Returning

River Frome, Bowbridge 12/09/25 -19/09/25

Part 1

After short trips north and west and a rather fragmented summer, I’ve been away from River for some weeks. I feel distant, my body not quite getting used to a subtle absence; making time for social media and its endless fractious noise, but not for bringing myself to a place where I feel whole and at peace. Will Frome feel humdrum now, after Cumbrian tarns and the Atlantic? It’s just a little unsung river. Maybe I need wilder spaces…

I stop the car and teeter through the maturing undergrowth of the hot summer, into the shadow of Alders, the rhythmic lapping of water. Already I can feel my body waking up to these familiar presences; already it feels more than ‘just an…anything’. I pause for a while, to say hello, and to receive a hello back. The wind is up, and though I can barely see the sky, light blooms and fades, blooms and fades through the trees, illuminating patches of Riverbed as clouds bustle over.

I speak out gratitude, another practice easily and often forgotten, and with each breath it feels like River and I begin to nestle back into each other’s company. I watch the ripples, endlessly lyrical, and feel like they’re happening inside me. There are plenty of words, but silence feels just as appropriate.

The doubts are ebbing away. We’ve seen each other, River and I.

Part 2

I few days later, I find myself steering my body towards River again, immersion in mind, but with doubts rattling around too. Do I really want to deliberately get cold and wet?…it’s Autumn! Have I lost my enthusiasm for it? Will my body will refuse to get in? Does it really have any marked benefit anyway?

A statement of intent on the bathers’ WhatsApp group pushes me to show up, and there’s a silent sigh of recognition arriving back in the space. Rustling branches, birds clattering, water murmuring, almost muting the trucks rumbling just out of sight. The textures are of here, unlike the peat and slate and noisy, oxygenated falls of the Lakes; unlike the black teeth and crash of the Devon coast; Frome - who rises on gentle slopes - is at this point muted earth-browns, ripened emerald; shadowy but blooming, pulsing with light. There are friends here. We wryly talk of thresholds, and moving into uncomfortable spaces.

As two of us wade in, senses adjusting to the cold and to seeing the world from duck-level, a single tiny white feather drops from the canopy, exactly between us, perfect and impossibly light, to settle on the water and be carried away. White feathers seem to have accompanied me since the beginning of the Living Waters programme more than two years ago. We laugh wide-eyed at the geometry of it.

It’s been a wet couple of weeks and River has a humus-y feel, earth washed through woodlands and into Water. The winds have shaken fragments of tree into the flow, and little rafts of broken twigs come spiralling downriver. One suddenly appears and comes snuffling over, nuzzles up. It stays long enough to get a measure of me and then lets go. I expect to see it whirl off with the clusters of brown bubbles and tumbling yellowing leaves, but instead it circles my body, caught in a countercurrent, and begins to head upstream. We crouch in the water, speechless. These moments must be happening all the time, but if we’re not there to witness them…

And again, almost without me noticing, River gently receives my questions and doubts, and without recourse to words, offers some kind of resolution and lets them go.

Part 3

This morning, I’m back to dip en route to work. As I walk through the copse I can hear voices, the good-natured bubbling of conversation, of humans shoulder-deep in water. It instantly kindles an inner warmth ahead of a dunk in the cold.

But as I drop down the path, the conversation stops dead.

Kingfisher is on the decaying concrete stump of an old fence-post, breast rising and falling, tail flicking, white cheek feathers lit up. The four bathers already in the water, just three metres away, are stock-still, watching. The two of us on the bridge quietly cease preparing to get in, mouths open.

Over the next ten minutes, Kingfisher flits between alder branch, coppiced stump and concrete lump as she circles above the submerged bathers, sounding us out. Most of the bathers have their hands clasped. It’s fairly normal practice, a way of focusing as we adjust to the cold, but now it feels like an act of devotion and reverence. Each time she moves, everyone silently moves to reorientate towards her, devotees in the presence of a Rivergod. We are all still holding our breath in her presence.

Finally she’s ready, and her iridescent back flashes upstream to bless the trees. Within a few minutes, we are out, changed, with cups of herb tea, and a hefty labrador is crashing noisily into the water, a stick between its teeth.