The River Rescuers

The tributary of the River Rother at the bottom of the Castle Fields was my special domain. Its dirty effluvium ran through from the bridge at the mouth of Chesterfield to the highways and byways, tributaries and streams of Bolsover. It filled up the great maw of the Clay Hole in the valley of Carr Vale on its way.

The Clay Hole’s name befitted its purpose, great gouts of earth and clay extracted to feed the ravening coal industry, once upon a time. It was now thronged with newts, old beds and car parts, jostling for position in a soup of toxic water. We took our nets and slithered down the precipitous mud walls, bellied out and bloated, to net a few for ourselves. This was not killing newts by removing them from their watery homes, it was rescuing them for our own stream.

A small distance from the Clay Hole itself, we would seek out a secret enclave of lime filled water where we swam and dammed, the sun peeking through heavy tree filters, the dazzle of the white rime and broken Byron bricks embedded in its earthy banks no deterrent to the joy of controlling it, managing it, with twigs, branches and scoops of clay fashioned into scruffy bricks of our own, which we left to dry and bake in the sun. We would watch the water stop, pause for breath, gurgling and bubbling in agitation to escape, throw leaves in and watch the film of sickly white scum form at their edges.

But our little stream on the Castle Fields was our own, further away from the source, cleaner, better, nearer to the castle which lent it a cachet and gentility that made us feel like Swallows and Amazons. A tiny brook, a trickle in reality but it was a river to us, there only for me and my small gang of friends. Careening down the hillside in the lea of the castle, through the prickles of stripped corn as they spiked our summer legs, with our jam jars and buckets pitching against our hips as we ran.

I had made us all River Rescuer badges, complete with a small pin and a card with our gang name, neatly penned with my best felt tips. We took our tentative eco warrior status seriously. This was a science experiment, better than anything we did at school. We monitored the water levels, picked glass out of the bed of the stream and filled our buckets, with earnest faces and careful not to cut ourselves, checked for dragonflies and water daphne, watched the brave wriggling of frogspawn as they took the next evolutionary step.

Every day, in most weathers, we found our way there, like a migratory species drawn to the spawning grounds. The satisfied glow of our faces as we walked steadily home afterwards, an almost worshipful gaze up to the skies, as if the slew of heavy rain, the wildest of winds, the harshest glare of the sun could not touch our moment of sanctity.