Caught by the River 2026-09-25T20:53:47Z https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/feed/atom/ WordPress https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/cropped-favicon-32x32.png Diva Harris <![CDATA[Croft, Coast and Hill: Letters from the Northwest Highlands]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190978 2026-09-25T20:53:47Z 2026-09-27T08:00:06Z Rainbows and tangled growth thread their way through uncertain weather on Annie Worsley and Kirsteen Bell’s respective crofts.

South Erradale, September 12th

Dear Kirsteen,

 How was your ‘summer’? We escaped the terrible heat although I confess to grumbling and moaning because of the relentless rain. 2026 will be remembered for extreme temperatures and drought in the UK but our Wester Ross summer has been such a soggy damp squib.

R. and I did get a taste of the heat. In early August we drove south to a family gathering in Wales. To celebrate our 70th birthdays, our four kids, their partners and children holidayed with us in a big house close to the sea; ten adults and nine little ones together in mayhem.

The journey down was interesting. We passed lorries loaded with bales of hay heading south, and once we were in England, saw mile after mile of pale parched fields, dust devils, dull dark hedges, and woodlands flailed by heat. No summer greenery. Everywhere looked faded and tired. It was shocking. And after the deep, dense jungle greens of home, upsetting too. The pressure on hay supplies for cattle and horses, on food crops and ultimately on supermarket shelves, seemed insurmountable. 

Our kids and their families in Paris, London and NW England struggled in the prolonged heat and stifling conditions; they longed for our Highland rains. We listened to their complaints about how hard it was to keep cool, especially at night, and sympathised of course. Being together at the holiday house, listening to the joyful laughter of children playing was the best medicine for everyone.

We watched the eclipse armed with special glasses, boxes with pinholes, a colander. Amidst all the news of forest fires around the world, the irony of a hot burning sun tamed by sister moon, the blistering fury of fire cooled by the slow calm movements of an orb 400 times smaller, was not lost on us. When the birds fell silent and the air cooled, the children hollered and danced with excitement. Later, we watched the Perseid meteors and battalions of satellites, grieving for a future in which stars might be lost behind a man-made grid of technology.

Red River Croft’s hay meadows were in my mind as we holidayed. Crofters cutting silage had waited until the end of July – a month later than usual – delayed by a very cold spring then summer downpours. Meadows were late to get going; growth was slow. I fretted about whether we’d even get a crop of hay.

We came home to familiar green fields, gentle breezes, misty rains. Some of the family came with us and revelled in wearing wellies and raincoats while building sandcastles and collecting shells. Finally, the weather changed with more dry August days than wet ones. And at last, the meadows began to flourish – growing tall and dense, filled with grasses and wildflowers. But with hay-making in mind, I obsessed over forecasts, repeatedly checking the weather app on my phone.

Occasionally, we lost the sea breeze and endured clouds of midges. But there were some glorious sunsets and fine days with azure skies and straggles of high translucent cloud. One day, we picnicked at Firemore beach. I remembered the militaristic lines of satellites wondering if they’d be visible in the clear air and deep blue sky. 

Over the summer our garden became a riotous tangle of all sorts of things. The jungle yielded a bumper crop of strawberries and blackcurrants and a feeble attempt by runner beans to find the sun. But we grew giant courgettes! We’ve laughed about that and filled the freezer, wondering how they managed to grow so big with so little heat. 

The expansive, tangled growth is everywhere – great clusters of brambles heavy with fruit, dog rose in bloom but spotted with mildew, rowans buckling under the weight of crimson berries. Our young trees have coped with the rains but we will need to think carefully about drainage in the future. 

And what about your family and the croft? Has your polytunnel been productive? Are you still thinking of getting pigs? 

After fretting too much, our hay harvest happened! The cutting, tedding and baling was done in a rush in early September, in a tiny weather window between awful forecasts for yet more rain. We rely on local young crofters, the three sons of Donald “Duck” Mackenzie affectionately known as the “Ducklings”, to harvest our hay. They take the hay for their cattle, Red River Croft and our wildlife neighbours benefit from management with nature at its heart. This symbiosis seems to work although our arrangements might need to change in the future if UK weather patterns become less predictable and more extreme.

The boys came with two tractors and began the cutting framed by rainbows. They worked by the orange glow of a hazy sunset and on into the darkness. The gamble paid off. A few days later, just as the last load of bales left the croft, the rains returned. As the “Ducklings” stored the precious harvest in their barn, I remembered those wagons of hay heading south.

How precarious everything feels when our climate is upended and re-ordered. Giant courgettes in the cold wet northwest, failure of crops in the far south. What a topsy-turvy world. Our forebears must have suffered similar variations and rapid change, right? I wonder if we have their strength and resilience. Cold, wet summers certainly contributed to the potato famine, the Clearances and the instigation of crofting, but local croft and estate records in Gairloch Museum may reveal more about specific harvests.

I’m still hoping for a sunny dry spell. Even the midges have given up. The meadows are pale gold but edged with colour – purple scabious, knapweeds and vetch, red clover, white sneezewort and yarrow, yellow hawkbit and tormentil. In the tangles are orb spider nests – wee globes made from grasses, rushes and vetch, tied together with webs. Ah! the resilience, determination and ingenuity of nature. That’s where the answers lie. In margins and edgelands, and the wild, wild spaces all around us.

Send news soon,

A xx

*

Duisky, September 20th

Dear Annie,

Yes, it very much feels like we are living in a world of extremes. Our August was also full of contrasts, sunlight glowing on the young birch round the house while the whole of the head of the loch, its hills, the wide glen, were lost to impenetrable grey rain. So many rainbows though, wavering between.

Unsettling seasonal changes too. I looked ahead in my calendar to find a free weekend in which I might run the gauntlet of bramble thorns, before realising that bramble season was already upon us. Rosehip vines over the garden fence were red and luscious long before summer hinted towards autumn. The apple trees we planted are still too young for fruit, but in a hidden corner of the croft two Bramley apple trees were full, their branches dipped down with the weight so that I barely needed the ladder. I had to enlist one of the kids to help me gather the apples before September gales emptied the boughs.

It would have been no hardship if I’d missed the early fruiting. I have in previous years, even when everything grew on its expected schedule. I have shrugged the loss off as leaving more for the deer and birds. There are two young female roe deer currently browsing the croft; they would undoubtedly make use of the windfalls. That said, histories of past hardships here combined with visible suffering in other parts of the world make it harder to leave anything. And the threat of hardships returning seems like a closer reality than it has before in my lifetime.

The extremes of moisture in the Highlands is indeed one of the constants we share with our predecessors. You’re right; it was a mild spring followed by incessant summer rains that destroyed the potato crops in the Western Highlands in 1846. Descriptions of mass decay and the consequences for crofters are as alarming to read as the news of the equally devastating desiccation we are seeing now.

The inability of waterlogged soil to nurture growth has long been a source of work. Ditches and underground drains score every slope and level. It’s one thing to learn how to manage an abundance of water, quite another to learn how to work with the opposite. I don’t imagine we can easily find ways to adapt to these new climate changes, but, as you say, there is resilience in and around us in the living landscape. The process of turning hay to silage in some ways gives me hope; the cut grass wrapped against the air and allowed to ferment. At some point, someone found a way to make anaerobic environments work with them instead of against. 

The varying extremes have continued into September, although these ones feel more like the Septembers of my memory. Morning mists obscure loch and hill with a gentleness at odds with the heavy rains that saturated them to begin with. And when the mists clear, sharp sunlight lances through leaves into wilting undergrowth.

The air now is sweet with decay, edged with a promise of cold. I keep getting adverts asking if I want perfume that makes me smell like the Highlands, which makes me laugh, living as we do beside a landfill. Although, it no longer accepts food waste and the heavy sickly methane clouds have gone. Instead, I breathe deeply into the dark fecund air of summer’s rot. Foxgloves are columns of mottled brown tongues, and sedge grass hangs empty of seed, architecture for orb spiders and sheetwebs.

I am worried for the fieldfare and redwings that usually visit in October. The rowans fruited so early that the berries are already losing their vibrancy. The moss below their trunks is scattered with dried berries like beads.

I found the remains of a sickle amongst the fallen fruit today. It had been embedded into the middle of a cluster of coppiced rowan for as long as I’ve been here, a curved metal heart. The blackened edges had finally rotted through. I wonder if the crofter who lodged that sickle knew that it was the last time they were going to use it.

On the ground between the trees and wall is a slightly raised circular platform of stones, now covered in a thick layer of wood sorrel, deer fern, moss, and thin dried grass. It was once the foundation for a hay stook. 

For haymaking here I have to look back. I found again black and white photos someone sent, taken in the 50s perhaps. One image looks from the west onto our croft, we think. The stone wall along the level beside these now overgrown stones appears to match with a stone wall and a stook that points up like a witch’s hat. The fields are pale and shorn in the image, with only a few dark patches of trees. My old oaks are young on the steep slope behind the stook, and a cluster of dark scrub around rough ground where our house now huddles heavily against the hill.

A fence line in the foreground of the image has a black jacket propped on one of the posts. Those fenceposts have long rotted away. In the far distance, Ben Nevis and Aonoch Mhor are held in their own vast timelines. The stones of the old houses and walls, and the traced lines of slope beneath our feet, are the only other fixed points linking that landscape and ours. 

I suppose the photos I take now might receive the same attention one day. Our kitchen table conversations revolve around where new fences should go, which ditches need filled in, which need cleared. I am itching to get pigs again but the fences need sorted first. Nothing happens quickly, Annie! Over the almost twenty years I’ve lived here, the croft has taught me what I need most is patience and the ability to envision this land on a far wider scale than our individual lives.

