Tag: River Severn

Mud: devastating, lowly, and the womb of life on Earth.

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We generally think of mud as something negative. It sticks, soils, hinders. We trample or wade through mud. Make detours to avoid it. 

Its many onomatopoeic variations evoke slight disgust: sludge, dirt, slime, muck, mire, slush, ooze, bog, gloop. 

Mud demands patience. We must wait for it to dry before we can brush it off. 

It can be utterly devastating in mudslides, burying whole villages and communities. It evoked horror in the fields and trenches of World War One. And it thwarted both Napoleon in 1812 and the German soldiers on the eastern front in World War Two, as it turned unpaved Russian roads into quagmires, drowning horses and engulfing supply wagons.  

Russia 1942

It terrifies as a quivering brown monster that sucks and paralyses, disappearing you as it swallows you whole into its depths.

In language, mud metaphors tend to be abusive, humiliating, derogatory, damaging. Something is ‘clear as mud’. You ‘drag someone’s name through the mud’ or ‘sling mud’ at them. You may be a ‘stick-in-the-mud’ in your old-fashioned attitudes. Your contribution to a situation may merely ‘muddy the waters’. Someone might describe your impoverished background as being ‘born in the mud’. We get bogged down… we muck things up…

It’s not a pretty picture and when weeks of rain once again render my walks into soggy tramps through mud, I am quite sure I won’t be coming to its defence. But today I will. 

For mud is full of contradictions and paradoxes. 

Its in-between-ness is part of what fascinates me. It’s melted earth – neither solid nor liquid. It dries to dust – weightless, airborne. It can be caked and baked into useful, beautiful or priceless artefacts and vessels. 

What two of my favourite places in the world – by the Severn and in Pembrokeshire – share is that they are canvases and alchemical blending pots for this in-between-ness. They are meeting places of the four elements: where water, earth, air and fire interact, wrestle, dance, blend and blur. Where the sun sparkles on liquid ripples infusing all it touches with heat. Where hard earth dissolves into softness as water ebbs and flows across its surface. Where tidal flow nibbles persistently at solid edges, and evaporates into sky to later fall as rain.

Mud is the womb of humanity. And its grave. 

Earth to Earth. Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Dust.

In the beginning… we emerged from the mud. 

Detail from Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust by Angela Findlay (2026)

Rebecca Stott gave a brilliant summary of the origins of mud in her recent Radio 4 series.

Back in ‘deep time’ and for most of Earth’s history, there was virtually no mud on land. Before the dinosaurs, the earth was made up of vast sandy plains. In the oxygenated waters of the sea, microbes, jelly fish, sponges and fish lived, but other than clusters of bacteria and algae clinging to wettened coastal rocks, there was no life on land. 

458 million years ago, however, something huge happened. Heavy rainfall and rivers swept silt and clay from the barren landmasses into the sea to gather on continental shelves and deltas where they transformed into thick layers of mud. This has become known as the “Mud Transition”. From then on things happened relatively fast. To cut a very long story short, plants began to grow… and the rest is history!

Charles Darwin kept mud in a breakfast cup and made the significant discovery that dormant seeds trapped inside dried mud could germinate. Mud is life-giving not inert. Snails and earthworms pass through it in a reciprocated exchange as mud passes through them.

sediment corers

Mud is the archive of the emergence of life on earth. Sediment corers – the deepest one bored 228 meters through Antarctic ice in February this year – can extract samples to read climate changes and natural disasters that occurred up to 23 million years ago. 

All this within lowly mud. 

This is the subject of my next exhibition and forthcoming Pecha Kucha talk Ode to Mud: My quarter-century love affair with the River Severn. I will be one of eight presenters using the strict format of 20 slides, each slide lasting just 20 seconds.

Dialogues with the Severn is a weekend [18th-20th September] celebration of the River Severn dreamed up and organised by Kel Portman, Alexander Caminada and me. Over the past year, we have gathered together a wonderfully diverse selection of people who share our love of the Severn, to exhibit their art, talk about their experiences and/or work on the river, read their poetry and play their music. We have put together an exciting programme, which you can find here. 

I will be exhibiting brand new work – mud paintings and installations – inspired by my renewed engagement with the Severn and its ‘rich, melted-chocolate mud’ as I described it in my 2024 blog: In the Flow: Ode to the River Severn.

The final remaining older mud sky- and seascapes from the early 2000s, plus new works will be for sale. But more of that in my September BLOG or NEWSLETTER. 

For now, I return to the mud: ancient, elemental, unruly and alive. The stuff beneath our feet, from which, in one form or another, we all began.

In the Flow: Ode to the River Severn

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First Encounter with the River Severn

June 1999. You wouldn’t know it was there. Nothing suggests the proximity of Britain’s longest river as you amble down the canal towpath at Frampton-on-Severn. I have a hand-painted sign promising Cream Teas to thank for its discovery. The arrow lured passers-by through a hedge and into a wonderland of round tea tables bedecked with embroidered tablecloths and mis-matching crockery and arranged beneath the boughs of a huge copper beech. A tall man navigated trays of silver teapots and 3-tiered cake stands along narrow paths mown through the long grass. 

