Swimming to a Place of Calm
We’re walking through the woods alongside the River Dart. Four Hodgsons. Two grandparents. My sister and her family. Ten of us on a holiday week in Devon. It’s hot, even in the shade where we pick our way beneath the white willows, and tempers are quietly rising.
After a week of seaside postcards, fish and chips, and running to the railway bridge to watch the trains, we’ve had a fun day on Dartmoor (despite minor GPS shenanigans). Now we’re picking our way alongside the River Dart as it streams south past Buckfastleigh, Totnes and Stoke Gabriel towards the Channel.
This part of the day’s excursion—wild swimming in the Dart—is for me and I’m getting anxious. Is the water high enough? Will there be hundreds of people? Will we ever find the right spot? We’re following a friend’s map, scrawled on a Co-op receipt (ginger beer, Scotch eggs, malt loaf) and the directions look dangerously ambiguous. Grandparents’ sugar levels are as finite as fossil fuel; one false step and it’s “Bugger this, let’s go home for ice-cream.”
Yet there it is. A little clearing, a flat patch of grass, and a slow southward curve of the river with a shallow gravelly spot to enter the water. In moments, I’m in and then I remember the hypnotic, hydraulic draw of wild swimming.
Swimming in a river is a challenge, a rite of summer. That first moment on the toes, the creep of cold on the calves, then the heartstopping tingle on your chest. Even though it only lasts a few breaths, that sudden clenched exhilaration never disappears. What follows is calm—all the fears and questions and anxieties slip away—and I’m totally present, aware only of the sense of place, the scent of the woods, the light stippling the river, the trill and trickle of running water.
It’s not all roses, wild swimming. The stones are often jagged beneath your feet. There’s rarely a changing room to hand. There’s muck on the surface and weeds in the shallows. The cold is sometimes less hypnotic than hypothermic. But the reason I return to rivers like the Dart is the feeling of immersion. It’s not far from the way music can transport us. Wild swimming demands your attention, it impacts all your senses at once, it’s like music for your skin.