I almost wrote ‘that’s needed now more than ever’, however I suspect many of our predecessors felt the same way about their own times. Their future arrived and we are still here. 

With love,

Kx

*

Kirsteen Bell is a Scottish writer of narrative non-fiction and sometimes poetry. All her words are gathered from the croft in Lochaber where she lives, and the surrounding Scottish Highlands. Her writing and reviews can be found in such places as Paperboats, Caught by the River, The Guardian Country Diary, The Lochaber Times, and Northern Scotland Journal. Kirsteen can also be found at Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre, where she is Projects Manager and Highland Book Prize Co-ordinator. 

Annie Worsley is a writer, crofter, grandmother and geographer with an enduring love of the Scottish Highlands. In 2013 she and her husband moved to the crofting township of South Erradale near Gairloch. While her husband was a community pharmacist, Annie worked on Red River Croft. She began a blog about life on the croft and then wrote essays on nature and environment for various publications including Elementum Journal, Women on Nature, the Seasons’ Anthologies edited by Melissa Harrison, Caught by the River and Inkcap Journal. Her first book about life on Red River Croft and the natural history of Wester Ross, ‘Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands’, was published by William Collins in 2023, and is out now in paperback.

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Heavenly Emissaries: Elizabeth Sulis Kim, interviewed]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190973 2026-09-25T17:50:30Z 2026-09-26T08:00:46Z ‘The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom’ is September Book of the Month. In this month’s author interview, Elizabeth Sulis Kim speaks to Tallulah Brennan about whale worship, gods wrapped in bearskins, and how our rituals and stories must adapt to modern life.

Find an extract from the interview below.

Elizabeth Sulis Kim, photographed by Michael Vince Kim

The first thing I wanted to ask about is your discussion of transitioning from childhood to adulthood. In your words, that meant becoming sharper, less animal, ‘more bordered and exact’. Can you explain how loneliness followed from this process, and perhaps also, if and how this loneliness led you to writing The Book of Beasts?

It wasn’t so much loneliness but a reprieve from loneliness. As I write in the introduction to the book, when I was very young I felt a strong sense of kinship with other animals, and there was this sense that every hedgerow, tree, river, was teeming with life. As I got older, I would walk into a forest and I would feel alone. It wasn’t just aloneness, it was a real sense of existential loneliness. I had this feeling that everything around me at the time was inanimate, even though I knew it was there. I knew that there were animals, but I felt a severance. When I had travelled to other countries, where they have a stronger relationship with their ecology, I had a sense that these places were more alive. As I read about prehistoric Europe, I realised that actually our culture was once more lively; it hasn’t always been as it is now. I experienced this on a personal level too — the child I was versus the adult I became. I’m cautious to say that other children have a natural affinity for animals. I’ve seen children my daughter’s age squish bugs, but I do think that their sense of self is less categorical. I didn’t have such intense self-focus as a child, and I didn’t have such a bordered sense of self.

I trained as a forest school assistant a few years ago, and something which always stuck with me was one of my tutors talking about discipline. He had this story of a little boy who was accidentally, or unintentionally, torturing a woodlouse. Instead of immediately disciplining the child, he asked what he was doing, and the child said ‘I’m trying to find the cure for COVID. To find a vaccine.’ So the child was replicating an adult behaviour — experimenting on an animal — in a primal way. There was no lab, no layers of human explanation to distance yourself from what is a violent act. So when you were talking about children’s relationship with animals, I was thinking about how early we begin to reproduce the society in which we find ourselves, and maybe this is what your loneliness consisted of too.

I think it’s also worth saying that being in the woods for a forest school session, or enjoying close proximity to animals in any way is not necessarily a freeing exercise, right? In the Wolf chapter, for example, you talk about the Turkish far-right’s use of the wolf and about Hitler’s preoccupation with the wolf pack and his view of himself as a wolf. Could you speak about the incidences of reclaiming animal wisdom for sinister reasons, and how that has in turn shaped your thinking?

To first go to the children in the play park or the forest school. As well as absorbing culture at large, young children don’t have a strong concept of death. Do they know what they are doing, then? As regards to the nefarious use of animals as symbols, there are really chilling stories. They point out that humans across the world have a strong emotional resonance with animals, and of course this is not always going to be used for good. But it does point out that we see animals through our projections, we’re not always looking at the animal for its own sake. The Nazi regime used the wolf, as you mention. The Klu Klux Klan used the eagle. There are so many cases of fascist groups using animals, as many as there are examples of pacifists using animals. The Klu Klux Klan used the eagle as a motif — it is a strong, predatory animal, and so they use it. Brands also use emotional resonances with animals all the time, and this is quite insidious. Red Bull, Puma, Jaguar, the list goes on. We’re often thinking of the verocity and virility of animals, we very seldom tap into their other facets.

I’m thinking of an advert I saw at the cinema a few months ago. A gorgeous man driving a Land Rover around the grounds of an estate, surrounded by beautiful manicured horses, deerhounds, the shadow of the country house. It’s tapping into what I think is a really sinister idea of the natural order — expensive car-driver equals land-owner, equals pedigree human amongst his pedigree animals. It’s like saying the quiet part out loud, because who isn’t part of the picture, and why? And I think this links to the problem of charismatic versus uncharismatic animals, which is what I wanted to ask you about next. I was thinking about this particularly in your chapter on birds, when you write about the cultural distaste for corvids like jackdaws, ravens and crows. I loved when you wrote about the contrast represented by chickens: ‘Is there something intrinsically lacking in them which disqualifies them from the role of heavenly emissaries?’ Some of my favourite churches have these beautiful emblems of birds in their stained glass windows. Birds like owls and wrens which are obviously seen as worthy of veneration. I wonder how you make sense of how culturally constructed endearments affect our conservation priorities, and how our society facilitates this kind of hierarchy of life?

In answer to the question of charisma, I think there isn’t really such a thing as an intrinsically charismatic animal. These things are very much created through cultural institutions. Animals have different meanings at different times and different places across history. The polar bear can be an emblem of conservation in one moment, but for a community in Alaska it can be a beast, a menace. My sense is that the things we have commodified, we have collectively, culturally, all played a role in changing narratives about certain animals not being charismatic. If we trace the story of the auroch, for example, an incredibly important part of our culture, but it is now something hardly thought about. When we think of cows we might think of fields or abattoirs, not a sacred art-worthy creature. It’s hard to discern which came first, but it does often happen that we facilitate commodification by devaluating things in our stories. I would imagine these are not distinct processes but parallel ones.

*

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Elizabeth Sulis Kim’s The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom is out now and available here, published by Chatto & Windus. Read an extract from the book here.

Elizabeth Sulis Kim is a writer and editor based in Edinburgh but originally from England’s rural West Country. Her writing has appeared in publications such as BBC Culture, Mslexia, the LA review of Books, The Guardian, Hellebore, Fiddler’s Green, Litro, Stylist, and Dazed, among others. She is the author of ‘The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom’ (Chatto/Vintage) as well as ‘The Art of Folklore’ (Frances Lincoln/Quarto). Her fiction was shortlisted for Penguin’s #WriteNow scheme and she is currently working on a novel. She is also editor of Cunning Folk magazine and the occult writing anthology Spiritus Mundi. 

Tallulah Brennan is a writer based in England, interested in the relationships between humans and their environment, and how they in turn shape each other. She is also a contributing editor at Caught by the River. Follow Tallulah’s Substack here. 

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Tweed River Festival 2026]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190963 2026-09-24T14:01:29Z 2026-09-24T14:01:29Z Connecting Threads have just announced the second edition of the Tweed River Festival, an annual creative celebration of the River Tweed. Conceived as a gathering of river-loving communities, the two-day event will feature an array of creative activities in, on and alongside the River Tweed.

Wild swiming with Ingrid Campbell. Photo courtesy of Tweed River Festival

Last year’s inaugural edition of the Tweed River Festival took place in Peebles, in the Upper Tweed. Moving downstream along the river, this year’s festival takes place in and around Melrose in the Scottish Borders on October 30 & 31, while next year’s edition will take place in the lower stretches of the river, as it makes its way out into the sea at Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The 2026 Festival will explore links between culture, health, climate and environment under the theme of ‘Under, over, round and through’ and is delivered by Connecting Threads, the cultural strand of Destination Tweed which is a unique source-to-sea river revitalisation project that features the creation of a 113-mile River Tweed Trail, launching in 2028.

This celebration of river culture and contemporary art nurtures connections between cultural, environmental and climate activities. With tickets available on a sliding scale, including free and pay what you can options, the festival features events and activities for all ages designed to deepen connection with the river. These culminate with a free Tweed River Festival Parade which weaves through Melrose from the main festival venue to the banks of the Tweed at the Melrose Chain Bridge.

Other activities range from collective net-making to riverside listening; costume-making to screen-printing; circus performances to photography workshops; films, food and river swimming. This year’s festival will also see the twinning of the River Tweed with the River Conwy in Wales with a view to sharing basin knowledge and culture with Welsh collective Dyffryn Dyfodol.

Screenprinting workshop at Tweed River Festival 2025. Photo by Ian Georgeson

Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Connecting Threads brings together creative practitioners with conservationists, environmentalists, scientists, river specialists and communities of place and purpose, to celebrate the River Tweed through a five-year programme of cultural activity.

