Return to Tarzan's Pool

Who wants to be a river keeper?

How or why did I become a river keeper? Something I have asked myself, particularly why, almost continually for the last forty years. I grew up on the Lower Testwood marshes alongside the river and my Dad always said that mum had found me on the banks under some purple comfrey so until I was about ten years old I thought I’d actually come out of the river. At Testwood secondary school in 1979, whilst my mates were trying to figure out Pink Floyd I was wondering why ranunculus wouldn’t grow in deep water. As you might suspect, I didn’t have many girlfriends. My life was the river.

It all began when my Grandad gave me a book that his father had given him, The Gentle Art Of Tramping by Stephen Graham written in 1927. I read it cover to cover a dozen times and one particular paragraph mesmerised me;

" The river, which, clear and innocent, finds the easiest and most charming way from birth to eternity. We were born on an invisible river which keeps gliding and singing and filling and flowing. We do not know where we go but we know we are on the stream. We do not always perceive the movement, but we observe that the landscape has changed."

I've always been damp....and musty

For most of my life I have been at the very least... damp. I’ve never fully dried out since first tumbling into the sparkling forest pools near my home more than fifty years ago as a young lad. It was a total wonder to me that the tiny brook I played in flowed to a bigger stream and then into a river and on to the estuary and finally the oceans of the world. A direct connection to everything, a message in the bottle type arrangement and I thought I could travel around the world and back just by floating down my little forest brook and more than once made myself a raft from willow and reed to do just that.

I currently work on the top of the Test at Whitchurch and have been here about 17 years. Before that I was forty miles downstream at Nursling for about 13 years, but I began my career on the queen of the chalk streams, the Itchen at Martyr Worthy with Ron Holloway for 10 years. I was born and bred on the Test at Testwood and spent my entire childhood on the river both helping, hindering, and often running from, river keepers. I was born to be one. Easier to chase than be chased, or so I thought.

Many say the Test is the most fabled trout stream of all mired in traditional tales, endless writings and an exalted, exaggerated mystery. To me? The river I jumped in as a kid, worked in as a man, consistently defended like a jealous boyfriend and finally look after and protect like an elderly parent. Not all the ancient old ways are good nor mystery glorious and as a river keeper with chalk stream water running through my veins, perhaps I have a slight guilt about not challenging damaging tradition and exposing these flaws and concerns a little more robustly.

The legendary Mr.Foot

So, this short story and film clip is hopefully going to explain something I finally managed to do after many years of thinking about it and was really brought on by the death of my great friend and river keeping mentor, the legendary Vic Foot, himself a Test keeper for 56 years. Together we fished on many Test stretches from the very top to the very bottom and at times Vic would say that we must have seen every beat on the river. It both intrigued yet slightly bothered me, that even after us spending a lifetime living and working on the Test we hadn’t seen but a tiny percentage of it.

His death aged 93 or 94, he never was sure of his birth date, prompted me to embark on a charity walk from the source to the sea following as closely as possible to the riverbanks, something that I wrongly assumed would be relatively easy and subsequently underestimated every single requirement. I would walk in waist waders so I could go under as many bridges as possible and stick to the course of the river. It would take about five days and I would sleep in fishing huts each evening. A journey from beginning to end, top to bottom, back to my childhood playground at Testwood and in particular a magical place where I learnt the beauty of moving chalk stream water called Tarzan’s Pool which was about halfway between my birthplace of Testwood, and Nursling where myself and Vic worked.

Tarzan's Pool

The pool was officially called The Wirehouse Hatches and had formed immediately downstream of some ancient sluice gates no longer in use. The deepest part of the pool was probably about ten feet deep and where most of the action took place. Huge willow trees and alders with a fringing of yellow iris and kingcups lead onto lush grassy banks which surrounded the crystal-clear water and made a scene that any celebrity garden designer could only have dreamt of. This was the ultimate in natural swimming pools and we always expected to see Johnny Weissmuller swan dive out of one of the great alders with a knife clamped between his teeth and so it became affectionately known as ‘Tarzan's pool’ and every launch into it was accompanied by a screaming version of his signature tune.

