Roger Deakin – at ease in the countryside as a poacher with deep pockets

Few authors have left such an immediate legacy as Roger Deakin. When he died of a sudden illness in 2007, aged 63, he had written just two books: Waterlog, which set off the wild swimming craze, and the even more influential Wildwood, which helped kickstart the publishing phenomenon of nature writing. Yet both books only really became well known after his death. During his lifetime he was, at best, a cult taste. When I approached the BBC 20 years ago with the idea that he should present a televisual version of Waterlog in which he swam ‘across’ England, through its ponds, lakes and rivers, I was told no one was interested in wild swimming – and who was Roger Deakin anyway?

Patrick Barkham has set out to answer that question. The results are unexpected even for those of us who knew Deakin. A man of many lives and compartments (and relationships), he himself thought that what you needed to write was ‘energy, sexual potency and solitude’. Having come of age in the 1960s, he brought a maverick and restless intelligence to his writing, which began late after an equally restless career in advertising, furniture restoration and as a campaigner for ecology. He helped found Common Ground, which pushed, among other things, for more variety in apples against the super-market monoculture.

When he came to write what he first dubbed ‘the swimming book’, he was living in Suffolk, at Walnut Tree Farm, in a cottage with a moat which became essential to his writing. It was where he began his swim across England. ‘Moat’ makes it sound as though he was living in a castle, but actually it was a farm cutting in the scraggy badlands of inland Suffolk around Eye, attached to a modest home. When I visited with my young children, they were entranced as Roger first showed them the many and yet-to-be fashionable shepherds’ huts he had collected.