The Tweed River Festival will be accompanied by a printed publication, which explores questions relating to the ‘Under, over, round and through’ theme and delves into the thinking of two artists in residence as well as Connecting Threads’ year-round programme. Designed by Emily Macaulay of Stanley James Press, the publication will feature writing by Dani Admiss, Em Merrin May Armstrong, Marleen Boschen, Alycia Pirmohamed, and Jamila Prowse. The publication will be available for visitors to Tweed River Festival.

Full programme information and tickets are available here.

Rebecca Beinart by the Tweed in Melrose. Photo: Pictorial Photography & Create Berwick

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Book of the Month: September]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190956 2026-09-23T12:52:30Z 2026-09-23T12:52:30Z September’s Book of the Month is Elizabeth Sulis Kim’s ‘Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom’. Read an extract, on the infinite lives of the Salmon of Knowledge, below.

There was once a salmon who swam upstream to reach the source of the river where she was born. We don’t know whether her journey was propelled by instinct or conscious desire, but either way, it was time to spawn her children. She swam against the current for miles. Salt water gave way to fresh water. She leapt up waterfalls. As she travelled, her silvery scales turned a pinkish hue. Her muscles weakened and wasted. The journey seemed impossible, and at times she was on the point of giving up. She saw other fish plucked from the river, by claws, hands and sharp beaks; at any moment, her own life could be taken too, but still she followed her destiny, moving ever closer to that place half-remembered.

Back then, thousands of salmon made this perilous journey each autumn, though few survived to tell the tale. When the salmon arrived at their destination, the people who lived beside the river rejoiced. They were dependent on the river’s bounty – its clean water and the plants that grew along its banks: watercress, raspberries, hazel – and the salmon’s arrival signalled its continued health. Soon, gathered on the banks were all manner of beasts, otters, herons and more, here to join the feast.

But back to our salmon, swimming upstream, watched by someone who would go on to recount her story far and wide. The river she swam up twisted and turned and then narrowed. A strange mist veiled the land. The river became a meandering mesh of smaller waterways, and the salmon pressed on, moving through the streams. By chance, or fate, she arrived in a place of great stillness, a well or a pool. She was hungry. She sought shelter from the glaring sun above in the shade of a tree whose branches overhung the water. A nut, ripe and creamy, fell from this tree. The salmon devoured it. Then, she swam back through the river maze to join her kin.

The tale is told again and again, transforming with each retelling. Of the salmon who slipped, by choice or chance, into the Celtic Otherworld. The salmon who feasted upon hazelnuts from a sacred tree at the Well of Wisdom, and gained all the knowledge of the world. It was a burden for such a small fish for, although she now knew that she would live for many years, she knew, too, what – or rather, who – would kill her.

Word spread quickly among humans of the Salmon of Knowledge that, once eaten, would impart sacred awareness of everything that ever was and everything that ever would be. Years later, the story reached a poet named Finn Eces. Upon hearing it, he set out on a quest to capture the salmon. Finn spent seven fruitless years fishing along Ireland’s great rivers, until he eventually caught the fish in the River Boyne, which was known then as the River of the White Cow. How he distinguished this fish from the others was anybody’s guess. Was she fatter? Were her scales more iridescent? Or perhaps it was just a feeling, not unlike those that came to him in moments of flow, from which words sprung forth like water from a spring. Finn asked his servant, Fionn mac Cumhaill, to prepare the salmon for him, instructing the young boy to eat none himself, not even a bite. Yet, as the boy cooked it, a drop of oil spat at his finger and he instinctively licked the burn to soothe it. No sooner had the oil touched his lips than suddenly the boy knew everything that ever was and everything that ever would be.

Later, people across the land would tell stories of the great exploits of Fionn mac Cumhaill, a hero and a seer, who need only suck his thumb to connect with his otherworldly knowledge. The salmon had seen all as it would be, and through each other’s stories, both Fionn and the salmon led infinite lives.

The tale of the Salmon of Knowledge is from the Fenian cycle of Irish mythology, penned between 900– 1200, though it may well preserve older stories. It’s the summer of 2021, and I am in Dundee, with a vague notion to follow the River Tay – Scotland’s longest river – to meditate on what the salmon knew. Ireland may be the source of this myth, but Scotland absorbed these stories too. Scholars don’t agree on how Gaelic language and culture first transmitted to Scotland but the prevailing consensus among linguists is that Irish settlers came to Scotland around 500, bringing with them their language and culture. The distinctive Scottish Gaelic came from Irish. While I could travel to the River Boyne in Ireland, to the Salmon of Knowledge’s ancestral homeland, it feels more urgent to meditate on the salmon here in Scotland, because it’s one of the world’s largest players in the salmon industry, producing more than 150,000 tonnes of farmed Atlantic salmon annually. (Ireland, by contrast, produces less than one tenth of that.)

*

‘Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom’ is out now and available here (£22.90), published by Chatto & Windus.

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Sceapig Island]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190941 2026-09-22T14:51:51Z 2026-09-22T14:51:51Z We were introduced to photographer Jess Bootes at our weekend event on the Isle of Sheppey earlier this year. As well as her fantastic photos of the Elmley event, we were struck by Jess’s ongoing personal project ‘Sceapig Island’, which gives intimate insight into Sheppey life. She has kindly allowed us to share some photos from the project here.

Jessica writes:

‘‘Sceapig Island’ is a documentary series exploring the community and landscape of the Isle of Sheppey, an island known historically for its sheep. Extending off of the Southeast coast, and neighbouring the Thames Estuary, this 35 square mile island is attached by two bridges. Rich with history and home to over 10 caravan/camping sites, the Island’s reputation of poverty and crime has gained it a negative reputation with many people from the mainland. The Isle of Sheppey is my hometown, the photographs are informed by my personal experience, as well as extensive research into the island’s history. The images explore a sense of place, our connection to home and how geography influences our emotions and behaviour.’

You can follow Jess on Instagram here / visit her website here.
]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Wainwright Prize 2026]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190931 2026-09-18T20:03:37Z 2026-09-19T08:01:46Z A dispatch from Paul Bursche, our man on the ground at this year’s Wainwright Prize ceremony.

We were delighted to be at Thursday’s Wainwright Prize ceremony, where the 2026 Wainwright Prize Book of the Year was awarded to The Book Of Birds by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane.

The ceremony was held at in the main barn at Elmley NNR, where our CBTR Weekender was held back in May, and the big autumn skies and marshland landscape made for  a very fitting location.

 The Wainwright Prizes are the UK’s foremost awards celebrating nature, conservation, and environmental writing. Created in the famous fell-walker Alfred Wainwright’s name, the prizes showcase writing that celebrates nature and our environment, nurtures respect for our planet, and informs readers of the threats that the natural world faces. It was wonderful to be there in the company of so many authors and illustrators that CBTR has championed and celebrated through the years, not least the winners.

Introducing the afternoon, Wainwright Prize Director Alastair Giles said: “This year’s entries once again show just how vital and vibrant nature and conservation writing have become, not only as a form of creative expression, but as a force for change. The Wainwright Prize continues to champion those who remind us that storytelling can be a powerful step towards awareness, action and ultimately hope.”

The Winners: 

The 2026 Wainwright Prize Book of the Year & Illustrative Book of the Year – The Book Of Birds by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane

Seven years in the making, The Book of Birds tells the story of 49 British birds and is a moving call to action and a celebration of UK birdlife. Judge Errol Reuben Fernandes said,”The book  is utterly beautiful and had me completely captivated. There is so much rhythm, movement and expression in their painterly depiction of the various species. The collaboration between author and illustrator has produced something very special indeed. This is a book to treasure.”

The 2026 Children’s Wainwright Prize Book of the Year & Children’s Non Fiction – Otherlands: An illustrated Journey Through Earth’s Lost Worlds by Thomas Halliday, illustrated by Gavin Scott

Otherlands is an illustrated journey into Earth’s distant path, introducing young people to the life on earth that shared the world before our time. The judges called it a “breakthrough children’s classic that will endure for decades”. The book is adapted from the adult novel Otherlands by Thomas Halliday, which was commended in the 2022 Wainwright Prize. Judge Mya-Rose Craig said, “This book is deeply knowledgeable and does a wonderful job at breaking down an extremely complex subject while remaining fun and engaging. I think that one of the goals of children’s non-fiction is to get children excited about learning, and the world around them, and this book definitely does that!”

The other Category Winners were: 

The Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing  – Ancient: Reviving the Woods that Made Britain by Luke Barley

Judge Michael Malay said:  “Barley is a true woodlander, his fine-grained knowledge of trees drawn from years of physical labour, careful observation and devoted listening. With skill and sensitivity, he brings us deep into the heart of the woods, slowing us down to plant-speed and immersing us in the great unfolding story of our ancient woodlands. He also demonstrates – beautifully, and irrefutably – how deeply interconnected everything is, and how, by adopting the perspective ‘tree time’, the world becomes vaster, wilder and more alive.”

The Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing – The Savage Landscape: How We Made The Wilderness by Cal Flyn

Category judge Phoebe Weston said “The Savage Landscape is a compelling and thought-provoking book that unpicks the idea of ‘wilderness’. We loved how Flyn digs into this idea of untouched wilderness, looking at it from a historical, religious and philosophical perspective. It’s a challenging book to read, making you think twice about assumptions we have about wild spaces. Her exploration of how we psychologically crave wilderness and our desire to use it to live life more intensely was particularly fascinating. Flyn threads together loads of interesting ideas that kept us thinking long after we put the book down. She also challenges concepts that are the bedrock of the conservation movement, such as humans being separate from nature. Finally, the writing is extremely strong and we found it to be a highly readable book that will draw in readers with no preexisting interest in the subject.”

