Over, Across
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By JLM Morton
I carried the wild with me on nights spent in the medieval woods of Estcourt Park, an estate which had been the setting for a now demolished country house and the seat of the Estcourt family since the early fourteenth century. We told our parents we were camping, but I don’t remember us ever taking a tent. A small group of sixth formers, we were still too young for the pubs in a town where everyone knew our age. Instead, we headed off quietly to the woods on weekends at nightfall, jumping over the stones in the young River Avon and boiling up water in a whistling kettle, with an ever present sense of generations of ghosts (poachers, maids, gardeners) living in the ancient oaks and conifers that surrounded us.
The kaleidoscopic darkness of discovery came with a sour hit of strychnine at the back of the throat from the tabs we’d bought from travellers parked up on the A46. They lived in an old coach and kept their dogs from wandering onto the busy road by tying them with bale twine to trees. I was too shy to go in the coach with my boyfriend and instead huddled outside in his white mini watching silhouettes behind the pleated curtains at the windows. Later, we would see patterns in the trees like a kind of phosphorescence on the air, the edges of everything effervescent and the arrival at an understanding that everything wasn’t as it had seemed. Enhanced by a toke on a joint made with squidgy black hash, the kind that was oily on the fingers and smelt muskily evergreen, it wasn’t only the drugs that shifted our awareness of our world and our place within it. Hours were spent wandering the woodland and fields with only moonlight to guide us, in the dream time between evening and daybreak when the rest of the world was asleep. We got lost in conversations or the simple act of being still as the birds began to emerge at dawn. We discovered there are layers to our experience of reality, that the social realism of our received perception was just one rock in the strata of our world, that was constantly shifting and revealing new angles and ways of seeing.
The Gloucestershire landscape then was much as it is now, shaped by the wealth of the landed gentry, built on rental income, agriculture, inheritance, the historic trade in wool, cloth and raw materials produced by enslaved people in the colonies. Public access is restricted to a tiny percentage of the local area via the footpaths that, by definition, curtail adventure. Another layer of the experience of growing up in rural England was the illusion of ownership, the Cotswold stone walls and stock fencing that measured out the land into portions, guarded by the lackeys of the well-to-do.
As a young adult, I quietly disregarded these man-made rules as my edges became porous, blending with the vibrant matter of marsh marigold, nettle and limestone, with the breeze running through the ash, with the song of the blackbirds. Trespassing never felt like an offense or a deliberate violation of someone else’s property. It was never a conscious act. And I never felt that the land was mine. I belonged to it. The word trespass comes from Middle English and it is no accident that it appeared in our native language around the same time as Estcourt Park became established. To trespass means to pass across or pass over, via Old French with roots in Medieval Latin. A word that contains a definition that is its own undoing, for aren’t we all temporary custodians of the land where we live, all of us passing through a space of mud and spores and water and fire. Atoms infinitely attaching and detaching from one another.
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When I returned to the countryside after decades away, it was grief that brought me home. A winter watching my father die and a river that connected us, with its source in the Cotswold hills and its brown, churning lower course that flowed through the city where I lived. Not the Avon this time, but the Thames, whose source has been contested for at least a century, as located either at the winterbourne of the Thames Head or fifteen miles north at Seven Springs, also known as the source of the Churn.
Water runs through my family tree, an element that connects me to the relatives who died before I arrived, the uncles and ancestors I never met who worked as stevedores on the London docks, sailed through the wars with the Merchant Navy, and built ships that brought emigrants from Liverpool to new lives in the Americas. My dad had become a legend in the family for swimming the English Channel smeared in goose fat and steering a sailing boat through a tempestuous storm lashed to the wheel over the Irish Sea. Whether true or apocryphal, these tales took on the patina of historical fact and said something deeply felt about who we were as people. Amid quite an ordinary upbringing, this was a kind of origin story we told ourselves as if our bloodline were something hallowed. Maybe even precious.