I had moved back to England after 10 years living abroad and was checking out the Stroud area as a possible new home. The top floor of the accompanying Lodge was up for rent, I soon learned… would I like to look at it? A sweeping staircase carried us up two stories and into an apartment of hexagonal rooms adorned with small fireplaces. Then, bending double, two miniature doors awkwardly birthed us onto a roof terrace and into the breath-taking view that would become my world. The River Severn stretched like a taut blue sheet tucked into a distant shore. Low tide mud sparkled. Silence was broken only by the soft chink of teacups on saucers.

Life on the River Severn

I would live in that apartment on the Severn for nearly three years. Every day I walked along the banks of the estuary, my breath aligning with the deep ebb and flow of the tides. 

I witnessed the stoicism of a little oak tree holding its precarious own through the seasons, storms and floods; watched cows amble home at dusk accompanied by the swirling black clouds of starlings that condensed and evaporated in the gentle orange glow.

This was where I became a professional artist, scooping rich, melted-chocolate mud into buckets, mixing it with paint and dancing sky and weatherscapes onto large canvases with my hands. 

On many a chilly morning I stood on the Severn’s banks with mugs of coffee and expectant crowds waiting for the world’s second highest Bore to swash its way up the estuary and carry brave surfers upstream. Once, in the pitch of night, I crossed its swirling waters in a rickety old boat and returned in the frozen pinks of dawn. 

A Severn Bore

In later years, I would park my camper van on its shores, drink chilled glasses of wine in the sun’s last rays and sleep through rising moons and meteoric showers. 

I have a rich store of happy, muddy memories of the River Severn.

Walking the Severn Way from source to sea

For the past eight months I have followed its 220-mile course [albeit not in order] from source to sea; from the peaty uplands of Plynlimon in Mid Wales, north-east through Powys and Shropshire, then south through Worcestershire, Gloucestershire to where it sweeps into the Bristol Channel… the Celtic Sea… the Atlantic Ocean. 

Map from the Severn Way Guidebook by Terry Marsh

Within a mile of its boggy birth, the infant Severn starts tumbling through the Hafren Forest, gathering erratic speed like a toddler until the ‘Severn-break-its-neck’ Falls plunge it into the valley that will bob it to its first town, Llanidloes.

Assuming a steadier gait, it meanders through undulating pastureland before looping north to cross the Welsh/English border at Crew Green. Growing prosperity expands its girth into a watercourse that cuts through floodplains as it heads into the dense cluster of the period buildings and timber-framed mansions that formerly made up one of Britain’s most prosperous wool and cloth trade towns, Shrewsbury.

Past the birthplace of Charles Darwin, a glassy stillness and almost imperceivable flow belie the Severn’s true force as it smoothly snakes its path between overgrown banks of willow, elder and the deceptively pretty pinks of thuggish Himalayan Balsam.  

History punctuates the landscape with traces of Roman forts and roads, a Saxon chapel, the evocative ruins of the Cistercian Abbey at Buildwas, 16th Century market halls and sandstone caves that once sheltered hermits or stranded travellers unable to cross the river. As the Severn bullies its way south through gorges striped by coal, limestone and iron ore strata, the legacies of once booming industries and trades are memorialised in mines, railway stations and canals that once linked local towns across Britain. 

Regular bridges drip feed the imagination with the industrial revolution. Ironbridge boasts the world’s first iron bridge cast by the grandson of Abraham Darby in 1779 in the wake of his grandfather’s revolutionary discovery seventy years earlier that coke could be used for smelting iron instead of charcoal. Further downstream, the fortified town of Bridgnorth perches on a sandstone cliff. Once the busiest port in Europe, it hummed with the sound of iron works and carpet mills, breweries and tanners until the 1860s when railways heralded the end of river trades.  

Following its increasingly wide, milky-coffee-coloured road, vocabulary from school geography lessons surfaced from the recesses of my turbulent education: Oxbow lakes, flood and sandbanks, confluences; soaring cumulonimbus or, equally frequently, water-dumping nimbostratus clouds.

South of Gloucester and around the peninsular at Arlingham, the now tidal Severn breathes in the sea and releases the river out into the vast estuary. At Purton, the ghostly remains of a graveyard of more than 80 sunken barges reveal man’s hopeless struggle to halt the erosion of the banks. Through the working docks at Sharpness and past a pair of looming power stations, the two Severn Bridges rise like misty goalposts. Portals to the open sea. And an abrupt, somewhat unspectacular end to the Way.

With the walking completed, there remained just one more aspiration: to surf the Severn Bore. A bad dream thankfully warned this novice surfer with a fear of water off. Instead, I rode the Bore in a boat driven by its champion.

We set out on a slack tide in the early dawn, deposited two surfers into the tidal stream and waited. You can hear the roar as it approaches. Pulled by the force of the moon, a small line of foam scrabbling its way against the flow comes into view, gathering body until it is a swell. And then you are on it. Riding the crest as salty water from far away thrusts its way up the river dragging the sea in its wake like a heavy cloak.

Immersed in the perfect balance of the 4 elements, the smile on my face remains for many hours. The magic of Sabrina will last a lot longer.