The Children’s Wainwright Prize for Fiction – The Danger of Small Things by Caryl Lewis

Judge Abi Elphinstone said: “The Danger of Small Things is a brilliantly original and thought-provoking story. It demonstrates, with such power, the fragility of the natural world and the courage needed to save it. This is a call-to-arms that will empower teenagers across the country and urge them to care for each other and the planet they inhabit.”

The Children’s Wainwright Prize for Picture Books – The Great Bear by Annie Booker

Judge Ash Bhardwaj said: “A magnificent book that explored morality and human impact through a tale of wonder and hope. Some of the most powerful, moving and beautiful illustrations I have seen in a children’s book. Each page was a work of art.

Our congratulations to all the winners and nominees at this year’s awards.

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[This [Ai]n’t the Way]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190927 2026-09-18T09:40:59Z 2026-09-18T09:40:59Z AI-generated articles about nature are fundamentally at odds with what we’re doing here, writes a very tired site editor.

A couple of weeks ago, an unsettling email landed in my inbox. 

I’m Mae, an independent writer (AI, to be upfront) based in the iLands community. Your contact page says stories and things to share are welcome, so here is one I’ve already researched […] I also write custom researched pieces about places, 500 to 800 words, every fact sourced, exclusive use, $25 flat per piece paid by card through a secure payment link. 

I could’ve just deleted it. I could’ve replied, taking the bait, sacrificing another however many trees or litres of drinking water to satisfy my own curiosity, boredom, need to have the last word. But instead I left it there, Marked As Unread, burning a hole in the bottom of my email account and the back of my mind. I just have not been able to stop thinking about it; the banal, pointless horror of it.

I know this isn’t personal; that it’s becoming increasingly normal for publications, publishers, book agents, et al, to have to wade through increasingly AI-sloppy submissions folders. But there is something compellingly grotesque about the idea that it is more important to churn out meaningless content “about nature” than to use our eyes and brains and spines to recognise everything that has to fall into the abyss to feed the generator.

Generative AI is fundamentally at odds with the point of this place. It heralds the death not only of huge chunks of the natural world, but of the human experimentation, curiosity and creativity that has built and sustained this publication for very nearly 20 years. Rather than letting myself go slowly or quickly mad, I instead want to use this as an opportunity to re-assert what the hell we’re doing here; what the point of any of this is.

This website, scrappily held together by fraying canvas and baler twine and old paperclips, is a repository for messy, embodied human creativity and enthusiasm and esoteric interests. Nobody will get rich writing for it. Its remit isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, formulaic. Throw the phrase “nature writing” out of the window: it isn’t serving any of us. This is a place for people to share the things that make their blood surge and pupils widen and fireworks go off in their brains — maybe sometimes while they’re half-way up a hill, knee-deep in mud or reeling in a fish, but that bit’s not compulsory. Being outside can be a flint-strike for the imagination, but so can being inside, listening to a barely listenable record, or reading a book about wind-up toys, or contemplating artwork made by a small child.

Has an AI agent ever thought of the sea as the living embodiment of its dead grandmother? Felt the crack of the season’s first acorns under its boots? Driven a sputtering Morris Minor up a moorland hill and thought oh shit? Found itself on a direct line to god listening to Al Green or Alice Coltrane? Contemplated whether its handful of blackberries is full of heavy metals? Momentarily wondered if it’s timeslipped back to hut circles and ancient cows, before ultimately concluding it should just more often remember to wear its glasses?

Has an AI agent ever got lost? Pulled a tick from its hip because it neglected to tuck in its socks? Gone out in the middle of the night to look at the moon? Stayed up reading by lamplight? Seen a young deer on the side of the road, glassy-eyed, and cried, or poked a different dead thing with a stick, or deliberately left the mistakes in its knitting, or thought oh god, my dog is so beautiful?

I would wager that Mae, the independent writer (AI, to be upfront), has never asked if it’s going to rain then gone out without a jacket anyway, seen an arrow on the ground and followed it, cooked the beetroot from its mother’s allotment, watched the peak night of the perseids and shrieked joy up at the sky, or seen a yellow slice of window on the horizon and thought ah, home. 

Bring us all your awe and wonderment, disgust, dismay, delight, psychedelic experimentation and beautiful misplaced commas, but please for the love of all that is green and living — metaphorically and literally — do not bring cold metallic $25 prompts about places. 

From the grey matter and fingers and editorial desk (sofa) of Diva Harris
September 2026

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Now Playing]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190920 2026-09-16T17:41:55Z 2026-09-16T17:41:55Z ‘Fairweather Friend’ by Sam Burton.

The title track (and second single we’re digging in a big way) from the upcoming album, out 30th October on Captured Tracks.

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Clean enough to drink]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190916 2026-09-16T13:37:25Z 2026-09-15T16:06:25Z Could you drink from your local river or stream? In an extract from his book ‘Unwilded’, Alastair Humphreys heads to his nearest river armed with a basic chemistry set, a mug and a thirst for a drink of water.

How clean is your local river or stream? Only a very small number of English rivers have good ecological status, and none have good chemical status. Consequently, drinking directly from your river probably sounds like a silly idea. We have forgotten what healthy water looks like and accepted poor conditions as standard.

For most of human history, people relied on streams for drinking water. But today, when we’re thirsty we turn on a tap or go to a shop, with little thought for the rivers our water comes from. Do you know which river supplies your water? When did you last drink from a stream? We have shifted from treating this as normal to seeing it as strange, even dangerous. What was once natural and intuitive now requires disclaimers, test kits and an iron stomach.

This detachment reinforces the idea that nature is ‘out there’, different to us, even though more than half of our bodies are made up of water. It runs through our veins and fills every cell. We drink tens of thousands of litres in our lifetime, and every molecule of that water is billions of years old. It was once rain, once ocean, once river and now is – briefly – us. How foolish then to see ourselves as aloof from the natural world.

So I went along to my nearest river with a basic chemistry set, a mug and a thirst for a drink of water. I planned to walk upstream as far as necessary until it was clean enough to drink. I would look out for obvious signs of pollution – floating turds, slimy rocks, algal blooms – and then, once it looked visually acceptable, I’d use my testing kit to check for nitrates and phosphates. High concentrations of these indicate nutrient pollution from agriculture, sewage and urban runoff. (Legal disclaimer: this is probably not precisely how they do it in a laboratory.) I certainly needed to be vigilant: in 2025 sewage was dumped into English and Welsh rivers over 380,000 times.

The water was muddy and brackish at first, so I walked upstream beyond the natural silt until it looked more appetising. It was, if nothing else, a pleasant excuse for a stroll. I enjoyed following the wide river, pushing my way through tall marsh reeds.

After a while, I passed under a dual carriageway and could see my first town up ahead. I scooped up some water, unpacked my new chemistry kit, read the instructions, and got testing. To the naked eye, the water didn’t look too gross, though there was a lot of plastic rubbish. I’ve certainly drunk much worse. But the test results confirmed that there were moderately high levels of nutrient pollution.

I was a little thirsty but I needed to keep walking upstream towards cleaner water. I followed the river through the town and into a park where children were splashing through sprinklers in a purpose-built water playground. Nobody was playing in the adjacent river even though it was shallow and looked enticing, burbling gently through rocks and yellow marsh marigolds.

Beyond the park, a CCTV camera on the riverbank looked at me looking at the river as I weighed up whether to have a drink or not. My assumption was that because I was upstream of the town, the water must be cleaner. But why should towns mean dirty water? It doesn’t have to be that way. We unquestioningly expect our settlements to degrade nature and don’t pause to reflect whether there’s another way.

In the 1960s, many of Switzerland’s rivers were thick with algae, their surfaces clogged with scum and dead fish. Swimming was banned because people were falling ill. But public pressure led to action, and now Swiss rivers are some of the cleanest in the world, even those flowing through cities. The Swiss today are rightly proud of their ‘blue gold’. Paris has cleaned up the Seine and enabled public swimming again after a century-long ban. Copenhagen harbour used to be polluted by industrial waste and sewage, but now is so clean that people swim in it. The Chicago River was once so toxic that it went up in flames, but after a polluted century people are swimming in the city again, proving it’s never too late to rescue a river. So why not us, too?

I dipped, scooped, tested… and failed again. Although I was upstream of the town, the river was still polluted. The problem therefore was not the town. Farming is the biggest source of river pollution in Britain – particularly through fertiliser runoff and livestock waste – even more than the high-profile sewage spills that make the news. Nevertheless, the stretch ahead was one of my favourite parts of the river, bending and curving through tranquil farmland, albeit with an accompanying roar of motorway traffic.

I enjoyed walking along the riverside footpath for a while, then filled another mug of water and tested again. But the nitrate levels still hadn’t dropped, so I was forced to keep going through more cow fields. By the time I unpacked my kit to test again, I was getting quite thirsty.

Drumroll… And the stream finally passed the test and I could celebrate with a welcome drink of cold water. It tasted all the better for having been earned and anticipated. (Legal disclaimer, part two: there are multiple hazards associated with drinking directly from rivers, and nasty things like E. coli and norovirus don’t show up on a GCSE-level chemistry set.)

I was enjoying myself, so I decided to continue the mission and follow the river for a few more miles to its source. The stream grew narrower and shallower as it wound on, undisturbed, beneath another motorway. The water was clear and cold and it was time to swim – or rather to lie down – which was lovely even though I was well within earshot (and bare-bum sight) of the motorway.

