Writer and film-maker, he connected with the British landscape by swimming across it
Roger Deakin, the writer, environmentalist film-maker and broadcaster who has died aged 63, changed the climate of opinion about access to the countryside, its rivers and waterways, with his Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain (1999).
As a book concept it must have seemed foolhardy: a journey across Britain taking a swim in every rock pool, river, mountain tarn and open-air swimming pool encountered on the way.
Waterlog will endure in the canon of British topographical writing.
Its publication moved Roger into a prominent position as a writer on the degradation of Britain's rivers.
It shifted the mood of public opinion, back towards open-air swimming and to greater access to tarns, ponds and rivers, and the landscapes in which they are set.
Roger belonged to that tradition of topographical and literary writers who had one foot in the library and the other in distant fields. The poems of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Lawrence were as immediate to him as today's newspapers.
In his introduction to the Common Ground anthology, The River's Voice (2000), he wrote:
"Mutability is also evident in all the forms of things in the river, which always wants to round everything to its own patterns of flow and is forever in a state of flux itself. Where others might meditate on their mortality with the help of a skull, my desk is cluttered with stones and sticks from rivers I have explored and swum all over the country."
Roger's writing and campaigning opened up the woods and the rivers for many others.
Roger Stuart Deakin, writer and environmentalist, born February 11 1943;
died August 19 2006
Link:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/aug/29/guardianobituaries.environment
The nature writer Robert Macfarlane was Deakin's literary executor.
He commented:
"Roger was one of those rare people whose character and passion is to be found in everything he made, collected, drew or wrote. His notes, written to himself, provide an insight into a beautiful mind and a sweet man. This archive will capture what it was like to be a passionate, engaged, subversive country intellectual living through a time of profound change. It is very appropriate that Roger's papers will remain within his beloved East Anglia."
In 1999, Deakin's acclaimed book Waterlog was published by Chatto and Windus. Inspired in part by the short story The Swimmer by John Cheever, it describes his experiences of 'wild swimming' in Britain's rivers and lakes and advocates open access to the countryside and waterways.
The book also inspired a one-hour BBC Four documentary film Wild Swimming, in August 2010, presented by the anatomist Alice Roberts. The film stated that he was the source for the voice of the swimmer in Alice Oswald's 48-page poem Dart, about the River Dart in Devon.
= Roger Stuart Deakin
A wind that's already slipped
in and out of several gardens
is churning the blue light of summer
waking sparrow, swift and starling
in my roof – 'Your roof is infested
with birds and mice'
said the chartered surveyor
with no trace of pleasure
at having made
such a discovery
From "Blue Wind Blue Light",
in the Deakin archive
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Deakin
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