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We start with a raindrop, single and defined. The Waterlands follows its flow from the Lowther Hills of Scotland to the coastal waters of the Firth of Clyde in this exploration of the transformative power of water.
The writer is Stephen Rutt, naturalist and award-winning author of several acclaimed books including Wintering: A Season with Geese. Along the way, he introduces us to various conservationists and experts in different habitats, including blanket bogs, reedbeds, lochs, marshland and chalk streams. It is the River Clyde, however, that is the key character. Its changing personality brings momentum, and we gain a deep sense of compassion for it. Rutt encourages us to view a river as a living thing that is deserving of “rights and a voice to be heard”. He achieves this without a drop of twee personification.
Rutt challenges assumptions. I realise that my sense of a river has been limited by perceiving it as just the channel through which it typically runs. Yet rivers are meant to expand and contract – the land around that channel is river too.
That single raindrop is our anchor throughout the book, and we return to its microscale as each chapter opens. With that hyper-focused close-up lens, we also examine the caddis fly larvae, mayflies, minuscule water snails and many other tiny life forms found in water. Then we zoom out, widening the perspective to the landscape scale. Or rather, as Rutt describes it, the waterscape.
The practice of abstraction is explored. Rutt explains that water taken from underground aquifers is not regulated in the same way as water removed directly from rivers. The very word ‘abstraction’ is analysed. He notes that we see water in an abstract way, as a concept somehow separate from ourselves, rather than our lifeblood. Maybe it is that dissociation, that ‘abstraction’ of it, and the environment more generally, that enables us to treat it so badly.
We have affected everything about water, from its form and flow to its health. Rutt writes: “What we seem to have lost, in the well-plumbed modern world, is a certain reverence or respect for water.” With the world’s wetlands disappearing faster than forests, we can’t ignore the risks of scarcity and possible conflict. Even in rainy old England, the deficit between a sustainable water supply and demand is forecast to be nearly five billion litres a day by 2050.
Much of the water we do have is polluted and damaged. The book explores the impact of chromium, used in industry, turning the water of the Polmadie Burn, in Glasgow, Scotland, “bright green, a lurid, newsworthy shade”, and the effect of other pollutants such as arsenic and lead used in shipbuilding. Whether it is pollution, acidification of lochs or our impact on chalk streams, Rutt states, “None of this is as it should be.”
Yet the book is far from depressing. Rutt balances the necessary honesty with the hope brought by rewilding and wetland restoration projects. Throughout, bursts of Rutt’s wry, sideways humour entertain and cheer, whether it is the description of a bearded tit as “a bird with a moustache that pings like a phone”, or the revelation that despite his fascination with water, Rutt cannot swim, and in fact fell into a river at the age of two.
Rutt’s use of language is a pleasure for word collectors like me. From Scottish cleuchs (rocky crevices) to a Welsh cwm (a valley head created through glacial erosion), and from the mesotrophic (water with moderate, healthy nutrient levels) to grundles (weather-worn drainage ditches), the vocabulary is rich and diverse: some colloquial, some scientific, all bringing depth and a sense of the way water permeates every facet of human life.
The Waterlands will immerse you in one of the most overlooked, commodified aspects of our environment. You won’t take water for granted again.
The Waterlands: Follow a Raindrop from Source to Sea by Stephen Rutt. Elliot & Thompson, 2026. ISBN: 9781783969319