Feeling refreshed, I continued up a wooded hillside. My stream was shrinking rapidly now and the final stretch was barely a trickle. When it dried up altogether I had to rely on my map app to guide me. I came upon patches of flattened grass where deer had been resting in the shade. My clumsy progress through the trees had alerted them and I spotted them bounding away gracefully.

I was standing now in a squidgy bog at the foot of an oak tree. This was the official source of the stream that would grow into the river I’d been following all day. It was a secluded and scenic end to an unusual and enjoyable walk, and the process had made me think differently about my river too.

Becoming emotionally invested in something we take for granted, like a drink of water, reminded me how important it is to keep campaigning to clean up our rivers. We must not assume that the way things are now is how they have always been. It is vital that we hold water companies, agricultural businesses and politicians to account, and demand solutions rather than allowing them to continue extracting profits and paying large dividends. Rivers can heal very swiftly if we only choose to prioritise them.

The walk had also reminded me that any small, arbitrary microadventure can turn you into an explorer of the world and lead you somewhere new – like this woodland glade I had never visited before, or to the source of the water that flows from your tap the next time you drink with gratitude and appreciation.

*

‘Unwilded: Finding Our Way Back to Nature’ by Alastair Humphreys is out now and available here, published by Eye (£12.99).

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[A remembering]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190910 2026-09-11T19:31:45Z 2026-09-12T08:00:02Z Ysella Sims revisits the moments — and personal ruptures — of a former life between the rivers Tavy and Tamar.

This piece comes with a content warning for pregnancy loss.

Anniversaries have a way of rooting us to a moment, inviting us to compare that one with this. In April 2026, as our timelines filled with flashbacks to the political ruptures of 2016, we headed back to our first Devon home in the Tamar Valley, pulled there by an instinct to revisit the moments — and personal ruptures — that had drawn us there a decade before. 

Before we moved away to Devon we’d lived, together and apart, all our lives on the same greensand ridge in the dry south east, shuffling variously along a wooded valley threaded by the rivers Tillingbourne and Mole. Our move, to a granite landscape shouldered by the rivers Tavy and Tamar, had been its own rupture. 

Had I run the way that my great grandfather Sandosham had run from Sawyerpuram, from Ceylon?

Travelling back to the Tamar Valley from Exeter we passed thick drifts of cowslips growing on the sides of the A30. 

***

I am a five year old girl in a Peugeot packed with siblings and tents moving towards a wet Cornish field to push baby teeth into stone walls for fairies to find, thrilling to the sea thundering below like a pantomime villain, like the Padstow oss; 

I am a nine year old brown boy in Edwardian frills — picking cowslips on a Norfolk mire, watching the cowslips shine in my pale cousin’s hand, pushing mine into hers;

I am a just-woman in combats and a spaghetti strapped vest, waving at trains from a common, chasing chalkhill blues with my tow-headed boy 

***

The travelling is a remembering, a piecing together; there is the dark circle of beech perched on the sloping hill, the banks of gorse flaming in the startling April light, there the pub shaped like a highwayman’s carriage, the defiant engine house on the moor. The road bends and curves like a fairground ride. Crossing the open scape of Dartmoor, I watch cloud shadows chase its vastness. Time unwinds as we drop down towards Tavistock, and I wonder if we are going back to our old home, the coffee cups still in the sink, the dinks in the cushions where we’d sat last night.

Reaching our old village I search ahead for the house as we crown Bedford Street, bracing myself for a gap where the tree should be. As we park outside the Edgecumbe, I can see that Bere Alston is as we left it. A slow motion Sunday morning, people are moving between the Co-Op and their cars. The bookshop, closed up and stuck with pages of cartoon scrawls and the hairdressers and post office are unchanged — lustreless, even in the spring sunshine. 

What had brought us here, ten years ago, so far from Surrey’s soft hills, copses, streams and meadows, its fast flowing roads and chichi farmshops, so far from all the people who loved us best? Perhaps, like foxes going to ground, we’d needed somewhere to curl up and lick our wounds from the gin trap.

We walked back up Bedford Street, wary of signs of our neighbour, expecting her to leap from the shadows, a woman who’d spat at me in the street and screamed at her daughter.

We reached the white exterior of our old home, a Victorian terrace at the end of a row. 

And there it was in the front garden — our tree for our not-to-be boy.

***

Do you really want to know? asks the nurse down the phone in the weeks after the sonographer’s room fell to a hush and we are conjured to a side room with a hard blue vinyl sofa, a box of tissues on the table.

Carefully pruned, the tree’s branches are cupped hands reaching upwards on orange stems, new lime green buds on its outstretched fingers. 

Its trunk is silver and solid — ten summers, springs, autumns and winters of growth — the shape of him inside us. 

Our silly boy, my husband says, his shoulders starting, almost imperceptibly, to shake.

***

The Linden Tree

But what about the tree for the-not-to-be-boy 

they ask in low voices when we tell them we 

are moving on. Will you untangle your grief from

the roots, buttercups and devils-bit

– carry it away to some new place?

 

What about the way he knelt

on the winter-drenched soil,

he, who didn’t cry all the time that you 

could not, would not, stop? 

 

What about the way the bark glows

orange in the January dim

red in April’s full bright

– spring’s new light filling its

heart-shaped leaves lime-green

like a communion?

***

Later, we leave the car at the station and climb down a once familiar hill — through wild garlic, celandine, bluebells and dappled light; through the messiness of the moss and trees to Tuckermarsh Quay. For a thousand years a ferry carried passengers the 100 metres or so across to Cornwall from here, stopping shortly before we arrived. Like children left in the car at the pub, we would stand on the bank of the Tamar, looking across to Calstock’s quirk and edginess, its Friday night hum. But our idea of keeping a canoe tied up on the bank was laughed off by the locals,

“It won’t stay there long,” they’d said. “There are still pirates in Calstock.”

Now we could call a solar-powered ferry to fetch us from the other side.

“Stay there”, says Will the skipper, “I can see you.”

We climb, over scaffolding poles and a pile of barriers, down to a small plastic jetty wobbling in the water. The dog follows us sceptically.

I look across to Calstock’s stagger of brightly coloured houses and boat sheds, its terraced gardens and glassy arts centre stretched into a steep granite slope. For generations smugglers brought their booty up river from Plymouth Sound where the Tamar rushes out to meet the Tavy and Lynher to store in the slope’s chiseled chambers, the surrounding wooded hideaways. During the nightly bombing raids on Plymouth and its docks in the Second World War people found shelter here — in animal stalls, sheds and barns — anywhere they could find it, glad of the sound of water, sheep and owls, for the feeling of sanctuary.

We watch Will amble down to the boat, St Piran’s flag and the Jolly Roger flapping at the stern.

Will docks artfully, unsmiling behind his wayfarers.

I ask him about timing our return journey for the tides.

“What is time?” he says, “time is a construct.”

At the Tamar Inn I sit with my back against a whitewashed wall and look out over the river and across to the woods, the dog pulling to talk to another dog at the next table. There’s a harsh easterly wind, but when it drops and the sun comes out, it feels bright and hopeful, like stepping out of our lives and into a new place. This was sometimes how it had felt to live down here – as if normal rules didn’t apply, as if things didn’t matter because nobody knew you and nobody cared, a relief after the closeness and grief of Surrey. Over the water where we lived on ‘Bere island,’ as my husband called it, we were wrapped in a womb of waters, by the rivers Tavy and Tamar shouldering the peninsula. It was liberating and claustrophobic, just like living on an island.

Dog walkers amble along the tow path, children play with cars on the grass, teenagers slouch at the bus stop, watchful for a way out. A team of middle aged gig rowers stop before the jetty, holding their oars above their heads to sing a chorus of happy birthday to a boy on the bank. A group of young girls in a gig are shepherded onto the water, followed by a glide of older women.

“Devon”, my son says, when I first tell him we are moving away, “where ambition goes to die.”

But our ambition was for the peace of the ancient forest, its wildflowers, rivulets and tinkling streams, for the rivers’ sounds and smell, their movement and energy, to be quiet islanders in a place where time meant nothing at all.

We climb back up the hurt-lined paths through the woods of beech, oak and yew to lie on our backs in a sunny field. Listening to the little branch line train rattling over the viaduct, the sound of its weight, metal and clack reminds me of all my journeys from the village into Plymouth and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

“I think we need to move again,” I say to my husband, lying next to me on the grass. The dog circles us, barking at us to get up, “because you get stuck when you stay still and our ideas of ourselves get stuck.”

“I think we should stay living where we are, but just go out more”, he says.

Driving around the lanes, I think of all the visits from family and friends, seeing my son, all gangle swinging and climbing on trees. I remember Friday nights driving home from The Plough full of beer and sadness, the awkward nights at people’s houses trying to make friends. I think of people looking down from the Conservative club balcony, smoking and sneering beneath the Union flag.

Back in the village I realise that none of our neighbours, the people we knew, who made up the day-to-day of our life were still here, conscious of how being in a place can feel like forever, and then it’s all gone, shifted.

After the reverse journey, ticking off the milestones signalling where home is now, I come through the gate into the garden, comforted by its familiar click, its ramshackle arrangement tied together with hessian and woven by ivy.

The light is glinting on the pond, the first delicate umbels of cow parsley waving in the cold wind and dimming sun. A blackbird is singing from one of the three lime trees, towering 60 feet into the sky. In sepia photos of children in pinafores holding hoops and staring at the camera, you can see a distinctive crop of trees in the same place. When the wind blows I wonder whether their roots are the only thing keeping the bank of shillet, sand and stone that the house is balanced on, in place. In late spring they flower, drawing in bees with their sweet honey scent until their branches tremble with pleasure.

