A visit to the rapid where she lost a cherished friend unexpectedly reignites Amy-Jane Beer's love of rivers setting her on a journey of natural, cultural and emotional discovery.
On New Year's Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer's beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored.
Returning to visit the Rawthey years later, Amy realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when on or close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration.
The Flow is a book about water, and, like water, it meanders, cascades and percolates through many lives, landscapes and stories. From West Country torrents to Levels and Fens, rocky Welsh canyons, the salmon highways of Scotland and the chalk rivers of the Yorkshire Wolds, Amy-Jane follows springs, streams and rivers to explore tributary themes of wildness and wonder, loss and healing, mythology and history, cyclicity and transformation.
Threading together places and voices from across Britain, The Flow is a profound, immersive exploration of our personal and ecological place in nature.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Only water, moving on
Chapter 1: Fresh and yet so very old
Eddy: Snow dome
Chapter 2: Torrent
Eddy: Hollowing
Chapter 3: Oak-water
Eddy: Groundwater
Chapter 4: Fly while we may
Eddy: Dark water
Chapter 5: Lines upon the land
Meander: Bath toys
Chapter 6: The meanings of water
Eddy: Otter
Chapter 7: The Bell Guy and the Gypsey
Chapter 8: A willow grows aslant a brook
Eddy: Minus seven
Chapter 9: The cry of the Dart
Meander: Flow
Chapter 10: Trespassers will
Eddy: Summer on the Nene
Chapter 11: Chalk stream dreaming
Eddy: Heron
Chapter 12: Land covered by water
Eddy: High water
Chapter 13: Ouroboros
Meander: Ghosts in the willows
Chapter 14: The silver fish
Chapter 15: Light and water
Eddy: Damnation
Chapter 16: Anadrome
Chapter 17: Riverwoods
Eddy: Flowover
Chapter 18: Confluence and influence
Meander: A river released
Chapter 19: The Mucky Beck
Eddy: Withow Gap
Chapter 20: Rodents of unusual size
Eddy: The narrow bridge
Chapter 21: Heartland
Chapter 22: A descent into Hell Gill (and out the other side)
Epilogue
Author's note and acknowledgements
Further reading
Index
