A mile from my home a river is born. In a little wood between a railway line and a hospital, nine springs rise in a deep hollow of chalk. Their water pools, then flows as a slender stream into the city of Cambridge. There it joins the River Cam, which in turn joins the River Ouse, which in turn reaches the great estuary known as The Wash – where fresh and salt mingle, and river and ocean become united, not single.

The water of these springs is so clear that it sometimes seems not to exist at all. Like the ‘well at the world’s end’ of which Neil Gunn wrote in his 1951 novel of the same name, it ...

 

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