After three decades living alongside mute waterways in East Anglia, with their soundless glide over clay, I am learning a liquid language here, and all its boulder dialects, as our winter‑filled local stream gushes down its limestone gorge.
My fellow country diarist and wild swimmer Amy-Jane Beer shares my passion for river music. She tells me of her compulsion to listen when fresh water is given a voice by coming to the surface.
There’s such fascination in the percussive clash against unyielding objects, the burp of air that bubbles out from those collisions, rendering them audible to our ears. My wife says all that gurgling, burbling and bumping sounds like muffled voices through a wall. Is it any wonder that our Celtic forebears on this land believed in the presence of river goddesses when we hear people in the water?
The River Frome speaks wherever it meets resistance; a susurrating hiss when it passes over a pebble bed, a light plash against the bathtub when it scuffs a bend of the bank. Great belches when it meets a fallen branch, a churn as it elects to surge over or squeeze under. And concentration brings surprises. Fixated on a barely submerged stone for a while, I’m astonished to find that the flow is not consistent. The river rides up against the rock, spitting mares’ tails of froth, but there are moments when that force abates. There must surely be some micro‑variation upstream, a conflict within currents, a confusion of eddying waters, that causes irregularity in the stream.
When we reach the weir, we might as well be back in East Anglia, for as the river pours over its artificial waterfall, accents flatten in the drop. All is one in the deafening crash, the pounding mass and thump, thump at its foot, mist billowing up around our faces. A hundred metres on, the force and foam look to be dissipated, the roar is reduced to a pleasing murmur.
River walking, watching and listening is nothing short of a mindfulness exercise, balm for the January soul on these shorter days. All we need now is a water sprite.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
