Originally published February 2021.
Messing about in boats, you come across all kinds of creatures – but it’s not the wild ones that chew your ear off.
Beavers do extraordinary things. While paddling canoes down the River Tay this summer, a local naturalist in our small team picked up a ‘beaver stick’. There are now several hundred beavers living free on the river and its many tributaries, and evidence of their activities is hard to miss. The stick shown to us had the typical gnaw patterns left by this industrious rodent on all sorts of woodwork, and I assumed it had been idly dropped or washed from some construction work.
This assumption was about to be thrown out of the water. Beavers are very careful with their sticks, and what we were looking at may well have been a message stick, a sort of beaver equivalent of a message in a bottle, imparting information to beavers downstream. With the Scottish sun bathing the river in a silvery hew and lighting the highland scenery, this knowledge added a deepening of the miracles of nature in which we were already submerged.
Scottish farmers along the banks of the river divide roughly between ‘beaver believers’ and those who want to return them to extinction. Sadly, many have been shot, and a tragic play of ignorance is being enacted. While freedom to control them and repair damage is an essential requirement, wholesale slaughter is just horrifying. Meanwhile in England the beaver is also returning, living free (if sometimes unofficially) on as many as ten of our rivers. For many ‘believers’ they are the new must-have accessory. On the River Otter in Devon the local community, including farmers, campaigned successfully to prevent Defra from killing several families of the new arrivals. Elsewhere, apparently, there is now a beaver dam one mile south of Canterbury cathedral.
Scottish farmers along the banks of the river divide roughly between ‘beaver believers’ and those who want to return them to extinction
In February this year, I found myself on another river adventure. Eager to escape the flooding at home, I phoned a farming friend, Dennis (not his real name), to suggest we take the opportunity to add the River Avon to our life list. He muttered that he did not want to get a ‘bollocking’ and asked about the access to this revered river. A few decades ago it had been the scene of confrontation between canoeists and the fishing fraternity, backed by some of the great estates of this enchanted Hampshire valley.
I assured him that that was history, settled by the work of the Reverend Douglas Caffyn on behalf of the British Canoe Union. In 2007 the Law Society confirmed that an act of parliament legitimising navigation from Old Sarum (Salisbury) to the sea at Christchurch, passed in 1664, had never been repealed. I also suggested that the first week in February, in flood, was not a time when anyone would see us, and so long as we didn’t get in or out on private property, “we would be fine”. A phrase I delivered without irony.
Once again the sun shone, and starting at the Avon’s junction with the Nadder beside the cathedral meadow in the heart of Salisbury, we – that is, Dennis, myself and two of my daughters – descended to just north of Ringwood, where we were to stay the night in a local pub. The water was brimming along gaily and we almost managed to avoid most of the low bridges and frothy weirs made dangerous by the flood. The countryside was a mix of the wild and the cherished, like paddling through an extended Constable masterpiece. It was like stealing a day in Eden.
All went well until our get-out point was reached, when, as we emerged from the river, a man in a tweed hat and suit appeared from a thicket. Dennis, who had got to the top of the bank first, took the brunt of the ‘bollocking’. I kept my distance initially, assuming the man to be a friend of Dennis as the lecture seemed vaguely worthy of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. But he was genuinely angry, and we did not argue. The tweedy keeper’s mistake was rudeness, from which he lost all of his moral high ground, confirming to us both that sometimes stolen pleasures can be vividly delicious.
Dennis, like me, farms on a river. His is a chalk stream, to boot. Neither of us consider ourselves to be the “ignorant b*ds” of the keeper’s rant. As I review my years of paddling, a curious and mischievous thought comes to mind. When the beavers from the not-far-away River Otter start to spread – and they would, like me, adore the Avon – what will this keeper do? As he at first picks up the beaver sticks, will he read the message? Will he relish the Return of the Native, and savour the enrichment of his watery wonderland? I do hope so!
