot is mentioned in a book, I said.

Not in current printings, it’s not, she responded sourly. I could tell she would burn my early edition, with its precious lore, given half a chance.

Epic.

But the best was still to come.

—

Cue: a weekend in Wales, no kids, with Joel’s sister Kirsty and her husband, Gareth.

It started with the whiskey at 2am. We were away.

Joel and Kirsty are both tall, dark-haired and lean, with family roots that can be traced back a few generations to the Welsh borderlands. It doesn’t surprise me they are drawn to this area.

Gareth is russet, broad-shouldered and capable. His friend Ish is a quick, brown pixie of a man, with a stately dowager Jack Russell terrier named Millie. I wrote about him once before.

The Brecons are in their blood.

Ish regaled the group about driving along the A303 recently, past Stonehenge.

“I was just looking at the Henge and the way the sun was hitting it and then I heard the vvvvvvvvv sound of the wheel crossing the edge but I thought it’s fine, just correct a bit, and kept looking but then, out the corner of my eye, there’s a line of traffic stopped, and no way to brake in time so I swerved and hit the verge and went past about eight cars and rolled to a stop and everyone was beeping like ‘whoa dude, are you crazy’ so I pretended I meant to do it to park and look at the Henge then I waited until everyone who had seen me had gone off. Then I kept driving.”

They know this part of the Welsh Valleys intimately. Ish is going to look at a house in Mountain Ash, which is the most beautiful name for a town that I can think of.

Gareth wanted to know what street it’s on.

“The one where that guy is building a wall.”

“Oh yeah,” Gareth knew it instantly. “The guy with the high-vis vest.”

“Yep.” They were both nodding. “He’s been working on that wall for two years now and it’s still only ankle high.”

The weekend was punctuated with high mirth: Gareth tormented Ish that he fancies me.

“You’d want to put a ring on that Joel or someone’s going to pinch her off you.”

I feigned embarrassment but actually basked in it, with pathetic gratitude.

Frankly, it’s the greatest birthday present they could give an almost forty year old.

Still got it, I whispered to myself.

—

The next morning, a temporarily clear sky, though rain was forecast. The plan was to go swimming at a new spot deep in the Brecons that Kirsty found.

A perfect rainy day activity, because who cares about getting wet if the aim is to get still wetter.

No wetsuits, we’re assured. It won’t be as cold as the waterfalls.

If you’ve ever been to the waterfall country of South Wales, you’ll know this isn’t promising much.

On the whiskey hangover, we stopped at a place in Merthyr for a late breakfast at 2pm. It was closed.

We strolled in hope and stumbled upon Plas Coffi, where they had cakes, coffee and smoked salmon bagels.

As if that wasn’t enough, in a gallery room downstairs, they also had a photo exhibit: shots from forty years ago showing the miners’ strike, protests against the Thatcherite closures and pre-closure shots down the pits.

I browsed the photos and first-hand accounts to my heart’s content. We even got cherry blondies, yoghurt-dipped berry flapjacks and sausage rolls to go.

10/10. Go to Plas Coffi, if you’re in Merthyr.

Satisfied I had enough calories to keep Joel going through a hike and a cold-water swim, off we went and left the car on a whale’s back swell of road somewhere in the Brecons.

We set off across open heath: bog cotton, black skies and bare rolling hills, above the Neath disturbance.

What a great name.

It’s a fault line: an ancient weakness in the earth’s crust.

The Neath Disturbance is the disturbance beneath.

It is the most southerly of the many fault lines that ripple out from a suture—a join in the earth’s crust—where, half a billion years ago, the bulletproof granite of the Caledonian ranges drove up against Scotland’s western edge and squashed the proto-Atlantic ocean of Iapetus to a puddle.

The Atlantic is named after Atlas, who carried the skies; Atlas’s father was the titan Iapetus, hence the name.

In the Brecons, these ancient fault lines ride under carboniferous limestone: a karst landscape of caves and sinkholes, the carved and compressed remains of calcified shells, on a long-ago sea bed.

We were aiming for a perfectly round bog pool, a bullet hole in the hills that is totally invisible at ground level.

It sits right above the fault line: perhaps what’s left of old Iapetus itself.

An ancient ocean, the size of a pond.

Kirsty pointed it out to me on a distant hillside, visible only as the faintest line, a bog scar, a hallucination.

“You don’t see it until you are nearly upon it,” she said.

If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never see it. You could be twenty feet away and miss it entirely.

But there it is: a perfectly round pool, hidden in a swell of heath.

The skies are so grey the water doesn’t look especially dark but I am assured by Kirsty that it swallows light.

Black water, she says, into which Ish won’t venture.

Bog monsters down there, he says.

Maybe bog bodies, I offered, and told Joel about the sacrificial brown-stained corpses they pull straight from the Bronze Age in the Irish bog lands.

“Cool,” he said. Monsters, bog bodies and ancient oceans notwithstanding, we are definitely going for a swim.

Slipping into the water, I struck for the opposite bank, intending a full diameter.

The water is definitely alive, alternating gusts of chill and balmy.

It is not difficult to imagine a malevolent creature tossing restlessly in the deep and roiling the stasis.

The Neath disturbance: the disturbance beneath.

This is not stagnant water. It is a spring, or it is connected to underground rivers and aquifers in some undetectable system.

It has an odd molasses-like quality of heaviness but without the buoyancy you associate with salted waters.

This is heavy water that will drag you down, not bear you up.

Joel pulled out an arm streaked with pondweed.

“It’s the bog bodies, grabbing at your ankles.”

“I want to dive down and have a look.”

“How would you see anything? Imagine diving and getting tangled in the weed. You’d never come back up.”

Down you go to join the dead, in the dead ocean.

The cold in the pool was insidious. At regular intervals, the water fluctuated twenty degrees in temperature. We were alternately borne up in a warm bath and blasted with frigid draughts from below.

We steeped for about fifteen minutes, floating about, joking that the warm patches are where we’ve had a wee (they’re not).

I felt fine, the cool was silky.

Pulling myself up the bank, the peat clung to every hair: even the finest were tea-brown. My belly and thighs looked as if they’d been dipped in iron filings.

It wasn’t until about five minutes later that the lowered core temperature made itself known. Every layer on, chilled to teeth-rattling, we shared out the best brownie I’ve ever had, baked by Kirsty.

Walking back to the car, at a certain point the chill in my bones retreated enough that I pulled down hood and let the wind roll my hair. It felt incredible, like a cool splashing. The lightest of rains dusted brow and chin.

A flock of sheep startled itself and flowed, liquid, across the hill. The lower flanks of the mountains were sun-lit while, up high, we were in deep-browns and grey-greens: bracken, bog and peat.

Just then, the clouds parted and there was sun on the pool.

Whatever magic fills this cleft was satiated, for the moment.

“Next time,” I said, “we have to bring some whiskey and pour it in as an offering to the water gods.”

A bit for the ancient ocean, and the rest for me.

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