Imogen Lycett Green on Ancient Sussex #10 – The River Ouse

In the summer I swam up and down a long, straight stretch of the Ouse below Lindfield bridge, silky, silty brown water flowing along my body. Promising myself I’d swim ten lengths, I nearly baulked at nine in the cold water, but on that tenth length, a kingfisher darted quicksilver over my head, and alighted on a low-slung branch of a catalpa tree, just there, next to me. We were, for as long as twenty, thirty, forty seconds (I held my breath), in communion. His black moist eye, his iridescent blue back and copper breast, the long bill, the stout little charm of the bird. He is so beautiful and perfect I can hardly look at him. Until this time, I’d only ever seen the flash of blue once or twice a year, from afar, like a fleeting spell. Now he stays. As if to commend my swimming. He actually cocks his head. This is magic. I want to say, I’m sorry we’ve hurt you, I’m sorry there are supermarket trolleys in your deep water. But in a swish of blue, he’s gone again.

The Greek word for kingfisher is ‘halkyon’. There are many myths about the kingfisher, but the best known is how the god Aeolus, father of Alcyone, calmed the seas so the ancient kingfishers could nest and mate. In consequence, calm, peaceful times are known by us as ‘halcyon days’. There are between 4,000-7,000 breeding pairs in this country, and 118 species in the kingfisher family all over the world. In Borneo, kingfishers are feared, in Polynesia they are revered. As with black cats, people all over the world see kingfishers in a million different ways.

Naming and stories is how we humans understand the world. Stories change and names change. We used to call the Ouse ‘Middewinde’ (meaning middle between East and West Sussex) before it was named Ouse (a Celtic word for river, some say, or an aberration of ‘Lewes’ or ‘Looze’). Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans have all defended settlements on its banks. Romans built a large detached bathhouse at Barcombe, and also villas with running water for riverside drinking and ablutions at Beddingham and Bishopstone. Anglo-Saxons used fishing rods and fish weirs (wickerwork funnel traps) to catch burbot, eels, lampreys, pike and trout. There were 17 mills – oil and flour – along the river, operating since Saxon times. The three Saxon round tower churches at Piddinghoe, Southease and Lewes were used as look-out towers when the French terrorized SouthEast England with their pirate ships, marauding up to Lewes in the 17th and 18th centuries. At this point the Lower Ouse Valley was covered in water and high tides would raise the river, flooding Lewes. The mouth of the Ouse has shifted with the tidal movement of shingle banks from Newhaven to Seaford and back again. Flooding of the Lower Ouse Valley was controlled by the fortifying of a deeper channel drainage of the fertile flood plains by farmers and the building of 19 locks to make the river navigable by 1812. Barges transported coal, chalk and timber as far up as Balcombe, but with the coming of the railways, the river was all washed up as a transport system. In fact, irony of all ironies, the very bricks used to build the Balcombe Viaduct in 1838 were brought up the river from Newhaven by barge; the river was the architect of its own demise.

These are the stories of our river. You know them. But we are just the last in a long line of riverine folk who have lived beside and been sustained by the Ouse for thousands of years. At school, we all learned that the earliest civilizations formed along the banks of the Indus, the Yellow Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris and Rio Pativilca rivers. While civilisation galloped ahead in Africa and the Middle East, we Sussex people were only just giving up hunter-gathering for farming, but yes, we lived along the river too. The main Sussex Neolithic sites in the Ouse Valley overlook the river – long oval barrows at Cliffe’s Hill and Money Burgh, Piddinghoe and the causewayed enclosure at Offham. Where the river used to flow, under Rookery Hill, at Bishopstone, where the Bronze Age burial mounds are, there is a Neolithic site (c3500 BC) with evidence of domesticated animals and plant cultivation. Alongside, marine shell and roe deer bones suggest huntergathers continued to operate alongside the new agriculture.