I learn that Lime trees are Linden trees, that in fairy tales and celtic mythology they are trees of magic, healing and protection, sacred spots to hide, trees of love and mothers.

Here we are, then, and there he is, sheltered by the canopy of mothers.

*

Ysella Sims is a writer, poet and performer. Based in the rural South West of England, her work explores identity, belonging and our relationship to place. Find her website here / follow her on Substack.

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Shorelines]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190905 2026-09-11T10:53:34Z 2026-09-11T10:53:34Z August’s Book of the Month was Alycia Pirmohamed’s ‘Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become’ — a book that is its own body of water, writes Aileen Angsutorn Lees.

Shorelines is the highly anticipated non-fiction debut from award-winning poet Alycia Pirmohamed. It won the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize, awarded to underrepresented nature writing. But this book defies genre, so I am reluctant to pigeonhole it. The act of labelling feels like an attempt to make a voice more understandable, more palatable to a specific audience. Like many racialised writers (myself included) Alycia refuses to be boxed in: ‘I want to undercut insidious thought processes that categorise me as either a Muslim writer or a nature writer, but never both.’

The book opens with a fissuring. In the prologue, ‘The Woman Who Belongs and Unbelongs in Two Waters’, Alycia places two moments in time side by side, arranged as two columns. Within them are fragments of memory, the forgotten seemingly marked by white space. While these two stories are separated, they can be read in tandem. It feels like the self splitting while co-existing — an embrace of duality. She writes one of my favourite metaphors, appearing later in the book, which I have held since reading her essay in Gathering: Women Of Colour On Nature. Alycia compares belonging to the mathematical asymptote, ‘the long line that can get close, so close, to touching its nearby curve… they do not touch, and they never will. The asymptote is the limit. I am the limit by which the oppressor can know themselves.’ I love the idea of reframing expectations around belonging, to turn the concept outward, repelling assimilation.

Shorelines is an exploration of ‘memory, migration and the selves we become’. The chapters are marked by geographical co-ordinates yet each is different in style, form and perspective. What results is a beautiful blending, a ‘resistance against a genre that is steeped in whiteness and bias.’ Alycia reflects on how the practice of writing has also shaped her experiences. She tussles with what she should and shouldn’t reveal both to the reader and herself, other times self-questioning through form. Her use of blackout and columned text amplifies feelings of erasure and containment. At times, I feel the literary sector looming. In ‘Trigger Notebook: Fragments from the shallows of memory’ interwoven strikethrough paragraphs initially seem like a critical voice she is trying to suppress. But this gradually reveals what feels like a truer narrative — of Islamophobia and genocide — that much of the world (still) refuses to acknowledge. To borrow her watery verb, her voice rivers between the loud and the quiet. The way Alycia uses language reflects the fluid space in which this book sits, and the ethereal quality of Alycia’s writing. It is captivating. It relays so effectively the feelings of being silenced.

Yet, Alycia also uses silencing as a form of resistance. At her launch event at Portobello Bookshop, she explained that when there is a pressure to give more of yourself for consumption, withholding can be an act of preservation. This resonated with my own experiences in environments, creative and otherwise, where there is an expectation to comply and conform.

The book honours this blurriness. She refers to misrememberings in the context of childhood memories with her family, as well as the trees she recognises but cannot name. There are many things which keep slipping just out of reach. Through the faint memories, Lake District mist and thick Alberta fog, there are recurring appearances of shapeless bodies. I am struck by her imagery of ghosts, who ‘unbend in the water, rising up to greet me like smoke’, and her reflections on imprints — the ones our ancestors make on us as well as those which we leave on our surroundings. In ‘An ocean lyric’, the movement of water over her body is ritualistic, rippling through the chapter like the paragraphs themselves. Each time she washes, dips and plunges, the ocean imprints onto her skin. It also carries a part of her into its own memory. ‘That water is a library keeping so many of our stories, the secrets and sometimes darknesses of our womanhood.’ The chapter is a powerful and tender turning point where moments swill, and bodies merge.

I am in awe of how Alycia draws connections across time and continents. She underscores place with displacement and grief, showing us how stories of migration and colonialism are intertwined with nature. She shows us how the outdoors evokes terror and joy. How memories fade and blend. How her body holds shame. How there is pain in the proximity and unknown. Across the ebbs and flows of lyrical prose and fragments, there are swells of emotions.

Alycia describes the sea/skin as ‘uncontained, reaching, seamless’ and I feel the same way about Shorelines. The book is its own body of water. It imprints onto you. I keep returning, experiencing something different depending on the weather/human condition that day. Each time, it refreshes.

*

‘Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become’ by Alycia Pirmohamed is out now and available here, published by Canongate (£18.04). Read an extract from the book here, and a Q&A with Alycia Pirmohamed here.

Aileen Angsutorn Lees is a writer and artist based in Perthshire. Her book ‘Tectonics’ was published by Edinburgh Art Festival in 2026. She has written for shado magazine, Fringe of Colour, Migrant Women Press, National Trust for Scotland, Bella Caledonia and The Courier, among others. Her poetry won the 2024 Bold Types Scottish Women’s Creative Writing Competition and was shortlisted for the 2026 Wigtown International Poetry Prize. She is the founder of Decolonising The Outdoors. Find her website here.

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Allotment Tapes Update]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190897 2026-09-09T17:11:01Z 2026-09-09T17:11:01Z As Ben McElroy’s year-long audio project on Nottingham allotments continues, he has just announced the release of some limited-run physical cassettes.

Tapes #1 & #2 from January and February this year are now available to pre-order on recycled cassette, in compostable packaging. Just 30 copies of these are being printed, with home made, pen-written artwork including printed wildflowers found onsite and the original polaroids.

SIDE A – JANUARY – ALLOTMENT TAPES #1 – A DIFFERENT STILLNESS (WITH VAL TURTON)
This is the first instalment of a monthly series exploring St. Ann’s Allotment in Nottingham through field recordings, conversations and film/music. It is the oldest and largest allotments in Europe and, sitting close to the city centre, has a rich
and varied history. January’s instalment visits artist and gardener Val Turton, who very kindly shared her space for the project, as well as her wisdom on the space.

SIDE B – FEBRUARY – ALLOTMENT TAPES #2 – THE LUNGS OF THE CITY (WITH STEVEN ‘STENO’ VITALE)
The second instalment of Allotment Tapes visits musician and gardener Steno on the plot he shares with his partner Michelle. They took the plot on a few years ago and, like a lot of the untaken plots at St Ann’s, it was extremely overgrown…so a lot of work has gone into making it the space today, with veg patches and fruit trees amongst a lawn and space to jam and hang out! Steno plays in the Carnival Band (with Maddy Prior), with various theatre troupes, and composes his own songs.

Val Turton from January’s tape also returns, as she had too much plot wisdom to be squashed into a single month!

The cassettes are out on 2nd October — pre-order here.

The latest tape, released last month, sees Ben visit community garden charity Ecoworks and be shown around by Adam and Hawthorn (with some Woodpecker ID help and bell ringing from Yvonne and fussing from Muppet the dog). Listen/watch below.

All the previous tapes can be found here. Due on September 26th, September’s tape visits the huge plot of gardener and someone who ‘can fix anything,’ Steve. His space is quite different to a lot of the other spaces visited so far, filled with lots of sheds and soundtracked by the radio piped round the space using a complicated system of salvaged speakers and car stereo. He’s been there since the early 80s and has seen a lot of change which he mourns along with the declining bird population.

Ben introduced and contextualised the project for us back in April — read here.

Visit Ben’s website here / follow him on Substack & Instagram.

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Call of the wild]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190894 2026-09-08T15:12:16Z 2026-09-08T15:12:16Z In ‘Down to Earth’, recently published by Wilton Square Books, Robert Ashton traces our evolving relationship with the soil. In the following extract, he considers self-sufficiency guides and the East Anglian rural wring canon.

‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’ Ernest Hemingway

A spell in hospital took me away from my research into soil for a while. It gave me an opportunity to reflect on the places I had been and the people I had met. It also gave me the chance to read more old books, written by people who had shared my interest in the land. What began to emerge was the realisation that just as I had felt compelled to make sandcastles, mud pies and jump in puddles as a child, so too had I felt drawn as I grew up to somehow make my living from the land.

I’d gone to agricultural college because I’d been happiest when milking cows, feeding pigs and driving tractors. The next ten years were spent in the sales and marketing team of a fertiliser manufacturer, which kept me close to the land. I fell for and married a farmer’s daughter, which then meant that whatever work I was doing, I was always in touch with the farming world. 

Later I realised that my desire to write was greater than my sense that I need to work the land in a practical way, and so what followed was a marketing career, writing words that influence others. Writing books about the land is where I now find myself, and that perhaps has always been where I was destined to be; it has just taken me a long while to get there.

People talk about hearing the call of the wild and the almost primal urge to leave civilisation in search of a more natural, elemental and grounded life. Too many of us now find ourselves remote from the natural world, perhaps living in a city flat, working in an office, eating processed food and wearing clothes made from synthetic fibres. It should not be surprising that many break free from such an artificial lifestyle in search of something more authentic.

While it is true to say that the last hundred years has seen the pace of technological and social change accelerate, taking us further and further from nature, people have always felt compelled to walk away from comfort and convenience to reconnect with the land. It is as if deep down, we have an instinctive need to live in harmony with our natural world. I’ve always been particularly interested in East Anglian rural writers and have been surprised by how many there have been over the past few hundred years.

