Running along rivers

There is something special about knowing a place by running. Moving at speed, the body must instinctively respond, through feet, breath and emotions, to landscape and infrastructure. Yet, there is not enough time to focus: physical details are abstracted into shapes, textures, boundaries. The runner overlooks material histories of power written on plaques and embodied in relics, power which has shaped rivers and the people along them. Instead, the runner has the chance to imagine these pasts themself.

I.

I set out to imagine the Tweed’s pasts. Starting at the Ettrick’s confluence with the Tweed, I follow the traces of the river’s industrial past. I drop down to the water by the old Lindean mill, now home to the Southern Upland Partnership. Running upstream, I feel the quiet privilege of moving freely, weaving lightly over raised ground between old lades carved to drive the mills, barely noticeable among the wild garlic. Now and then the path pulls me back to the river’s edge, the water shimmering and beckoning in the spring heat.

The Tweed and its tributaries have long been commodified, in particular during the industrial era, which involved thousands of labourers who would form bigger towns such as Selkirk. Commodification brought economic value to the rural watershed, via the textile industry or agriculture, but ruthlessly rechoreographed bodies of water (and people) wherever necessary. In the 18th century, Eddleston Water, which joins the Tweed at Peebles, was straightened and geomorphologically “improved”, only to lead eventually to floods that could not be withstood by the Peebles mills despite the caulds (weirs) built to control the water. Today, a major project is underway to re-meander Eddleston Water in imitation of its former flow. Beyond its physical un-straightening, does this restoration act as a radical challenge to the urge of historical landowners to dominate water just as they did land? Or does it merely reflect the latest aesthetic tastes in landscape management and control?

Reaching Selkirk, I weave through the forecourts of today’s industrial estate. Running forces my eyes to be selective, and the only glimpses of its buildings I catch are clues left behind by deindustrialisation: remnants of pulleys, engine rooms and boiler houses, an ephemeral sketch to be filled in by my imagination. Not that there is much more than imagination to go off anyway: Helen Taylor, archivist at Heriot-Watt University, tells me that there is a waning academic interest in tweed’s human histories, especially the histories drowned by those who wielded power. Back at the Ettrick, in front of the former Ettrickbank Mill, I pause to catch my breath. From the river’s edge, Selkirk rises in layers: its baronial-style courthouse on the skyline, its townhouses, and the river that once powered it all.

Visit plotaroute for a more detailed map of Andrew's Selkirk trail run.

II.

Nowhere in the UK is the influence of mills greater than in the Derwent Valley, where I lived before moving to Scotland. Indeed, the Selkirk mills made use of technological and managerial systems originating from Richard Arkwright’s cotton mills in Cromford, where this route starts. I rapidly ascend the Derwent Valley’s steep wall, my breath struggling to keep up, and the hum of the A6 echoes between High Tor and Gulliver’s Kingdom.

From the 18th century, the Arkwrights exploited the power of the Derwent as it descended from the high Peak, to process cotton grown by enslaved people on plantations in the southern United States. With the resultant wealth, they enclosed parts of the ravine, which contributed to Matlock Bath becoming the hottest inland pleasure destination at the time. In the trail-runner’s eyes, this has left behind exhilaratingly steep trails on which to descend back to the Derwent.

The exploitation of water for economic gain is a global story. At the turn of the millennium, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in central China, still the largest power station in the world, necessitated the displacement of millions from ancestral homes. Yet, the damming of the Yangtze sprung from the same economic reforms enacted by Chairman Deng’s Communist Party in the 1980s that brought social mobility to some of the poorest Chinese at the time.

A few miles downstream, these reforms brought my father, who grew up as a lotus-root-picking peasant surviving off its waters, to immigrate to the UK, where I was born. Thirty-five years on, he is indisputably a middle-class suburban British dad, his lowly watery past only resurfacing when a fish head is between his chopsticks or during his weekly lotus root procurement.

How do we, as immigrants far from ancestral waters, assuage contradicting policies which both separated us from water and water from us, yet also led to our existence?


Visit plotaroute for a more detailed map of Andrew's Derwent trail run.

III.

Up on the scree-sloped Eildons, it’s easy to see how Melrose continues to be romanticised as a place to visit, nestled in by the Tweed, with its abbey and modern-day pilgrimage enshrined by multiple monastic-themed long-distance routes. I’m more excited than usual for my weekly jaunt, knowing that the spring gorse will now be in full biscuity scent. Only a matter of weeks now before the heather follows. As I run down the slopes and turn into the town, I run past the National Trust of Scotland’s celebrated Priorwood and Harmony Hall, whose accommodation and gardens are marketed with all the bucolic keywords: tranquil, unspoilt, elegant.