Through pollen analysis, archaeologists have been able to see that until the Middle Bronze age most of Sussex was forested: deciduous oak forest with peat deposits in the Vale of Brooks, south of Lewes. After which the landscape changed. At Rookery Hill, 45 subsoil holes were discovered, by which we can understand there was tree removal. Pollen analysis also shows up the alluviation of the Ouse valley occurred due to forest clearance, with coppicing, pollarding and shredding taking place in the Neolithic period. The slopes of Mount Caburn (south-east of Lewes, at the head of the Ouse river valley) were wooded in Mesolithic times, but by the Neolithic, browse-resistant trees such as juniper and yew planted at the bottom suggest animal husbandry and settlement near the river. Yew was planted to fence in animals (it is poisonous so they won’t go near it) and juniper is a medicine plant used as a diuretic in tea, as an antiseptic and anti-inflammatory. It was a traveller’s plant, carried by hunters, cultivated by Neolithic people, the first farmers.

We’ll be the last farmers if we don’t watch out. How lucky we are to have kingfishers here on the Ouse in Sussex. But for how long? Arguments rage between organisations lobbying for the restoration of locks and mills against re-wilding, removal of weirs against retention of history, preservation or dredging. Flooding upstream or downstream, where do you want it? Is the river there to wash away our sewage as they have done for millennia, or to remain pristine for drinking? People are writing about rivers everywhere. Olivia Laing’s To the River (2011), about her walking the 42 miles from the Ouse source at Lower Beeding to its mouth at Newhaven, is a bestseller.

This book and others all say the same thing: without water, the flora and fauna and we are all dead. Here in Sussex, we are asking this river, which only runs for 42 miles, to sustain our human drinking, washing and cleansing needs for the rest of time. The river and the rain, the two reservoirs at Ardingly and Barcombe and the underground aquifer in the chalk south of Firle, which feeds the 28,000 residents of Seaford. If you count all its tributaries, like Cockhaise Brook, Glynde Reach and the River Uck, the whole Ouse river system stretches to 180 miles of waterways. The distance by car between Lewes to Bristol. It is not of infinite length, yet we expect it to be of infinite depth, an infinite resource, fed by infinite rain. What is the best way to look after a river? Certainly not by pouring tens of thousands of cubic meters of sewage into it every year as Southern Water has been fined over and over for doing.

But perhaps we are asking the wrong questions in the wrong way. We, as usual, are wanting to control and manipulate, predict and redirect. We, as usual, want a solution, and the government wants a blanket solution for all rivers. Perhaps instead of asking ‘what is the best way to look after a river, according to the research’ – it used to be clearing and dredging, for instance and now it is restoration of ‘natural’ dams, and allowing the river to spread thinly and broadly to prevent flooding downstream – we should remember that we are an adaptable species, we have always adapted to our environment. And environments are localised. Perhaps instead of arguing over how to control it, we need to listen to this river, here, watch it, and adapt to its course.

Some say it is drying out, others say it will flood. But flooding in Oxfordshire does not happen on the same day as flooding in Sussex. To lower the lock gates in Lindfield (flooding Isfield and Barcombe) because of panic over the floods in Valencia is illogical and misguided. Owners of land by the river have what they call riparian rights. They ‘own’ the water to the middle of the river. But really nobody owns the water, just as you cannot own mermaids or river nymphs or indeed, kingfishers. Riverbank owners know this more than anyone and if they are sympathetic characters, they will listen to the river more than any of us. They hear when it’s raging and listen to its ripples and gurgles when it is gently passing by. They of all people know it is best to learn from the river itself and ‘go with the flow’. Gently tend to the river as it ebbs and flows. Let all the arguments be heard and work together to respond to the rivers rising and lowering habits. It has risen and lowered for thousands of years. People have always lived on rivers. Now the people who ‘run’ the rivers live in office blocks high above the Thames with water dispensed in plastic cups and toilets with ‘touch free’ flushes.

Let the river tell us when we are wrong. Sure, the great flood of October 2000 in Lewes – when all those Caffyns Landrovers floated off under the Culfail Tunnel – occurred when a super high tide met exceptionally high rainfall (a month’s worth fell in four days). Everyone has a story about that day. But if we had not built new housing on the flood plain, the water would have found somewhere to go and would not have whooshed down Cliffe High Street and entered 1003 buildings and destroyed 682 cars. The river was angry, filthy, tired. We are building in the wrong places. We think we can control the river, but the river is in charge of us. We must respect and honour it, swim our lengths, listen to the torrent, celebrate its vigour and its fragility. Only then can we meet the kingfisher eye to eye.

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