Free Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane

Roger, water flowed fast and wildly through culture: it was protean, it was ‘slip-shape’ – to borrow Alice Oswald’s portmanteau from her river poem,
Dart
– and so that was how he followed it,
slipshod
and
shipshape
at once, moving from a word here to an idea there, pursuing water’s influences, too fast for his notes or audience to keep up with, joining his archipelago of watery subjects by means of an invisible network of tunnels and drains.
    Waterlog
also possesses this covertly connected quality, this slipshapeness. It feels spontaneous, written as if spoken – but as the dozens of closely annotated drafts of the book reveal, it was in fact densely contrived in its pattern-makings and metaphors. In one chapter, Roger explored the Rhinogs, a small and wild mountain-group in north Wales:
Searching the map, I had seen some promising upland streams, a waterfall, and a tarn, so I hiked off uphill through the bracken. There is so much of it in the Rhinogs that the sheep all carry it around on their coats like camouflaged soldiers. I watched a ewe standing between two rocks the shape of goats’ cheeses. They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones. He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape. By grazing the moors and mountains they keep the contours – the light and shade – clear, sharp and well-defined, like balding picture-restorers constantly at work on every detail. The black oblongs of their pupils set deep in eyes the colour and texture of frog skin are like the enormous slate coffin-baths you see in the farmyards here; seven-foot slabs of slate hollowed into baths.
    Sheep like soldiers, sheep like picture-restorers, sheep like stones, stones like cheeses, sheep’s eyes like frog skin, sheep’s pupils like slate baths – this joyful promiscuity of comparison, this sprawl of simile, is characteristic of Roger’s prose. The finding of ‘likeness’ was a function of his generosity and his immense curiosity; it was also a literary expression of the idea that, as John Muir put it, ‘when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to the whole world’. Roger loved language for its capacity to connect and relate, and as he swam through Britain he collected some of the wondrous words that ran through its waterways:
dook
(noun, Scots) – a swim in open water
    gull
(verb, East Anglian) – to sweep away by force of running water
    tarn
(noun, Cumbrian/northern English) – an upland pool or small lake
    winterburna
(noun, Old English) – an intermittent or ephemeral stream, dry in the summer and running in the winter
    bumbel
(verb, Shetlandic) – to flounder around in water
    Waterlog
, unlike much that gets labelled as nature writing, is very funny. There is plenty of bumbelling in it. Roger’s gently subversive sense of humour recalls that of Kenneth Grahame, Jerome K. Jerome and A. A. Milne: all of them, in their ways, water-men and river-rats. In one chapter, Roger decides to swim up the estuary of the River Erne in Cornwall. He discovers that by catching the incoming tide in the estuary mouth, he will be carried rapidly upstream:
I threw myself in and … felt the incoming tide lock onto my legs, and thrust me in towards the distant woods along the shore. Each time a frond of sea-lettuce lightly brushed me, or glued itself around my arms, I thought it was a jellyfish, and flinched. But I soon grew used to it; seaweed all around me, sliding down each new wave to drape itself about me. I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved, jostled from behind by the swell. Then, as the tide rose higher, the sandy estuary beach came into focus. The woods reached right over the water, and began accelerating past me. I found I was moving at exhilarating speed, in big striding strokes, like a fell-runner on the downhill lap. It was like dream swimming, going so effortlessly fast,