Thomas Tusser is the earliest example I have found, of someone choosing to leave behind an easy life, to live closer to the land and then write about his experience. Born near Witham in Essex, it is thought in 1524, he had a privileged upbringing, becoming a chorister at St Paul’s in London before going to Eton College. This was a time when as few as one in ten could read and write, and only the wealthy sent their children to school.

His career got off to a promising start, when he joined the team of William Paget, one of Henry VIII’s most influential political advisors. For many, this would be a dream job, at the very centre of power with no doubt an envious network of contacts. Providing he toed the line and did not fall from favour, he would have been assured of a long, interesting and lucrative career. 

But I don’t think bureaucracy sat comfortably with him as he was also a budding poet, although none of his early poetry was ever published. His head will have told him to sit tight, keep his nose clean and look forward to a wealthy retirement, but his heart was drawing him to nature and the land. In around 1556, despite Paget’s protestations he gave it all up to and farm at Cattawade in Suffolk. Biographies of Tusser say that he married and started farming at the same time, which makes me suspect that like me, he married a farmer’s daughter. His book 100 Good Points of Husbandry was written from experience and proved to be a best seller when first published in 1557. So much so, that a sequel titled 500 Good Points of Husbandry quickly followed. Even then, publishers were not slow to push a writer for more if a first book sold well.

While his books were a great success, his farming was less so and he moved first to Ipswich, then Norfolk where he had another try at farming, then to London where he died in 1580. It is said that he died in poverty, but his legacy is his writing, and arguably he was the first to write authentically about life on the land in East Anglia. He launched a tradition that others, me included, have strived to continue.

A century after Tusser, John Mortimer, an affluent London trader who by the age of 43 had become wealthy as city merchant, also turned his back on London life and bought a country estate in Essex. Clearly he too wanted to experience the satisfaction of growing and harvesting crops, rather than just buying things from one man, then selling them at a profit to another. There is I’m sure some satisfaction to be had from making money, but for Mortimer, like Tusser, he wanted to connect with the land.

He too wrote a book; The Whole Art of Husbandry was first published in 1716 when he was 60 and had been farming for more than fifteen years. Unlike Tusser, he did not write his in verse, but it is packed with practical tips, suggesting that he was not afraid to get his hands dirty, rather than be a gentleman farmer who returns indoors once the morning’s orders have been given to the farm workers.

Perhaps better known for his adventure novels, Henry Rider Haggard, as I’ve already mentioned, also wrote an excellent and very descriptive book about farming, A Farmer’s Year in 1898. Born in Norfolk, he’d lived and worked in South Africa, before returning and marrying Louisa Margitson, who had inherited her family farm at Ditchingham. 

Interestingly, while he wrote the novels he is perhaps best remembered for, King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quartermain in the 1880s, after he had written A Farmer’s Year a good proportion of his future writing was about rural affairs. Once he had found contentment living on a south Norfolk farm, he no longer needed to look further afield for excitement. For the rest of his life, he just wrote about rural affairs, although his last years were lived in London. Like Tusser, I think he earned more from writing than he did from farming.

In the 20th century, Adrian Bell shocked his parents by leaving London in 1930 at the age of nineteen to learn how to farm. Unlike others I have mentioned, he continued hands-on farming for more than sixty years, writing books about his experiences along the way. He had an inquisitive nature and hungry mind, and thanks to an introduction made by his father, who was editor of The Observer, also compiled The Times crossword each week for nearly fifty years. This shows in his writing, which is particularly lyrical and rich.

You won’t have failed to notice that all of the examples I’ve given of people who chose farming over an easier life elsewhere were men. This is a stark reminder that until relatively recently, women had little opportunity to follow a career, let alone give up that career to farm. One notable exception is Lady Eve Balfour, who I mentioned in the last chapter. Not only did she became a farmer, but she also challenged the way farming was done, setting up the Soil Association because even in 1946, when fertiliser and herbicides were considered new and exciting, she could see that farming organically was more sustainable and so better for us all. 

But as I look back on these writers’ lives, most were born into wealthy families, most had the benefit of a good education, and most managed to farm, either because they had grown wealthy in an earlier career, or because they had married well. Their routes into farming were not ones many of us could follow, which makes their stories interesting, but frustrating because we cannot easily follow their example. And then I discovered and was moved by the 1973 book Self Sufficiency, written by the late John Seymour and illustrated by his wife Sally.

I was not alone; Seymour’s biographer Paul Peacock wrote: ‘Ever since I read The Fat of the Land I had considered myself his friend. More desperate a friend he never had. Reading The Fat of the Land brought me a companion who was living out a life of which I had only dreamed. If John could do it, why not me?’ 

The Peacocks visited the Seymours’ farm in Pembrokeshire shortly after John’s death, to seek the support of his daughters to write a biography of their father. They helped where they could and A Good Life was published in 2005. It is an insightful book, which tells both the story of a remarkable life, and the deep respect that Peacock had for both the man and his work. Paul Peacock had become an enthusiastic follower of Seymour’s path to self-sufficiency. As well as books about gardening, he also wrote books about keeping bees and chickens. Several of his books focused on growing food in a built-up area, and one, Nature’s Wild Harvest, on foraging. His wife Diana also wrote a number of books about preserving and cooking the products the couple grew.

I love Seymour’s simple and honest style of writing and can quite see how it motivated Paul Peacock to change the direction of his own life. In fact after writing about Seymour, Peacock went on to write thirty more books, charting his own journey in search of self-sufficiency. One was titled The Sausage Book and tells you everything you need to know about making sausages, apart that is, from how rear and kill your pig. For that you need Seymour’s Self Sufficiency. For many years Peacock also wrote a regular column for The Mirror, signing off each week as Mr Digwell. 

Talking with Peacock’s daughter Rebecca and his widow Diana I learned that he’d picked up a copy of Seymour’s book The Fat of the Land in a second-hand bookshop and found it captivating. Diana told me how it had changed her husband’s life, who as a botanist, had always been interested in growing food, but Seymour’s book had helped him realise that he could start with what he had, rather than wait until he could afford to buy more land. Seymour’s book showed how what he thought was impossible, was achievable straight away.

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Robert Ashton’s ‘Down to Earth’ is out now and available here, published by Wilton Square Books.

Robert will be appearing at the Leiston Book Festival on 19 September. 

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Now Playing]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190891 2026-09-07T17:49:32Z 2026-09-07T17:49:32Z ‘the garden’ by foot foot.

Taken from the EP ‘PREY TIME’, out 27th October on Memorials of Distinction.

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Elmley Sound Space]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190882 2026-09-05T11:47:36Z 2026-09-05T11:36:29Z You can now listen back to talks and performances from our May event at Elmley Nature Reserve, thanks to Elmley’s newly launched Sound Space.

Hear Elmley’s Gareth Fulton sit down with Nicola Chester and Tallulah Brennan to discuss all things farming & ecology; Emma Warren and Mathew Clayton consider our need for collective community space and action in a time of tech billionaires; Rob St John and Tallulah discuss Rob’s recent project Are You Lost?, and what happens when artists connect with community in a meaningful way; Lamine — plant shop owner, and one half of plant and fungi biosonification duo Plants Can Dance — demonstrate how music can be made from plants’ biorhythms, using specimens collected from the Elmley site: and Horatio Clare and Tallulah discuss human and humane approaches to people caught up in the ‘small boats’ crisis.

You can additionally listen to a roundtable conversation between writers Brian Dillon, Sue Stuart-Smith and Noreen Masud (chaired by Tom Morton), the result of a creative writing retreat last winter, as they spend time on the reserve and reflect on the landscape, geography and location of Elmley not only as something exterior but also on the interior experience of inhabiting the marshland.

Elmley are also soon to add recordings from their new hydrophones and sound recorders to the Sound Space, so listeners can immerse themselves in the soundtrack of the landscape through real-life audio recordings of birdsong, wings overhead and wind in the grasses.

Listen here.

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Updates from the Underland]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190871 2026-09-04T16:58:32Z 2026-09-04T09:27:27Z We are very pleased to announce details of the CD release of Hannah Peel’s original score for Underland — Robert Petit’s film based on the Robert Macfarlane book of the same name. The CD, available to pre-order now and out on 16th October via our Rivertones label, will be followed by a world premiere of the score, part of the Hannah Peel In Focus series at the Barbican on 23-24 October 2026.

Photo: Rachel McCarthy

Hannah Peel’s Underland draws a glorious and vivid electronic map of the ground below, and what comes buried beneath that ground. Melodies that feel like they’ve been lifted directly from the soil merge with rhythm tracks that could be insects burrowing caves through the undergrowth, and gorgeous ambient echoes intertwined with spectral voices… these elements in Hannah’s hands are the true sound of the underground.

The premiere performance of Underland has been adapted by Kieran Brunt and will be performed by contemporary vocal ensemble Shards. For this unique performance, the score combines choir and electronics with stunning imagery from the film, adapted for stage by the director, Robert Petit. 

Talking about the source material, Peel says, “I had read Robert’s book back in 2019, and even included some words from it for my 2022 album ‘The Unfolding’. The chance to actually compose for the book’s film in return though: beautiful synchronicity!”

