The Waterlands by Stephen Rutt review: 'impossible not to feel wonder'
Stephen Rutt’s exploration of Britain’s waterlands combines clear-eyed scientific writing with just the right amount of epiphanic prose, writes David Robinson
All too often, nature writing is like fine dining: the same words we might normally use, but spruced up, extravagantly prepped, garnished with flamboyant adjectives or odd ways of describing a fleeting moment of rhapsody. There’s less of that these days, but it’s still a trope: only last month I read one of our most acclaimed nature writers describing a song-thrush as “Coltrane-esque without the booze and the drugs”. (Well, obviously.)
Stephen Rutt heads down the rhapsodising route quite often in his latest book, but it doesn’t seem indulgent. Each one of his chapters examining Britain’s waterlands ends with a page or two of epiphanic prose about a meaningful moment from his fieldwork. And since the preceding chapter is invariably a fact-heavy blend of geography, ecology, social history, limnology and hydrology, with a tiny sprinkling of memoir, this seems not only fair but necessary.
His book carries the strapline “Follow a raindrop from source to sea”, which is both impossible and inaccurate. For while Rutt does indeed spend some time following the Clyde from its source in the Lowther Hills to Greenock, the whole point about a raindrop is that it can go anywhere. It could just as easily get stuck for a while in a peat bog in the Flow Country, an East Anglian fen, a Wigtown Bay salt marsh or a Dumfries and Galloway lochan, and he writes well about those too.
Throughout, he is guided by JA Baker's dictum “the hardest thing of all to see is what is really there”. The Flow Country, for example, used to be written off as a waste of space: indeed, Rutt himself used to think that it was a long stretch of nothing on the way north to Orkney. These days, he sees it as “a landscape in four dimensions”, each year laying down another millimetre of the peat which not only provides a habitat for threatened species but locks up twice the amount of carbon as all of Britain’s woods.
Seeing what is really there but generally invisible also includes looking at clouds from both sides - before and after they form. Before, he points out, the evaporated molecules of water rise into an “invisible sea”. They then coalesce around grains of dust and turn to ice in the high skies before returning to water and falling in an endlessly repeated cycle which many of us hardly ever think about. While still vapour, Rutt points out, this invisible sea is just a thousandth of one per cent of the water on earth. That doesn’t sound much - until you realise that it is five times more water than is contained in all the world’s rivers.
This is the world we are gifted, and I find it impossible not to feel wonder at such facts. I can see that I would struggle to drag some of them into any conversation, so I shall keep quiet about the fact that the average time a water molecule stays in Loch Lomond is 1.9 years and restrain myself from explaining the differences between oligotrophic, mesotrophic and eutrophic lakes. All the same, it is a measure of how much I have learnt from Rutt’s book - and the clarity of his writing - that my notes on it are seven times longer than this review.
It is easy to read his book as a series of man-made ecological disasters: the algae bloom killing off Lough Neagh, the carcinogen-laden waters of Glasgow’s Polmadie Burn (the same toxins as those Erin Brockovich campaigned against), and water companies treating Britain’s rivers as open-air sewers. But there are victories too: 2024’s UNESCO listing for the Flow Country, radical wetland conservation projects at Threave Nature Reserve and elsewhere, the return of salmon to the Clyde among them. “We have cleared up our rivers before,” Rutt concludes. “We can do it again.”
The Waterlands, by Stephen Rutt, Elliott & Thompson, £16.99
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