Bog Myrtle & Peat

The Severn has considerable clout as it rolls towards Wroxeter. Comfortable in the fatlands of Shropshire, the river has become a deep and complex movement of glides and eddies that is only loosely contained by a cakework of banking. At certain points, the current is frustrated by the presence of crisp and shingled islands. The water reaches around these obstacles in the certain knowledge that life would be easier without them – and maybe the next decent flood will itch them away forever. But for now, there’s no getting away from physics and the fact that these side-lines and land-behinds are low enough to be flooded. So water is grudgingly subdivided and spared to spill sideways and down into new and inefficient webs which vanish beneath the trees to reconvene around the bend without a word of thanks or acknowledgement. 

You can look vertically down to the water from one of two bridges which cross the narrows at Atcham. The view is mainly of ducks which gather and snooze on a curling bar of sand which has grown behind the bridges’ western piers. Not far downstream, the stonework of St Eata’s church is laid in mighty motley screeds of red and grey. In an English way, it’s beautiful there when the sky has thickened with swifts and swallows on the willow’s edge. Teams of young mergansers hunt beneath the banking where the graveyard falls suddenly into the river, and tiny landslides of erosion are gradually releasing the residues of long dead people to the water for the sea. 

Below the rolling surface, certain of these water-borne gleanings are churned and overturned by barbel with yellow fins and sickened, dull expressions. You can see them clearly from the bridge; ugly fish with dabbing, whiskered mouths. As they sift around the riverbed, they stew up clouds of sediment which churn around them in the current. Sometimes they dig and forage with such enthusiasm that they vanish altogether; blooms of dirty water roil around them like smoke and the sediment trails for thirty yards downstream. They they’ll reappear at first as fins and lazy tails which writhe around the reek, gradually revealing the scaly bulge of a belly or the shrugging, basset-hound resignation of a single torpid eye.

Some of these fish are almost two feet long and fat and sleeks as slugs in the pool where the graveyard leaks – and I hear that barbel are highly prized by local anglers who mark their movements and pursue them with baits like luncheon meat and sausages which resemble the withered tips of fingers.