Rivers

Rivers

Few are the cities not sited adjacent to rivers. The benefits of proximity are many: drinking water, transport, power, access to trade, not to mention fish if you’re lucky.

‘Is this the river?’ friends would ask as we rode the Docklands Light Railway to my flat on the Isle of Dogs.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘these are the docks, or what’s left of them.’

‘Is this the river?’ they persist as we traverse a narrow stretch of water.

‘No, it’s the canal linking the docks to the river.’

The River Thames, when we reach it, is unmistakable. The confidence of its broad sweep dwarfs the manmade docks and canals. From the air, on the approach to London City Airport, the opposing promontories of the Isle of Dogs and the North Greenwich peninsular fit into the S-shaped bends of the river as neatly as teeth on meshing cogs.

Visitors to Exeter are equally bewildered when I take them for walks along the River Exe. What it lacks in majesty compared to London’s great river, it compensates with profusion. In places, there are four parallel waterways: the Exe itself, leats dug to power mills, the Exeter Ship Canal and, the most recent addition, the wide flood relief channel. Further downstream, they all succumb to the pull of the river. Having served its purpose, the leats slyly rejoin under the cover of brambles or discharge audaciously from concrete culverts; the flood relief channel empties into an accommodating bend; the canal is absorbed into the river at the estuary where the confluence can be viewed from the grounds of the Turf Hotel.

Unlike the Thames at Greenwich, the Exe is not tidal here, but the water levels in all four bodies fluctuate with the seasons. In the summer, the river’s roar over the weir subsides to a whisper. The flood relief channel, a river in its own right after a storm, is reduced to a meandering stream and bog-loving foliage erupts on its gently rising banks. Starved of supply, the trickling leat diminishes to stagnant pools separated by isthmuses and strewn with fallen branches. As the pools evaporate, a muddy skin pimpled with stones forms in the bed. Only the canal, its flow carefully regulated by locks and sluices, stays constant and reliably navigable to rowers practising for the annual regatta.

© David Thompson 2020