‘You can tell a river-lover. They cannot help but pause on a bridge to investigate what lies beneath.’ It is hard to imagine anyone not doing that, but our author is a generous soul and wishes to include us all in his passion.
I wanted to celebrate the ways in which rivers stirred spirits and set imaginations alight; to learn how they were worshipped, and then abused and overlooked … I needed to make a river journey; the question was, which river?
He chooses the River Trent, which cuts across England from west to east, more or less dividing south from north, 170 miles of it before it disappears into the Humber; but he chose it, surely, because he knew nothing about it and wanted to find out. In order to be as close to the river as possible he decided to do the journey in a punt, designed by himself.
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