The mystery and wonder of our waterways

How do you feel about rain? When it’s pelting down, do you think approvingly of rivers filling up and reservoirs being replenished, or do you groan and long for drier, sunnier days?

Naturalist Stephen Rutt is firmly in the first category. Although, to his great regret, he has never learned to swim, he has been enchanted by water since he was a child.

Lakeside Kingfisher 

He mourns how profligate we are with water. In his view, we are now so disconnected from the hard work that goes into harvesting, storing and purifying water that we have lost sight of just how precious it is.

In The Waterlands, Rutt looks at how water has shaped our island nation, from rivers and lakes to bogs and fens. It is endlessly recycled, changeable yet indestructible.

When water evaporates it becomes vapour, circling the world on atmospheric currents, condensing and then falling back to Earth’s surface, ‘flowing as liquid or frozen for a time in an alpine glacier or Arctic ice cap’.

Almost all of the Earth’s water, 96.5 per cent, is in the seas and oceans, which cover three quarters of our planet’s surface, while rivers account for a mere 0.0002 per cent. As Rutt walks along the banks of some of Britain’s great rivers, uppermost in his mind is the poor quality of our water.

Discharged industrial waste, sewage and droughts have all degraded our rivers. Only about one in seven of them is in a good ecological condition, though compared to how they were in the 19th century, when vast amounts of chemicals were dumped unchecked into the water, ‘they are in an unimaginably good state – the salmon back in the Clyde, trout still abundant on the Test’.

Bogs may not seem particularly alluring, but Rutt makes the Flow Country, Scotland’s vast bog peatland, sound as fascinating as an archaeological dig. If you slipped your index finger into this peat bank you would be in contact with organic matter from the 1980s; keep going down to your elbow and you’d be touching pollen that was laid down in Shakespeare’s time.

The state of our waterways isn’t all doom and gloom. The East Anglian Fens were once home to wolves, bears, boars, beavers and white-tailed eagles before they were extensively drained in the 17th and 19th centuries. Since 1997, the RSPB has been restoring 300 hectares of it, excavating new channels and areas of water and planting reed beds. The landscape is returning to ‘a better, wetter, wilder state’, the air now filled with birds.

This deeply felt book meanders rather like one of Rutt’s beloved rivers, but its central theme is a compelling one. Without enough water, we are doomed. We need to fall back in love with water, because ‘water is the heartbeat of the planet’.