I set out to walk and swim the course of the River Churn, 23 miles from Seven Springs to its confluence with the (official) Thames, not thinking that I might be trespassing. Instead, I was preoccupied with adventure, with Ordnance Survey maps tracing the route through patches of unknown land I’d never reached by bike or on foot as a child, wondering where it might be deep enough for me to immerse my body and be carried along on the current.
I made my journey along the river in a haphazard way, swim-walking it in stages and out of order, when I could steal the time away. The Churn transects the land I roamed as a child, playing in and around it, watching water voles scurrying along the banks, paddling and fishing for snotty dogs and minnows, riding the current where the flow ran high at the water meadows. On the stretch from Siddington to South Cerney, public access to the Churn has been severely controlled, but I was determined to find a way in and wade along the river, bypassing land-based restrictions. It was a beautiful high summer day. After the heavy rains of May, it had been dry for a couple of weeks and very hot. Strange weather. I joined the baked mud footpath and walked along the Thames and Severn Canal, weaving my way through the grass and flag iris, past baby moorhens and milk sheep, eventually reaching the river where it meandered through an acid green field fenced off for grazing.
I paused on the bridge. Soaked up the high, meandering flow over the gravel bed. Dog rose, speedwell, hogweed. I was in a world of flying things. Common damselflies, the emerald metallic of the beautiful demoiselles. Red admirals, meadow browns, orange tips, small heaths. The white fluff of the poplar trees floated through the air – said to be highly flammable, I imagined tiny fires exploding everywhere. Fireflies. Wildfires.
A B52 bomber flew over from an RAF base nearby.
Still, I could not reach the river.
Barbed wire and fencing lined the route. Signs against entry. Private land. A family had gathered on the riverbank for a picnic on the other side of a high metal barrier.
Smoke from their barbecue rose steadily upward on that windless day andRnB blasted out of their boombox. They eyed me nervously through the tall grasses. I wished I could be where they were.
Finally, I took a right turn, past the alpacas the man in the village had told me about. A long, green pathway between hedgerows ran down to the meadows which were bright with buttercups and the red and white clover that made me think of my grandfather, who taught me how to suck sugar from the ends of the tubular flowers. The grass was long, the fields untravelled.
A line of poplars and willow led me away from the footpath through fields to the water. I threw myself in and basked in the longed-for cold water flash of ice on hot skin. I waded and swam and paddled out to a plunge pool on a bend where the current had carved depth into the riverbed. I brushed my fingers on the reeds before returning against the current, to the place where the riverbed rose again. The water was healthy, clean and clear, the banks fizzed with insects. I wallowed and watched. The birds were commonplace: wagtails, crows, blackbirds, wood pigeons. As ordinary to me as home.
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I had a strong sensation of being accompanied along the Churn, as if the place were a kind of spirit I thought I’d left behind in Estcourt Park, but which gained on me again. I felt bound by it. In the still heat of that afternoon on the untravelled terrain, the river felt like a sanctuary. A sacred place that connected me back to a bloodline of flesh and soil.
The feeling of a body being in landscape and of land being in the body has no boundary or limitation to pass over or across. To trespass. A spiralling cord of water tugged by gravity at the gut, the Churn offered kinship. A place that dissolved the edges of my nature and returned me to the riverbed laid down by my past, releasing lines on maps, shifting the land’s shape by simply being. A source, not an end. It was everything.
JLM Morton is from Gloucestershire in the west of England. Her work has appeared in Poetry Review, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Berlin Lit, Anthropocene, Bad Lilies, Modron, The Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere. Highly commended by the Forward Prizes, she is also the winner of the Laurie Lee and Geoffrey Dearmer prizes. Her first poetry collection is Red Handed, out now with Broken Sleep Books (2024). Juliette has collaborated with musicians, artists and field recordists and had residencies at the Cotswold Water Park, Stroudwater Textile Trust, Corinium Museum and Sladebank Woods. She is currently writing her next book with the support of an Authors Foundation grant from the Society of Authors.