Tracing the source of the River Frome…

“To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge — and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffers’s beautiful phrase.” Is a River Alive by Robert Mcfarlane

Watershed’s closest neighbour is the water. Our home sits at the entrance to the harbourside, at the exact point where the culverted River Frome meets the River Avon in the Floating Harbour. 

Despite our proximity, and our name, we don’t really have a relationship to the water, much less one we can articulate. Watershed Wild and Generous gives us the opportunity to explore what a meaningful collaboration with the water could look like in the future. 

Watershed Wild and Generous is a holistic vision for Watershed and the Canon’s Road area that centres notions of wildness and generosity and creates more welcoming and inclusive spaces in a key part of the city centre.  We will take a regenerative design approach to the work, striving to be non-extractive, and creating a project where humans and nature can survive, thrive and co-evolve.

The vision for Wild and Generous extends to the outside spaces around our building. Currently, our urban realm is dominated by hard surfaces and is configured for cars, not for human activity or nature. We would like to extend generosity to nature, support local biodiversity and habitat recovery, and create spaces in which nature and humans can co-thrive. 

To begin this research project, reconnecting us to the water, back in July the Watershed Wild and Generous team decided to walk from the source of the River Frome to the mouth, in order to introduce ourselves to this potential more than human collaborator, thank it and understand its flows. This is part of our process of moving beyond a sole focus on human needs to include nature as a collaborator and consider their/its needs in our thinking and planning for Watershed’s future. 

We’re doing the walk in two halves; the first stretch we walked on a very wet day in July. We began with leaf offerings at the source and shared some of our favourite river poems. 

There’s a mixture of idyllic countryside and urban sprawl, with a fair amount of pollution and rubbish in the water. We saw dock, quince, hawthorn, hogweed, nettle, plums, blackberries, plantain, mugwort and cleavers. We walked through woods, parks, fields, housing estates, industrial estates, main roads, thigh-high nettles, manicured private parkland and farm tracks. There were sheep, horses and their foals, mice, little egrits, and ducks. We saw signs for eels, fish, and hedgehogs (although didn’t actually spot any). As the river twisted and turned, the water ebbed and flowed, several times we had to check OS Maps wondering if we were still looking at the Frome because the water had disappeared completely. We saw nature and humans intertwine in many different guises along the 16km stretch of river we traced. 

We ended the first walk at The Globe pub in Frampton Cotterell, wet and tired but excited for day two in November. These walks are part of a much bigger research project around reconnecting Watershed to nature.

Watershed Wild and Generous is supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players.