Going on to explain, “Scoring for these astronauts of the underworld, those sacred ancient cave systems, the mysteries of the universe’s secrets, exploring what would they actually sound like? Those haunting descents that remind us of our planet’s past and future, asking us to look deep into our ancestors’ stories and evaluate where we will go next, made it a profound film to work on. I used ancient Mayan Pod Trumpets and an iron age horn called a Carnyx mixed with baroque choir, string orchestra and synths to bring to life a score that had to combine mythology, technology and possibility.”

Hannah Peel In Focus is a two-day takeover at the Barbican, opening on Friday 23 October at Milton Court on 23 October with PIA – a brand-new live music and dance production for her 7-movement odyssey Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia (2020). The production was created with choreographer Katya Bourvis and creative producer Tala Lee-Turton, and will be shaped by the sound of a 17-piece brass band.

This will be followed on Saturday 24 October with the Underland premiere and a live performance by Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang of their recent album The Endless Dance (Real World Recordings), an album grounded in the strength of ancient concepts. This will be a rare chance to see the album performed, as it comes alive with the joy and freedom of play as together, the artists travel through the 24 solar terms of the Chinese calendar with a cornucopia of sound in tow – synths and prepared piano alongside traditional and unconventional percussion that includes rice bowls and a jawbone.

Underland is released on CD on 16 October via Rivertones. Listen to / buy the album here.

HANNAH PEEL LIVE

20 October – Gateshead, International with Beibei Wang

21 October – Glasgow, St Lukes with Beibei Wang

23 October – London, Barbican – PIA

24 October – London, Barbican with Beibei Wang

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Time’s Mirror]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190867 2026-09-03T11:25:09Z 2026-09-03T11:25:09Z Published today by The Bodley Head, Rachel Morley’s ‘Church Crawling’ is a kaleidoscopic history of place and community straight from its author’s expressive heart, writes Alex Woodcock.

In 1993 the artist Rachel Whiteread cast in concrete the interior of a Victorian terraced house in the east end of London. At a stroke the ordinary became strange: interiors were now exterior, fireplaces stuck outwards, doorknobs drew shadows into deep, rounded hollows. The transformation revealed the everyday spaces where life is lived to be spectacular and mysterious, the dead air in a room or the depth of a window for the first time present, as real and rich as a sculpture. Suddenly, absence had a voice. 

Rachel Morley’s book Church Crawling: The Secret Lives and Hidden Stories of England’s Churches in many respects sets out to do something similar to that of her namesake artist, but for a different type of building: the church. Hence it is no straightforward history, though it is crammed with history, but as she writes, an attempt to ‘draw out what our old churches are, not what they are made of, and why that matters, and ultimately why we need them’. These are grand ambitions but perhaps nobody is better placed to achieve them than Morley, a buildings conservator by trade and for the last few years Director of the charity Friends of Friendless Churches, which rescues and protects historic and redundant places of worship in England and Wales. The cover, by the artist Ed Kluz, alerts us to the fact that the book in fact has grander ambitions still. Kluz is known for his dramatic reimagining of historic buildings and landscapes and Morley likewise is inviting us to completely reconsider these often-ignored places and recognise the ‘cacophony of lifetimes’ that they have witnessed. If that weren’t enough, throughout, she writes like a dream, by turns poetic, occasionally caustic, often hilarious, casually leapfrogging decades with colourful anecdotes.

Time is the star of the book. In Eccentric Spaces the pioneering architectural writer Robert Harbison suggested that a building represented ‘the simplest experience of being in more than one place at a time’. Church Crawling turns that inside-out, revealing churches to be buildings where, due to the great depth of histories that have accumulated within them, time has become porous: here the personal time of lives lived, the geological time of materials and the historical time of events all overlap into a beguiling non-linearity offering us the chance to experience being in more than one time in the same place. Accordingly, the book is divided into six parts organised thematically rather than overtly chronologically, for example ‘Making Nowhere into Somewhere’, ‘Makers’ and ‘Revelations’ that are themselves divided further into chapters that pursue aspects of that theme. In this way Morley’s fascination with the looseness and ambiguity of time and the ability of churches to ‘invite interaction, and sensory fulfilment and connection in a very real way’ stays in the foreground.

Objects are crucial to this sense of connection and materials especially so, Morley’s love of their textures and stories shining through many of the chapters. Bricks contain ‘a soft warmth in their colour and texture’ while glass we are reminded is mainly composed of sand – ‘the past, pulverised […] a mountain, a boulder formed millions of years ago, eroded down to the tiniest particle’. Flint, however, is the one, ‘the most beguiling of all materials’. Morley, I feel, could write a book just on flint – I would certainly read it – given her ability to conjure its wayward beauty. ‘The surface is restless’ she writes, describing its vitreous, often mottled colour of charcoal blacks and deep blue-greys. ‘Speckled and shimmering. It’s an oil spill, it’s a swatch of camouflage, it’s a universe’. 

If Morley is well-used to working with materials hundreds of years old, the occasional sudden crystallisation of a moment in time before her eyes can still elicit a shock at the sense of freefall through the centuries. Tracking a lost rose brass, a commemorative late medieval plaque, to a bank vault, she hopes that by taking it home she is not ‘summoning a ghost’. Or uncovering, by accident, a twelfth-century sculpture of a bird behind the plaster on the wall of a pub toilet in Herefordshire how she ‘sobbed in my cold little cubicle’. In fact, the further you read the more you realise that Church Crawling is that rare thing, accessible and entertaining, built upon considerable research, but without losing the expressive heart of its writer. It’s a potent blend that lends itself to some of the most sensuous writing about historic buildings I’ve yet encountered, for example, that about Binham Priory in Norfolk: 

‘These days Binham Priory is majestic and marooned. Fat Norman arches stomp along the walls and give way to the most delicate early Gothic window tracery, which was eventually savagely infilled with traffic-cone orange brick in the nineteenth century. On two sides, stumps of its former self endure. A blueprint of ruins. Dressed blocks of masonry, once carefully cut and shaped to fit around the rubble core of the church’s columns, are now randomly stacked, frozen mid-air like a game of Tetris that’s been paused.’

We are living through a good moment for writing about historic buildings and materials. Books have proliferated on the subject in the last decade or so, often using personal narratives and unconventional quests; Pamela Petro’s The Slow Breath of Stone from 2005, for example, in which she wanders the Romanesque abbeys of southwest France in pursuit of both the twelfth-century and a twentieth-century scholar, was an early herald in this regard. Church Crawling takes the widest remit, if you like, following no particular narrative or aspect of churches, but rather exploring everything that they are, from their walls to their windows to the plurality of events that have shaped them. What emerges from its pages is a kind of kaleidoscopic history of place and community, with churches a reliquary containing the shadows of lives long spent. And I think that this is the point. Like Whiteread’s casts this book throws into relief things normally invisible and in doing so brings us back to what churches really are:  ’spaces given over to mystery – the great mysteries of existence and its meaning – where we are invited to dwell in and contemplate that which is beyond our understanding’. Morley’s gift is to make us see this in every aspect of the building, from the raw materials to the design, to the characters connected to them, to the history they have both witnessed and participated in.

 ‘Naturally we can only mourn what is absent or missing’ writes Judith Schalansky in An Inventory of Losses, ‘if some vestige of it, some whisper, perhaps little more than a rumour, a semi-obliterated trace, an echo of an echo has found its way to us.’ In Church Crawling Morley has made sure that some of these echoes and whispers reach us, and moreover, that as well as mourning what has been lost we must celebrate the traces of the past that have survived and continue to reverberate, in so many unforeseen ways, throughout our lives now.

*

Rachel Morley’s ‘Church Crawling: The Secret Lives and Hidden Stories of England’s Churches’ is out now and available here, published by The Bodley Head (£20.90).

Alex Woodcock is a writer, artist and former cathedral stonemason with a background in buildings archaeology. His book ‘King of Dust: Adventures in Forgotten Sculpture’, was published in paperback in 2024 by Little Toller Books. His first poetry pamphlet, ‘For the Futures Left Behind’, is out with Broken Sleep Books in 2027. Follow him on Instagram here.

]]> Diva Harris <![CDATA[Pleasures of… Summer]]> https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/?p=190863 2026-09-02T16:37:06Z 2026-09-02T16:37:06Z In addition to sending paid Steady subscribers monthly interviews with authors of our Books of the Month, once a quarter, we invite a different writer to share their most favourite and pleasurable moments of the season.

Today, CBTR editor Diva Harris bites down through summer’s shared bounty of ripe fruit, hot red planets and abundant honesty stalls.

Read an excerpt from the piece below, and log in or subscribe via Steady to read in full.

Illustration: Adam Higton

It would be remiss of me to pretend that summer has been easy to enjoy. Nothing makes me feel more deranged than a cheery allusion to the lovely weather, or rosé-tinted instagram post whose caption-writer wishes for a neverending summer, when for weeks, everything has been metaphorically and literally on fire.

As I sit down to write this, in the middle of a national park in the south west of England, three-quarters of the country is officially in drought. Out on the moor, gorse drier than bone, tinder, or anything else that is dry, we watch teenagers mucking about on 2-stroke motorbikes. A bolt of anxiety rockets through me when B says that 2-strokes are notorious for spitting out sparks. The pond at the top of the hill is empty and fissured; its earth smells scorched. The sheep who normally drink from it sit in its cracked bowl, confused. The reliable moorland spring trickles to a stop.

The balance of life is delicate and it swings precariously, delirious in the heat. How am I supposed to derive pleasure from a violently hot summer in which the mushrooms spring from the ground and go over, the blackberries and apples ripen and fall in June and July and August? What will the birds and snails eat in September and October?

All is fraught, but all is not lost.

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