Roger Deakin is pretty disparaging of Byron’s pool in his Waterlog of wild swimming spots:
I went up to Grantchester, ignoring Byron’s Pool because it is now ruined as a swimming hole by an ugly concrete weir and the constant drone of the M11 a few hundred yards away. Byron and Rupert Brooke, who both loved this place and swam naked here, would hardly recognise it.
That was a year before I was born, in 1999.
When some friends and I went in search of Byron’s pool towards the end of term, it was clear that would not be going back to any kind of normality after the Easter break. It was a cool, late March morning cycling out of town towards Trumpington and the outskirts of Cambridge. The first cherry blossoms were starting to lean over front gardens and into the sky, above roads that were otherwise unusually clear. It all seems a long time ago now, but at that point the closest Corona Virus had come to my life was a cancelled Six Nations match.
We found the pond following a dinky sign off Grantchester High Street. Along a path and past some trail maps, we found the spot pretty easily. In truth, Byron’s pool is a slightly wider nook of the River Cam, as opposed to a pool to itself. The water was pretty near opaque, but smelt fresh – the Cam’s unmistakable combo of mint and mud. My usual swim spot further downstream had only just warmed above my thermometer’s friskier single digits, so I was keen to find a good entry spot. Somewhere easy to get in but, more importantly, easy to get out. As I pushed away from the bank, I realised it was the first time I had swum somewhere other than my usual spot for at least a couple of months.
The Cam still holds its surprises (nature’s wildlife and human naturalists included) but swimming up and down one same stretch of water I realised I’d begun to make a lane pool of my little stretch of river. My arms started to prickle with warmth in the cold water and I found myself recapturing that first excitement of swimming in “new” water. I usually swim front crawl, but on this occasion treated myself to a couple of minutes of breaststroke: the “naturalists’” stroke shared by Byron and Deakin. I began to think about how we think of ourselves in nature; how I had numbed myself to the wilderness around me; and what Byron might have made of his pond, all these years later.
Ever since Byron was doing it, and before, swimming has been part of a different way of engaging with the environment. There’s every indication Byron chose his closest friends based on who could keep up with him in the water; Coleridge would walk down street twirling his arms in imitation front crawl; even Shelley, who couldn’t swim (to his eventually fatal detriment), fetishized water and being submerged. He would sit by ponds for hours fascinated with the fading ripples from stones he’d just thrown. Once, a friend tried to teach him to swim: that if he jumped in and lay on his back without panicking he would float. The same friend dove in seconds late to find Shelley lying on his back at the waters bottom calmly staring upwards, like an eel. Other poets have swum here since (Rupert Brooke, most famously), nor is this to comment on Byron’s poetry – slightly overrated if you ask me. Rather, Byron and his contemporaries can teach us a little about swimming and how to use it to engage with the natural world.
These writers approached swimming the way they did everything else: they romanticised it. For them it was a way of going beyond the staid traditions of picturesque landscape. It isn’t enough to just to look at nature; the Romantic swimmer yearns to be part of it in an act of immersion within nature. That’s what we continue to do as swimmers – place ourselves bang in the middle, with the ducks and the fish and the dragonflies. The Romantic poets of water fixate on a telling metaphor: the mirror. Rivers and lakes are beautiful, but only as much as they reflect a version of ourselves and often, in our fascination with their beauty, we disrupt that mirror with our intrusion. Thinking about “blue spaces” and nature more generally, the poet-swimmers understood that humanity wasn’t separate from nature; we’re profoundly linked.
That couldn’t be more true today. When Granta magazine began collecting nature writing for their ‘Green’ issue in 2008, editor Jason Cowley was interested in this kind of relationship with nature. Cowley, ‘wanted the contributions to be voice-driven, narratives told in the first person, for the writer to be present in the story, if sometimes only bashfully.’ The climate change crisis breaks up comfortable distinctions between human and natural. If industrial pollution has been changing the very composition of rain across the globe since the 19th century, how much of the planet is still uncomplicatedly “natural”? If we’re unable to act decisively on climate change science (which clearly predicts climate catastrophe in coming years) can we continue to hold ourselves to a higher standard than animals on the basis of our rationality?
Understanding this distinction has never been more important, because our difference from nature has been used to justify the many abuses committed against the planet. At least when Byron was writing the sea was still beyond our grasp:
Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin; his control
Stops with the shore;
In an age of supertrawlers and rising ocean temperatures, unfortunately those words are no longer true. Marine Protected Areas have many positive effects, but the very principle is weakened by the same idea that we can neatly split human from nature, even split different parts of nature up from each other. In Dorset’s Poole harbour MPA, polluted soil runoff dramatically undermines any attempts to protect the marine life. More broadly, political indifference makes a mockery of offshore MPAs; a Greenpeace investigation revealed this month that supertrawlers fished inside UK MPAs for 2,963 hours in 2019. That adds up to 123 days in areas that are supposedly protected.
Today, Byron’s pool is part of a Local Nature Reserve to the side of Trumpington. A sliver of wildness clinging to the Cam, it stretches from a small carpark in the south and is rather abruptly curtailed by the M11 in the North. Non-native Sycamore are removed, and Hazel trees are cut back to stimulate growth. The weir Roger Deakin mentioned is in rude health; but so is a man-made system of connected ponds, running parallel to the river, supporting fish and amphibian spawning. It’s a fine example of a human-integrated approach to conservation, but it is also very small. It's just a start.
In the coming years we will have an opportunity to redefine how we engage with nature. Maybe we should follow Byron’s lead – swimming right in the middle of it all, peaceful cohabitants, and part of the natural world ourselves.
P.S. There is also a rope swing.
