Eden Big Swim

Fellfoot voices blog by the Eden Big Swim team

24 August 2023

We are ten kilometres, or two swim days, from completing our Eden: Source to Sea project. The August bank holiday Monday should see us land at Old Sandsfield on the Solway where marsh locals reckon river becomes sea. Once the traditional port for Carlisle, it feels a fitting place to finish.

Rain fell for most of July, making the Eden in August a very different river to the one we left in June. Water, much more of it, was moving faster from the get-go, making it vital to physically scope out the routes beforehand. A map provides you with only so much information. Some of the public rights of way we accessed for ingress and egress, for example, had become overgrown with Himalayan balsam – and whilst weirs are marked on maps, rapids are not. Pre-scoping in person has helped us make important decisions in advance – such as where to exit and re-enter in the case of an obstacle.

Within minutes of our first August swim, we were gifted the sight of a sitting kingfisher, its feathery other-world blue bobbing gently on a nearby branch. Soon after that a swan, stock-still, stitched to the bank, a regal white yacht resting in port without her fleet.

Another swim brought us a rare human encounter with a team of fieldworkers from Natural England, checking the health of crane fly and mayfly populations. One of the team was encouraged by mayfly numbers, saying they’re a good indicator of the health of a river. We were fortunate to have our filmmaker, Rosa, with us that day.

By Wetheral, the Eden feels more like a three lane motorway than a single track road, and the bridges crossing it carry more noise. Yet herons perch and cows graze peacefully in the shadow of lorries speeding over the M6 bridge. In the heart of Bitts Park, Carlisle, where the river travels below much-walked, well-worn paths, we were astonished by an otter, popping up only three feet ahead of us, a fish in its mouth, whiskers glinting with river-drops.

It’s wonderful to see wildlife equally at home amongst voices, chimneys and bricks, as it is on remote moors and river banks.

You can follow the Eden Big Swim on Facebook @ViewfromtheRiver, Instagram @viewfromtheriver, and Twitter @TheBigSwim

The funding from the Fellfoot Forward scheme’s community fund is supporting the creation of a short film which will be screened locally within the Fellfoot Forward area to engage schools and the wider community, and to promote involvement in citizen activities which will be taking place after the swim.

The project is supported by the Eden Rivers Trust, an environmental charity dedicated to improving and protecting the River Eden to make it a better place for people and wildlife, and a partner in the Fellfoot Forward Landscape Partnership Scheme (LPS).

The Fellfoot Forward LPS is led by North Pennines AONB Partnership and funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.