The River Path
The Nature of Rivers
All rivers, small or large, agree in one character, they like to lean a little on one side: they cannot bear to have their channels deepest in the middle, but will always, if they can, have one bank to sun themselves upon, and another to get cool under.
The Elements of Drawing, John Ruskin
Ruskin captures the essence of a river, left to its own devices it creates meanders, pools, waterfalls, ox bows, backwaters, cliffs, islands, swallow holes, caves: it never runs straight, it never does other than taking the easiest way downhill. It is ruled by gravity.
Springs seem to contradict this, often bubbling upwards. To find water emerging forcefully from the ground is to know that there is an impediment to the downward movement of groundwater - a change in the geology, some impermeable barrier, perhaps a fault line or clay or just more water. Forced by the weight of water above it makes its escape forming a springline. Springs are magical whatever the explanations, it is easy to see why our forbears treated them with reverence.
The water broke into sounds and shinings
at the vein mouth, bearing the taste
of the place, the deep rock, sweetness
out of the dark.
The Springs, Wendell Berry
Water in the ground is dependent upon rainfall and the rate at which we take from rivers and boreholes. Because the water table has been lowered in so many places owing to over-abstraction, many springs have disappeared, migrated downhill or become undependable. There are further repercussions: in Buckinghamshire the river Misbourne is now dry along part of its length. In London, on the other hand, because of falling industrial demand, concern is increasing about rising groundwater levels.
Waterfalls are as exciting as springs, whatever their size, and they are characteristic of the steep headwaters of river systems and in areas of mixed geology where hard rock overlays softer strata:
Our Yorkshire shales, carpenter-like, form merely
Tables and shelves for rain to drip and leap
Down from...
Ruskin Remembered, Charles Tomlinson
They have their own specialised fauna and flora especially ferns and mosses. The dipper, miraculous subaqua-walker on the beds of rocky streams, will often make its nest behind a waterfall.
In limestone country surprises confound the expected order of things: the River Manifold in Staffordshire suddenly disappears into its own bed only to emerge after times of persistent and heavy rainfall; in Yorkshire the great dry waterfall at Malham Cove has a tiny stream, disputed origin of the river Aire, emerging at its foot.
The picture shows a River Stirchel spring at Grove Farm, Melbury Abbas, Dorset.
Other books you might like to read include:
Alice Oswald Dart (Faber & Faber, 2002)
James Crowden In Time of Flood (about the River Parrett) (Parrett Trail Partnership, 1996)
