Animal

Country diary: Izaak Walton's watery paradise regained


Like Piscator in The Compleat Angler, I am sitting quietly on a flowery bank by the calm of the River Lea. Amid the froth of cow parsley and purple bells of comfrey, I’m in the watery landscape cherished by Izaak Walton. I’ve entered, through the embrace of a kissing gate, a microcosm of riparian medieval England. Although it is close to the urban edge, the only building in view is Waltham Abbey, a place that has influenced this countryside for a thousand years.

Lily pads, Cornmill Stream



Lily pads in Cornmill Stream. Photograph: Jeremy Dagley

Cornmill Meadows lie where the meandering Lea separates into a confusion of intersecting manmade waterways. Most notable are the abbey’s ancient fish ponds and a dozen calico ditches, over which lapwings tumble and swifts tilt for midges. The ditches were dug in the late 17th century, shortly after Walton’s death. The cloth, treated with wood-ash and sour milk, was washed in the ditches then laid out on the grass to bleach and dry before being hand printed. Within a century, however, chlorine made the process obsolete. Now grey herons stalk menacingly along the ditches, amid black cattle, and meringue-white little egrets worry at the mud with their bright yellow feet.

The Cornmill Stream is home to more than half the UK’s dragonfly and damselfly species. But mid-May is early for them and the lily pads lie empty. At the margins, though, a few banded demoiselles are basking on the ruched leaf-tips of sweet flag, while large red and blue-tailed damselflies flicker in between giant water dock leaves. A cuckoo calls, with soothing confidence, as some newly emerged hairy dragonflies hunt mayflies along the banks.

A banded demoiselle female basking



A banded demoiselle female basking on a leaf. Photograph: Jeremy Dagley

Alongside the Lea, Walton’s Piscator proudly informs his companion that rivers “are for wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by”. The Lea’s “wise men” included Patrick Abercrombie, the town planner behind the 1940s postwar reconstruction of London; Herbert Morrison; and, most pivotal, Lou Sherman. In 1961, Sherman, then mayor of Hackney, took London councillors on a grim boat trip through chronic toxic pollution, dereliction and neglect, and set out his vision for a 10,000-acre Lea Valley park. They did not pass by. Today the park has rescued something of Walton’s paradise.



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