The mere mention of Johnny Weismuller gives away how many years ago that we're talking and there's no doubting I’m a keeper who’s beginning to feel my age, perhaps wondering if an amble down something so important to me might help explain what I’ve been doing for the last sixty years? As my wife kindly pointed out - I was remembering my great mate Vic, raising money for a quite incredible charity but also......undoubtedly having a late life crisis.

As the crow flies I had about forty-five miles to walk to the sea and being an expert on the way rivers work and knowing that the Test falls about three hundred feet, I was confident I’d be walking mostly downhill. What people won't understand is that whilst the main Test is less than fifty miles long, there are actually hundreds of miles of tributaries, connecting streams, side streams and carriers. Bogs, sedge and reed beds stretching for many miles across ancient water meadows and flood plains. I had a rucksack containing a sleeping bag, toothbrush, notepad, pen and spare socks and was wearing a Naomi House tee shirt in case I got shouted at. I know all of the keepers and would ask permission from the many large estates, riparian owners, mill owners, private owners and fishing syndicates. I could call in a few favours, liaise with the Test and Itchen Association, document my walk, sleep in fishing huts, do something that might not have been done before and raise money for a children’s hospice itself very near to the Dever, a Test tributary. 

One of the first things I did was talk with the Test and Itchen director and we came up with a rough idea of where I’d go and whose land I would need to walk through. It quickly became apparent that there was a lot more planning required than initially thought and I ended up with a list of over eighty people that I needed permission from and my initial thoughts of sauntering down a single mown path alongside a babbling chalk stream was as far from reality as could be.

A face for radio

The next change in plans came when I explained my idea to a couple whose house backs onto my beat in Whitchurch, Jane and Andy Fenning. Turns out Jane was a BBC TV director for over thirty years, and she asked how I was going to record my walk, insisting that I would regret not somehow filming it. My only plan was to take a selfie with all the keepers!

The Test is possibly the most private river in the world and people’s privacy was utmost in my thoughts with the idea of being followed by a camera team was impossible besides, according to my wife, I have a face for radio and a voice for writing. After much discussion with my boss, advice and casual threats carefully listened to, I was fitted with a permanently running GoPro camera, carried a 360 camera on a stick which I could keep in my pocket and use when required, and would be filmed occasionally by a drone and cameras off bridges and public land etc. This involved the fourth member of the team, BBC cameraman Steve Shearn. My grandchildren refer to me as a ‘Techno Peasant’ so expertise in the filming department was vitally important and Steve supplied, fitted, and attempted to teach me how to use it all.

Important to say that this wasn’t just a voyeuristic project being nosey (well, a bit nosey), but being a keeper walking down my river, in memory of another keeper whilst raising money for Naomi House definitely gave me the high ground when it came to authenticity and allowed me access to some very special places.

I was also asked to give something of a running commentary of my adventure so on this walk I had to remind myself to immediately say what I thought rather than thinking first. That has got me in a whole heap of trouble for much of my life.

Another requirement was timing. Obviously couldn’t walk after the fishing had started so first week of April was chosen and cold fishing huts it was. In hindsight, as much as it would be great to see the river in all its summer glory, and warmth, I would have really struggled to get through the reed beds and sedges. The keepers took pity on the old boy, and huts were always warm and welcoming. Nobody really knew how long it was going to take to walk through various beats so planning where I would be at the end of each day was an educated guess although did actually work out uncannily well. Most keepers said they’d like to walk their beats with me and were happy to pass me on like a relay baton to the next keeper downstream.

Continually lost

Walking the entire river is not as straightforward as you’d think. I had to cross it many times, walk through meadows, under bridges, down carriers and tributaries and I got lost most days down the myriad of different connecting streams, dead ends etc. Keepers' ability to give directions on their own beats haven’t changed in a hundred years and boy, did I get lost! I remember Vic Foot telling a fisherman how to get back to Romsey from Nursling;

 ‘go down there a way until you get to where my uncle used to live and turn towards Fred Shuttler’s place next to the old school, which isn’t there anymore.’

