Walking on water

 

“Walking on water” is an implausible but pleasurable outdoor activity that doesn’t get the publicity it deserves. The expression carries religious undertones, of course, of miracles, of achieving the impossible. This connotation was exploited implicitly in the final shots of Peter Sellers in the role of Chance the Gardener / Chauncey Gardiner in the 1979 film “Being There”, where he is seen walking blithely across the surface of the lake of the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina. This film, based on Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 book, took as its bizarrely unrealistic theme the completely absurd premise that a total nutjob with no experience of the real world could become the president of the United States. As if. What a preposterous idea.

Maybe it’s a sense of achieving the – if not the impossible - then the unnatural, that provides one of the reasons why we so enjoy seaside piers, especially the really long ones like Southport, Southend or Ryde, or the one at Llandudno, which is Y-shaped, with one of its branches running parallel to the shoreline. A sense of power-by-proxy that the structure is not only unnecessary, but can go out of its way to prove its engineering superiority to the mere forces of nature. Ruling the waves while waiving the commonsense rules of physics. This sensation is further intensified by deliberately employing such a location for an improbable juxtaposition of activities – watching a theatrical performance, riding a rollercoaster, going ballroom dancing, or having a drink or a meal – while the waves splash and crash beneath, as in Bournemouth, Brighton or Blackpool, for instance. Those gravity-denying Victorians certainly knew how to poke Mother Nature in the eye.

Walking down the middle of a river is a less familiar concept, and one even more pleasurably ridiculous, than the seaside pier. Consequently, perhaps, opportunities for this kind of indulgence, a necessarily inland one, are fewer. Thin islands in big cities – Roosevelt Island in the East River in New York, for instance, or Eel Pie Island at Twickenham - aren’t quite the same thing. They simply aren’t thin enough. The Allée des Cygnes in the middle of the Seine, with a double decker bridge at one end and a mini Statue of Liberty at the other, is perhaps the best you can get in a capital city. It’s dead straight, artificial, and very narrow. However, if you walk the Thames Path through the Chilterns, there is a wonderful section by the weir about a mile upstream of Henley Bridge, where the footpath swings out on a wooden walkway, proceeds down the middle of the river for some distance, and then swings back to land again. It’s like a dream; if only it could go on for ever.

One hundred miles or so to the north of this spot, a few days ago I walked down the middle of the River Trent. Well, not quite the middle, but as good as. The Trent is, of course, a substantial river, even this far from the sea where, south of the Derbyshire village of Sawley, it meanders and falls over a weir, to the west of Harrington Bridge. To avoid this point, a 1200 yard canal, called the Sawley Cut, was dug at the end of the eighteenth century and, much of it now lined with no-nonsense concrete, it features a couple of locks, well used by the narrowboats that are so numerous on the many navigable stretches of water in this part of the East Midlands. Going east, the Cut and the river slowly converge, the county boundary between Derbyshire and Leicestershire being along the centre line of the river itself.

At this point, Sawley Lock, shortly before the confluence of canal and river, is a tiny establishment, the Traveller’s Rest, which is not only a micropub (very micro, and aka the Lockkeeper’s Rest) but it also serves light refreshments on Fridays and at weekends. Currently closed because of the wretched virus, the owners are evidently making the best of things by sprucing the place up in anticipation of normality returning. Continuing eastwards, past a set of lock gates, one walks along an artificial concrete island for some distance, with the river on one’s left and the canal on one’s right. I find this set-up oddly enjoyable. 

 All too soon one rises up a ramp onto an ugly footbridge which crosses the Trent to the north bank, adjacent to the equally unattractive railway bridge which carries the freight line from the superbly named Sheet Stores Junction to Willington, on the Derby to Birmingham line. A line which with a bit of imagination could be used for a fast and direct passenger route from Nottingham to Birmingham, avoiding Derby. Some hopes. The two waterways merge immediately east of the bridge, while the footpath continues along the north bank of the river for about a mile to Trent Lock, on the outskirts of Long Eaton.

But here, at Sawley Lock, one can contemplate being at the centre of a complex of transport infrastructures. Motorways and major roads converge nearby, railways fan out in all directions, confluences of the rivers Trent, Derwent, Soar and Erewash are all adjacent, as is the Trent and Mersey Canal and other waterways. Away to the south the planes – passenger and freight - roar in and out of East Midlands Airport. Predictably, such a transportation focus has proved irresistible to those companies who love to cover our green and pleasant in vast design-free sheds, and to pound our highways with enormous dangerous thundering smelly lorries, or as I understand they are now called - because it impresses some people - logistics solutions. Yet here, right at the heart of all this 21st century ghastliness is this wonderful spot, protected from “reality” on all sides, where one can sit and watch the barges slowly passing through. And where one can also ponder whether, in fact, we are all walking on water.