In a heatwave, Teffont Evias could have been a mirage.
Slipping away from the thundering A303, descending down sweeping Wiltshire downs, I found a line of dumpy cottages, their thatch as plump as a freshly-baked loaf, with the somnolent chirrup of sparrows and the tinkle of a tiny brook playing by the lane.
I’d travelled here to take a walk and a swim, which I hoped to execute in the River Nadder. A random Google for a suitable spot en route to Shaftesbury suggested this one, and my map seemed to confirm a nice-looking wiggle of a river beside a public footpath.
I was on a book tour, talking about the writer Roger Deakin (1943-2006), who specialised in brave swims in unlikely spots. This looked ideal, especially on a roasting summer’s day.
The little stream in Teffont Evias was like a foot spa – deliciously clear water rippling through Ophelian tresses of ranunculus. The solitary visible villager was earnestly combing excess weed from the riverbed – out-of-control water-weed must be the greatest threat to this perfectly tranquil civilisation.
I parked by the church and admired several flower-filled, stone walls on a slow promenade through the village. It was so surreally pretty, I couldn’t quite believe there weren’t coachloads of tourists or a film director shouting ‘Cut!’
Taking a left, I climbed out of the little valley and onto a field path between a beech copse. This opened onto one of Wiltshire’s characteristically enormous fields, planted with the elegant, grey- green wheat of midsummer. The farmer (I assume) had considerately mown a route through the wheat; the mowings, drying in the sun, smelt as sweet as hay.
An Emperor dragonfly hawked over this bleak field, looking for insects that didn’t seem to exist.
Crossing a small lane, I reached the bottom of the Nadder Valley. The air was scented with the hogweed flowers which towered above me and the river must have been hiding nearby because I’d
never seen so many banded demoiselles moving jerkily in the hot thick air.
As I entered a scrubby field, a red deer hurdled away from me through the long grass. I was no more alone here in the green valley than I had been in downtown Teffont Evias but my walk suddenly took an eerie turn.
The English idyll became an obstacle course. The stile was broken. The path disappeared. The meadow was poached by cattle who had trampled everything and then also disappeared. I leapt a muddy ditch, shimmied under an electric fence and nearly jumped out of my skin at the rattle of distant gunfire from one of Wiltshire’s many firing ranges.
Finally, I found the pool of green on a chalk stream, below an old stone weir. One yellow sign warned of danger of death from the overhead power line. Another sign declared, ‘Dangerous water. No Swimming. No liability accepted for injury or damage.’
It takes moderate courage to swim in water marked ‘Dangerous’ when no one else is doing it. I undressed furtively, ducked under the electric fence, through some nettles and into the water via a muddy pool, where fat tadpoles gathered in the cool shade.
Oooof, the water was deliciously cool but the current was rapid and I felt for and found the gravelly bottom with relief. I was alone in this beautiful pool with only dragonflies and a wagtail for company and yet I couldn’t enjoy myself as I should. My doggy paddle was dogged by a nagging fear that an angry fisherman/farmer/landowner would tell me off.
No one did. In fact, I saw no human being on this walk at all, which I found melancholy: we are a hot nation of empty woods and rivers and jam-packed roads and retail parks.
I felt as lonely as the solitary ringlet butterfly jinking over the vast green wheat field on the route home. It was a relief to reach Teffont Evias again.
Here, at least, was every child’s fantasy of warmth and homeliness: parental swallows swooping into open barns, an ancient box hedge of sensuous curves and hummocks and those somnolent sparrow-chirps once again.
