‘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. Breast-stroking up and down the 30 yards of clear, green water, I nosed along, eyes at water level. The frog’s-eye view of the rain on the moat was magnificent. [...] Then the rain eased and the reflected heavens were full of tiny dancers: water sprites springing up on tiptoe like bright pins over the surface. It was raining water sprites.’
So begins Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, the environmentalist and writer Roger Deakin’s 1999 treatise on ‘wild’ swimming, bucolic immersion and the social politics of our access to nature. I remember the exact place and time the book cast its damp spell on me. Sitting on a branch line from Chayamachi to Uno in Japan’s Okayama prefecture, I became engrossed in Cornish estuaries and oneiric Yorkshire gill ponds when I should have been taking in the unfolding levels of the Seto Inland Sea. I’d planned literary pilgrimages in the past, but none would end up as quietly affecting as the trip to north Suffolk I’d make a couple of years later, prompted by the early, sodden revelations of Deakin’s travelogue. Deakin spent much of his life at Walnut Tree Farm – a 12-acre smallholding and 16th-century farmhouse in the village of Melis, bought as a barely standing husk in 1969 and restored to idiosyncratically tumbledown glory by the mid-70s. Both the farm and its ornamental moat were a place of calm and restoration to which he cyclically returned across his books; a nexus for his writing, much of which took place in a repurposed railway wagon a meadow away from the house.
After his death in 2006, Deakin’s archive was executed by the writer Robert Macfarlane and donated to the University of East Anglia, and the farm bought by Jasmine and Titus Rowlandson, friends of Deakin’s son Rufus (and with whom Titus co-wrote a book, Life at Walnut Tree Farm, about its restoration). In 2019, after another sympathetic overhaul of the grounds, they began renting the wagon and a nearby cabin to weekenders. The scene set itself.
The farm, glimpsed through a boundary of mature ash trees, is approached via the village’s beatific, 150-acre grazing common. It remains as it was in Deakin’s day, a place still suffused with an overt sense of his being: from the hoards of his wooden articles, farm tools, building detritus and rusting Citroën Safaris mouldering in the foliage; to the fêted moat itself, its shining, pollen-clouded levels languid under a canopy of coppiced hazel, willow and ash. (‘After the reconstruction of the house,’ write Rufus and Rowlandson, ‘Walnut Tree Farm and Roger Deakin were in many ways one.’)
I bedded into the wagon – acutely rustic, painterly, the aura of the man who used to sleep and write here palpable. There are works of abstract cerulean art by Jasmine on the wall, a wood-burning stove, a well-appointed outdoor field kitchen, floral bed-spreads, trug baskets of kindling (dragged from the surrounding hedgerows), a straw blind in the doorway and, of course, a little pile of books by and about Roger. I found a rare serenity in sleeping with the carriage’s sliding door open to the meadow beyond, the silence only fractured by the intermittent roar of the Norwich London intercity railway a quarter of a mile away, and the murmuring cacophony of local fauna.
The loo, a short walk across the meadow, is spider-filled and afforded a little technicolour ambience by a stained-glass panel; while an alfresco shower, intermittently warm, is located in a cubby in the side of a barn. Bijou, this is not.
And then, the moat. Aside from a fascination for utilitarian pool architecture, I’m not a huge swimmer in a conventional sense, but find a profound peace in what’s still rather spuriously dubbed ‘wild’ swimming – deep nature’s evaporation of worldly concerns; the weightless drift; the occasional irking terror of what lies beneath the glistening murk. I clambered in via a rickety foot ladder. The pool, around ten feet at its deepest, is fed from a natural spring and chilly even in high summer; perhaps 10°C, and enough to make the first length of the opaque waters breath-sappingly bracing. I swam slowly, eyeballing water boatmen and damselflies, peering into the reed beds for a sighting of something larger. It was a true idyll; the glacial lengths suffused with subtext as the words of the book leapt into sparkling life; the suspended, sun-dappled afternoons close to halcyon, reflecting heaven.
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