As a regular listener to football-mad Radio 5 Live I learned a trick question which is quite a regular in football quizzes:
Which football league ground is closest to the River Mersey?
Most people assume it is a choice between Liverpool & Everton, but the answer is in fact Stockport
These days we tend to think of rivers as barriers to easy travel; we fail to appreciate that for thousands of years rivers provided natural highways, easier to navigate & to use for the transport heavy loads than rough & dangerous tracks through the forest. For an ancient journey planner the instruction Go down the Derwent & turn left when you reach the Trent would have been as familiar as today’s M1 – M25 – M3
I wonder if primary school children these days have to learn, as we did, the rivers of England, drawing maps & carefully writing in the names so we learned how small rivers flow in to larger ones & eventually reach the sea. Some – perhaps most – children found this boring but I always had itchy feet & so perhaps there was some atavistic memory of travel which made this activity seem romantic to me
Later came the serious business of geography – watersheds, river basins, erosion, deposition, an intimate interrelationship which shapes our physical environment
I was surprised to find myself thinking of these things when I woke up this morning
I think the explanation is that the business with the drains had been weighing more heavily on my mind than I realised
It was not just the worry about what I might go home to, or wake up to, after heavy rain
I know that our stream flows in to the Goyt which flows in to the Mersey, all part of the same system. A lot of links to history there, but if one gets clogged up enough or backs up or pushes too much water through at too fast a rate we could all know the consequences
So I almost look forward to the next (shortish) bout of rain so I can see with my own eyes that it is draining away properly again
"Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.If a clod be washed away by the sea Europe is the less as well as if a promontory were"