The construction of Harmony Hall was paid for in 1807 by Robert Waugh, a pimento plantation owner who robbed the lives of at least 150 enslaved people in Jamaica to accumulate his wealth. The very name, Harmony, which the National Trust for Scotland celebrates, came from the name of Waugh’s slave plantation. Returning to Scotland, Waugh then bequeathed to the Melrose poor the chain bridge, over which I run to cross back over the Tweed. I found out about this history through Melrose Stewart, who visited the town in the run-up to Black History Month in 2021 to find out more about her own family connections to Scotland. Stewart writes:

“By virtue of the way in which millions of my enslaved predecessors were uprooted, transported and killed during numerous transatlantic slave crossings, it is conceivable that I may never be able to explore my true African ancestry as I am now exploring my Scottish past.”

Inside a local bakery, this history manifests rather differently: flavoured with brown sugar and ginger, the Melrose tart is sold as a twee celebration of the town’s Jamaica-made fortunes. It is certainly quite delicious as a post-run snack, and I support a local business in the process. But I cannot ignore this as a sign that Tweed tourism still profits from the legacy of a town enriched by the exploitation of enslaved people. Two hundred years on, is it consequential to acknowledge our complicity in the erasure of these lives and voices?

The sanitisation of colonial legacy in the countryside still affects the British public. We are among the least connected in Europe to nature, despite all its benefits: to our green spaces, our moors, birds, stars, lochs, rivers. Yet to protect nature, we ought to know it, belong to it, care for it and be cared for back. It is only empathy that allows those that control the narrative to imagine the barriers faced by the Global Majority in accessing nature: from historical oppression to today’s revival of xenophobia, from a marginalisation of diverse voices on decision-making boards to a language of conservation that synonymises, for our more-than-human kin, migration as invasion.

Along the Tweed, how can we create equity of access if the trauma of colonial legacy remains unaddressed, the stigma that has been drowned and never resurfaced?


Visit plotaroute for a more detailed map of Andrew's Melrose trail run.

IV.

Access to nature has always been a power struggle. I stride along the familiar western edge of the Kinder plateau, which delimits the Derwent watershed and its pleasant White Peak estates, much of which was long owned by the Earls of Devonshire, from the Mersey watershed of the industrial revolution’s masses. Peat bog underfoot, I pick out the Manchester skyline.

I was born in Stockport a few miles downstream. We learned about the 1932 Kinder Trespass at school - what Julian Batsleer has described as a “deliberate, youthful act of class struggle politics” that is still in the mind of every access campaigner today. At the time, there were mainstream fears that the countryside would be “vulgarised by picnic parties” and “hordes of hikers”. Today, this radical action has been retold as a quaint backstory to the designation of the Peak District National Park and the Pennine Way.

The UK faces crises in biodiversity loss and climate change, in part stemming from a mass disconnection of people from land and the natural world. We, the masses, are told to stay out of nature - to protect it, we should donate - yet we are actively discouraged from developing meaningful relationships with the places that the privileged few are protecting. Or not protecting, as I spot an old grouse butt in the mist. We should not spend a night under the stars, unless we buy a ticket that allows us to do so. People-of-colour walking groups must prepare for hate if they promote anything publicly. Gatekeeping from natural spaces is nothing new - it has only been exacerbated both by the commodification of nature and the political mainstreaming of prejudice and xenophobia.

But within outdoor culture, there is a new current of people using their privilege and empathy to push against social-environmental injustices. A current uniting not only social justice activists who first challenged the status quo of access, but also ordinary outdoors folk who roam and watch over land and water, unknowingly politically engaged. It unites environmentalists, nature-lovers, those that traditionally upheld the status quo.

For me, this confluence of communities is the most exciting thing in the outdoors now. Together we enable the access whose benefits we have always taken for granted: these fragmented, fragile rights that flowed down the Mersey to where I learned how to ramble, climb and run.


Visit plotaroute for a more detailed map of Andrew's Kinder trail run.

Andrew Wang is an activist and campaigner for better access to nature and the outdoors for everyone. He founded ESEA Outdoors UK, a grassroots community to advocate for better representation, diversity and inclusion in the outdoors. Andrew is also on the board of National Trails UK, a national charity championing and campaigning for National Trails across the UK.
https://eseaoutdoors.uk
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