Letter from Claerwen

James Roberts

It could have been the first day of summer. Being Wales, it could also have been the last.

I crossed the dam at Claerwen beneath a single opening in the clouds which seemed to be apologising for its presence. It frayed, thinned, and vanished into the grey. A hundred feet below there was a farmhouse surrounded by oaks, a little cup of shelter beneath the wind, which I’m sure is constant in that place.

House martins and swallows looped and dived along the wall of the dam. The Claerwen river gathered itself from the stone channels beneath and found its ancient scribble of ground. I followed a track leading up to an outcrop on a hill which towered above the little farmhouse to take pictures of the view, one of the grandest in Wales.

Hoping to catch that certain slant of light. An hour later, with no photographs in the bank, I headed for my car in the hammering rain.

Nature reserve

Coming back down the hill the reservoir stretched out below. I tried to identify the point where a footpath began up to the remote nature reserve in the distance.

I’d been told by a few people that it was a long, hard trek to the little oligotrophic lakes near the summits, the best place to see birds like golden plovers and curlews. It didn’t seem too far away.

Nevertheless I didn’t make it there. This was to do with the presence of the reservoir, which is vast and filled, as far as I can tell, only with darkness.

I have a fear of open water which began in childhood. I’m not sure why, but my parents placed the importance of learning to swim above all things. I was taken to swimming pools from an early age and I learned well, but still I was told to keep away from the edges of canals, lakes, even ponds so shallow I could have walked across them without getting my ankles wet. I have no idea why this fear existed in them, since there had never been anyone in the family’s acquaintance who had drowned and we lived in the most landlocked place on these islands.

Drowning

I usually do the opposite of what people tell me and, therefore, I have come close to drowning on a few occasions, most recently last summer when I thought it was a good idea to tie my kayak to the side of a narrowboat on the river Avon while I climbed into it. The kayak flipped, I hit my head on the side of the steel boat and ended up stuck upside down.

When I managed to scramble to the surface I got caught in a soup of sucking mud thigh deep and could not move. Luckily a burly fellow had seen me and managed to pull me out. I thanked him, scraped the mud off, corrected my canoe, and did exactly the same thing again, with identical results. He has me labelled as an idiot.

Diving pontoon

When our boys were small we rented a house beside a large reservoir in Limousin, France, which had a swimming beach and a diving pontoon far out in the middle of the lake. One evening our youngest, nattily dressed in full Victorian swimming suit, shark fin float and skull cap, decided to attempt to reach the distant pontoon.

My wife and I watched as he slowly shrank to a blueish fin in the huge, dark and utterly empty lake, before remarking to each other that he had not yet learned to swim. We then remembered that we hadn’t brought our own swimming costumes with us. And so, I ended up frantically swimming out to him wearing just my underpants, which he seemed delighted about, making me dive in with him several times from the pontoon before I towed the half-human, half-shark 3 year old back to shore. Perhaps my parents were right to teach me a fear of water.

Claerwen is a quiet place, almost a silent place, that vast expanse of water having nothing to say at all, except on the windiest of days, a faint slap-slap at its edges. I have yet to see a bird out on the water, or a fish leap. While walking back to my car I passed a puddle on the path, its surface alive with water boatmen, its shallows wriggling with larvae. Is there more life in a puddle than a reservoir? Impossible. Claerwen is particularly known for its trout fishing in the summer months. Nevertheless the dark water feels void, a watery echo of its surroundings, the lonely Cambrian Mountains.

Dippers

Can mountains and lakes be lonely? Obviously not, though I often use the adjective to describe this part of the world. I have come to think that these places long for more life, more of everything: tangled growth, loud bird choruses, the intersecting and overlaid footprints of mammals. Something more than the isolated scream of a peregrine, or the bark of a raven. Reservoirs in particular make me think this way. They have obscured huge tracts of land which were once filled with life. Maybe water remembers what it has drowned: a little river running twisted, braiding over rocks and down waterfalls; dippers and wagtails feeding among the stones; herons spear-still on the banks.

That day at Claerwen, almost back to my car, I was passed by a line of motorbikes heading along the perimeter track. I watched them weave and bump, shrinking into the distance. The steep slopes channeled the engine noise and the water seemed to vibrate with it.

It was so out of place that noise. The area is known as a dark sky reserve, a place to see stars when the clouds clear for those few moments each month. It seems like a strange marketing decision to me, to promote an experience which is almost never on offer. A quiet reserve, or reservoir, would be achievable however. We could go to these places to hear our hearts beat, the lap of water and trill of wind, to watch rainbows appear silently in the air.

A reservoir is a sound sink, a place to absorb the noise of modern life, somewhere to help us come back to our senses. There should be signs up all along their shores: Quiet please.

You can read about James’ art and writing here.