Reservoir swims are the best swims
Saying goodbye to the sea and hello to a whole new way of getting into the water
There are many things I love about living here on the edge of Sheffield. The view from my desk up towards Blacka Moor and the edges of Burbage Rocks beyond. The trees that line every street and the woodland in the most unlikely of places. The ready access to Curbar Edge, the sight of climbers heaving themselves over the cliffs and giving a nod hello as you walk past. And our haphazardly planted garden, replete with pond now teeming with invertebrates and a fruit and veg corner that’s just weeks away from offering up something vaguely edible.
I’m even down with the family of magpies that have made the roof of our dormer their playground, one youngster tapping at the window of our Juliet balcony at 4.30am each day, doubtless ‘checking his look in the mirror’ but actually waking me up for good with a jolt and a start.
The knowledge I could take a dip at a time of my choosing meant that I was often calmed just by the thought of the water
It has, emphatically, been the right thing to move north. We have more space to spread out, to make our own. New hills to climb, new paths to walk. There is, however, one thing missing. Ready access to the skin tingling coolness of the sea. It’s not as if I wasn’t aware that I was moving to one of the most landlocked parts of England. But a decade of the beach being less than five minutes from your front door means that access to the water becomes so deeply ingrained that you aren’t even aware of it. It’s just there.
While my regular swimming days are behind me in many ways, the knowledge I could take a dip at a time of my choosing meant that I was often calmed just by the thought of the water being in such proximity. Often, on my way to work each day, I would ride along the coast from Kemptown and take myself for a quick swim close to the Peace Statue, where Brighton ends and Hove begins. In summer this would involve leisurely loops around the Swim Area buoys. In winter, the shortest of sojourns. Enough for me to feel it, but not so much that I was rendered useless for the day ahead.
Coming home, I would sometimes do the same in reverse, slipping into the water near Sea Lanes. In high summer, afternoons would involve squeezing in as much work as possible before decamping to the beach and swimming out beyond the crowds to clearer water, the thrum of bass from Bluetooth speakers and the buzz of distant jetskis the soundtrack.
There were days when I would cycle along the Undercliff path for a swim at Rottingdean, mornings with my daughter before she started school where we would swim with friends, each of her pals waiting in turn for me to ‘tick tock’ them in the surf. In hindsight, the sea was my cornerstone.
In the months since moving, I’ve found my succour elsewhere - at the local traditional sauna, in the garden, out on the tops. But it had been upwards of eight weeks when my friend Molly, herself a recent transplant to the city and one of my best friends, suggested we go for an illicit dip.
Agden Reservoir is only a 15 minute drive from Hillsborough, but in that way that only Sheffield seems to manage, it feels at a total remove from anything resembling city life. The road around its edge is fringed by broadleaf woodland, dry stone walls coated in moss and lichen. Strictly speaking, swimming in the local reservoirs is forbidden. But simple acts of rebellion are what make swimming outdoors fun and interesting. I quote him constantly, but Roger Deakin wrote in Waterlog about how signs, warnings and labels were creating a kind of virtual reality in the British countryside (in 1999 FFS!). Fast forward to today and, alongside the inevitable No Swimming signs, rivers have been degraded to the point where they are unsafe to swim in. Shit floats in our seas (there’s a reason I rarely ventured from Rottingdean down to Saltdean, a renowned spot for Southern Water to dump raw sewage and then blame a lack of investment from their own coffers). Here in the Peak District, though, these rainwater vessels are among the last redoubts of proper swimming, even if the authorities would have you believe otherwise.
There’s little thought given to how we can make such places safe for recreational swimming. It’s not as if there aren’t examples all over the world. I think back to when I swam with my friend, the author and environmentalist Jessica J Lee, in Schlachtensee on the outskirts of Berlin. Her book Turning is entirely about a year spent swimming in such lakes. Why, then, do we have to put up with rules, regulations and a general sense that so-called ‘waterbodies’ are there as resources to be plundered, not to be enjoyed by all? (With a large nod to my current read, Robert Macfarlane’s peerless Is A River Alive?)
Molly and I followed a wide path that dropped down onto the bank. To our right, a group of swimmers in bright orange caps were tacking out a neat breaststroke into the depths. The bank, though, was at least ten feet above the current waterline. In the weeks since I moved north there had been a significant drought and the kind of heat I had come to expect on the south coast in high summer. Joyous, yes. But also disturbing. The levels of larger reservoirs, including nearby Ladybower, are lower now than during 2022, when these vast lakes revealed their ancient secrets and the taps ran dry.
Look out across the water and you could be in Canada
Beneath our feet, the slick stones which usually made up the reservoir bed made for hard walking. Clouds had gathered overhead and the warmth of recent days had dissipated. Molly and I are old hands at this. We’re friends because of swimming. Between 2013 and 2015, Molly drove me across the country as research for Floating. We dipped off of the coast of Suffolk in the pissing rain in October. We lolled in tidal pools in Treyarnon in Cornwall. We even swam across kelp forests off of Bryher in the Isles of Scilly. Age, though, seemed to have dimmed our stamina somewhat. We strode in without a whimper, the water a peaty orange, straight off of the moors, redolent of burns in the Scottish Highlands and drinkable too. The temperature was in the low teens, the pull of the water below strong enough to be noticeable. We kept close to the edge and watched jackdaws above, Molly picking up on the call of sandpipers. She’s like a real life, infinitely more interesting version of Merlin.
‘Look out across the water and you could be in Canada,’ she said. And from the low vantage point of the surface you could, pines lining the water in the distance.
Back in the day, she always stayed in longer than me. Like the time we swam at Marazion, opposite St Michael’s Mount, and I bailed and sat in a vintage deckchair while she attempted the full crossing. Today, though, we’re both north of 40 and in need of the coffee I’ve packed.
As we emerged, a female mallard waddled along the edge of the water, her young in tow. She was happy to ignore us. Emerging from the water as creatures of the deep meant we didn’t feel like interlopers. The freshwater, too, felt like a new kind of novelty, one I could get used to. It didn’t have the breadth or scale of the sea back down south. But it had something else, something intangible: the illicit thrill of stealing a swim that someone, somewhere, reckons you shouldn’t be able to enjoy. It made that coffee taste all the sweeter, the air smell fresher and the water on my growing beard feel hard won too. Maybe, just maybe, a new cornerstone around which I could grow, thrive and flourish.