Rivers matter enormously to people in Dartmoor and South Devon. When I describe my research as tied to an interest in people’s relationships with Dartmoor’s waters, I have yet to receive the common follow-up of ‘Why are you doing that?’ that humanities researchers often face. But our project is doing much more than just tracing these relationships. It approaches them with an analytical conception of authority, power and historicity.
Through the early summer, I spent most of my time outdoors on the moor: swimming twice weekly with two groups, joining walks led by moorland guides, and visiting places that people have mentioned as key sites of contention, diversity and historical significance. Alongside following these leads on the ground, I started delving into local archives for stories tied to particular places, for historical moments around which to build what was quickly becoming a micro-history of Dartmoor’s waters. As issues of access stretch back a long way, with fantastic material emerging from the late nineteenth century to present, covering the entire moor was never realistic. Instead, I have started to take a site-based approach, choosing locations, such as Spitchwick Common, whose histories bring out ideas about themes such as care and vulnerability, belonging, knowledge and expertise, danger, fear, joy and intimacy.
The questions local people are asking about water on Dartmoor are diverse, and access is only at the forefront of some people’s agendas. Other key issues include water quality, biodiversity and river ecology (and what threatens it), and water consumption and reserves. Around these concerns has grown a web of people and organisations committed to resolution and restoration. I have been getting to know the networks of people working to care for Devon’s waterways, many of whom keep the physical environment at the very centre. At the AGM of Wild About the Erme River (WATER), one speaker described the river as the ‘silent stakeholder’, and my swimming companions’ worries about low river and reservoirs levels were likewise for all the species that live in and depend on them.
Access on Dartmoor also means different things to different people: legal access and patterns of landownership; ecological barriers, such as pollution and poor water quality, which are enmeshed with privatisation and failing infrastructure; the physical logistics of reaching the water, including transportation and terrain; and opportunities limited by socio-economic and cultural barriers. The inequalities our project seeks to uncover begin to arise in the mix of these dynamics, and teasing these out will be the focus of the next stint of my fieldwork. Another development in my thinking has been in how I frame the project, in my own work and in conversations with others. I came to my fieldwork already reticent to use the term ‘wild swimming’, as a concept that is fixed in so many people’s minds as being inhabited by a particular demographic of mostly white, middle-aged women. Increasingly, though, my definition of ‘swimming’ has expanded even beyond an understanding of outdoor swimming. In particular, I have been attracted to forms of ‘non-swimming’, that hanging out near water, paddling and splashing around in the rivers: this approach is inclusive of those who, when first asked, might respond, ‘I wouldn’t say I swim in the river’.