Before this particular walk, I asked Phil Parker about getting through the Bossington and Pittleworth beats.

‘Yeah Donny easy, you’ll have to walk down the top bank of the western arm as far south as that little copse we roost shoot pigeons and cross to the eastern arm and on down to brother Nick’s.’

Some things never change.

The river is magnificent and amazingly diverse from beat to beat especially as you get further downstream. I was tired of the number of times I said how wonderful it was. It’s immense and nothing like how the average general public would think and it was an absolute joy to be able to walk its banks and meet all the keepers. I remember so well when I was a kid and my Dad saying, ‘how young the policemen are nowadays.’ Every beat I walked through, apart from one or two notable exceptions, I kept repeating to myself how young river keepers are nowadays. With regard the keepers - and I’m ridiculously biased of course - but this is what I wrote of them:

"I’ve recognised every bit of anxiety and worry in their eyes. I’ve seen their triumphs and I’ve seen their tragedies and it’s been a total privilege to have walked their beats with them. This glorious river is as much about the keepers as anything else and its very future is entirely dependant on their passion, on their fight, and of their toil."

Honorary life membership of the Hampshire River Keepers' Association right there.

As much as I’ll always support keepers, that’s not to say that nowadays, as one of the older keepers, I won’t call them out on things I don’t like or agree with and there’s no doubting some river keeping practices which I’ve seen over the last forty years haven’t been particularly good for the river, but my walk most definitely highlighted a positive, youth driven, ongoing change for the good.

Of course the river has its own problems, and we all know what they are and mostly who causes them however, I haven’t really gone too much into that other than a gritted-teeth mention here or there of my beloved water company, Southern Water, and of those tasked with monitoring the destruction caused by Southern Water, the Environment Agency and Natural England, known by river keepers as The Easy Life Agency and Un-natural England, and actually, Southern Water are rarely referred to by their real name!

Retaliatory shit will not flow upstream

I did comment a lot, almost non-stop, on the superb work being done on many of the beats. River restoration projects are mostly brilliant, re-wilding (whatever that means, rewild to what, to when?) But fallen trees left in etc. I saw the general change in the way we manage these chalk streams that has taken place over the last twenty plus years or so of which I’ve always been a great supporter. That’s not to say it’s all been perfect, still not an entirely holistic acceptance and lessons have been learned by failure as well as success. Any work done on a certain beat will obviously have consequences for your neighbours, particularly those downstream, and not always in an agreeable way. A lesson I always gave to fishery students and underkeepers was to prioritise your relationship with him upstream over him downstream. No matter how many times you try, and god I’ve tried, you cannot get any retaliatory shit to flow upstream.

Now this is a ten-minute clip, from over seventy hours of tape of the walk to give a taste of what I was up to. It contains a small, in more ways than one, amount of casual nudity and unnecessary profanity but, I’m a Hampshire riverkeeper and that comes with the job.

I owe a huge amount of thanks to all the keepers who looked after me so well and all the owners who allowed me to walk through their beats. The T&I who were so supportive and helpful and to Tufton, Wherwell, Kimbridge and Broadlands for letting me sleep in their huts and most importantly to Jane Fenning who never let me rest and Andy Fenning who made the best cheese and marmite sandwiches ever. This walk meant the world to me. Not exactly climbing Everest and it wasn’t a test of fitness, strength or stamina but it certainly was an unexpected test of emotion and understanding and I loved every minute of it.

I think to have a record of the walk on film could well be useful in our fight with the wretched water companies in years to come and I also enjoyed writing the adventure as a book - publisher anyone? However, the most humbling thing of all? My subsequent invitation to The Naomi House Children’s Hospice because they wanted to thank everyone involved in this walk and of the great amount of money we raised, very nearly £17K, and me realising that the majority of poorly kids there were about the same age as me and my mates when we were jumping into Tarzan’s Pool more than fifty years ago.

It truly was a Test of character, both mine and the river's.