It’s like being on a floating Christmas pudding. Our boatman churns the muddy water with a pigouille, a punter’s oar made from ash, and the flames leap around us in response. As the whirlpool settles, they subside, and the stillness is only disturbed by dragonflies skimming the water’s surface. Swamp gas – a mix of methane, hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide – bubbles away in the silt. My two dogs, capable of barking at a fly as though it were an axe murderer, don’t appear remotely fazed by the fact that our boat was just on fire.
Left dried out and lethargic by the heatwave sweeping through Europe, my partner and I made for Marais Poitevin, a wetland covering more than 200,000 hectares in western France. Here, a network of more than 8,000km (around 5,000 miles) of muddy canals stretches all the way from the medieval city of Niort to the Atlantic Ocean, straddling the Vendee and Charente-Maritime. We’d been staying with my partner’s family in Vienne, 90 minutes away. The heat was so oppressive inland that even the fields of sunflowers seemed to be wilting. Our dogs kept climbing into my mother-in-law’s ornamental fountain to cool off, and we inspected the koi carp afterwards to see if they’d been turned into tartare by 30kg of hot, wet fluff.
