Episode 2 Riverland

This tiny trickle,

high in the mountains of Mourne,

is the birthplace of our longest river.

From humble beginnings, here on the slopes of Slieve Muck,

the mighty River Bann runs 80 miles out to the Atlantic Ocean,

and we're going to make that journey together.

'The Kingdom of Mourne,

'an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty,

'famous for its majestic scenery -

'the perfect departure point for a fascinating journey.

'With me, 1,200 feet up and looking down on the Spelga Dam,

'is geologist Kirstin Lemon.

'She's my guide to the rocks and stones that determine

'where our rivers flow

'and ultimately where we live, work and play.'

So we're up at the source.

The river sweeps through, meanders down into the reservoir.

Once it gets out of the reservoir, why does it go where it goes?

It's simple gravity. All it's trying to do is get from the upland area,

so that's here in the Mourne Mountains,

right down to the lowest point, which is at Lough Neagh.

And as it goes, it goes from the granite that makes up

the majority of the Mourne Mountains, which is a really, really hard rock,

and it takes the path of least resistance. So, whenever it gets down

into the valley below us, it's going over a much softer rock

called graywacke, which is a type of sandstone.

And as you go along the course of the River Bann, you're going through

towns like Hilltown, Rathfriland, Katesbridge, Banbridge.

And if you just even think about those names,

like Banbridge and Katesbridge, they are along the River Bann,

they have grown because the River Bann was there in the first place.

Now for a canoe trip with a difference.

The Spelga Reservoir is one of the Mournes' best known landmarks.

The water level's so low this summer that the old Kilkeel Road and bridge

over the infant Bann are exposed.

They were submerged when the dam was built back in the '50s,

so this is a rare opportunity for the pair of us to paddle through...

if we ever get our act together.

HE LAUGHS

We've run aground.

We just couldn't resist it.

We got special permission to paddle on Spelga Reservoir

and we must be among the very few people

to have gone through that bridge

since it was first filled up in 1957.

It's absolutely astonishing to be able to do that.

You told me you were a really good paddler.

That might have been a couple of years ago.

-It's amazing what you forget.

-For good or ill,

we're paddling on the River Bann. Well, really it is Spelga, isn't it?

It is. This is Spelga Dam.

It's one of several reservoirs in the Mourne Mountains.

The water from here supplies Banbridge and Portadown

with drinking water. And that's six million gallons of water every day.

And that's crazy to think. And that's without talking about

the other reservoirs in the Mournes. They must hold a lot more than that.

So, it must be absolutely hammering down on the high mountains here

and running off all that granite.

That's right, cos granite's really impermeable.

Granite's a rock that water just cannot get through.

So any rainfall that falls here,

which is quite a lot at any time of year,

will gather in these reservoirs and it's just used for drinking water

all the way across the eastern part of Northern Ireland.

After a long, dry summer,

the river cuts a scar across fields, farms and villages -

the patchwork of civilisation.

By Hilltown, the shallows make an ideal paddling pool,

a cool place for everyone in the neighbourhood.

On to Katesbridge, said to have been named after a Kate McKay

whose grandmother owned a lodging house where the workmen

who built the bridge stayed way back in the 1700s.

'I'm here to meet a young naturalist and wildlife photographer.

'James O'Neill is only 18 but he's able to spot the little things

'the rest of us would never see.'

Oh, here. Look at this.

It's a Burnished Brass moth.

And it's one of the nicest moths you can see at this time of year,

-I think, in my opinion, anyway.

-Yeah, yeah.

Feeds on these nettles but if you look at it up close,

it's got this shining green.

These funny little lumps along its back,

they maybe sort of imitate the serrations on the leaf.

Yeah, they do indeed.

So, is this one worthy of being snapped and preserved in the memory?

This is good, I'll have a go at this.

James has loved the natural world since he was a youngster but,

amazingly, he's only been taking photographs for the past year.

His favourite subject is the kingfisher.

How do you get the majorly big,

beautiful photographs that you get of them, right next to the camera?

Well, that requires a little bit of effort and a lot of patience.

So, for that I would need my portable hide and, you know,

very careful consideration of where I'm going to do this.

I have to know where the kingfisher is,

I have to select a good place from the bank.

I have to think about where the light's coming from

and my background, so it's a very specific art.

And then once you've done all that, you just have to sit and wait

and wait and I waited up to six hours one day before the kingfisher came.

It's unpredictable.

If you had any kind of species that you really want to photograph

that you haven't yet, what is it?

The otters. I know that they're up and down this river.

I can see signs of them everywhere -

the prints on the bank and their entry points to the river,

but I just haven't got that shot yet.

What about your future, career-wise?

I've applied to Queen's to do marine zoology.

And we'll see where that takes me

but I do want to go on to do wildlife film-making.

Wow. I can't wish you enough success

-cos you've started amazingly. One year?

-Yes.

-Wow.

Skipping a few miles downstream,

beyond Banbridge, Tullylish and Gilford,

that chat with James reminded me of a passion of my own.

It's great to get the feet wet on a lovely warm summer's day.

And I had to stop here because this place is really special to me.

I learned to fish here.

And I remember, probably half a lifetime ago,

standing in there with my welly boots on, my shorts,

and a rod in my hand and catching roach in there.

Now, this really is the point at which the River Bann

begins to open up, becomes navigable.

And I'm going to take a cruise downstream to meet a man who knows

everything there is to know about the history of this place.

Drifting among dancing damsel flies, the journey downstream

offers a chance to go with the flow.

Slipping past Portadown Golf Course,

the banks here are popular with pike anglers.

And you'll meet fishermen all the way to the point of Whitecoat.

This where the Bann is joined by the River Cusher,

and it was also the start point for the Newry Canal -

the oldest in these islands opened away back in 1742.

Welcome to the point of Whitecoat. It's a beautiful day.

And a very iconic part of the river.

'Waiting for me is waterways historian Brian Cassells.'

Take me back 250-odd years to the sights, the sounds,

the smells of this place. What would it have been like back then?

This was a very busy part, being

the end and the start of the canal.

The lighters - they were

known as lighters here,

not really known as barges -

would have been leaving the river

and moving up about one and a half miles up to the first lock here,

to Money Penny's Lock.

What were these lighters or barges carrying into Portadown?

Well, the canal was built to carry coal from the newly-discovered pits

at Coalisland, eventually to Dublin via Newry.

But lots of farm produce,

products of the linen industry,

imports/exports to the area.

This was the motorway of the whole infrastructure of Ireland.

There were two foundries here in Portadown

and they constructed a lot of these lighters.

Bright Brothers was just before the bridge

as we go from here into Portadown.

The Portadown Foundry was the far side of the bridge.

What about the people that were on these lighters?

Well, lighters were old, rusted hulks.

The colour came from the characters that sailed them.

One individual character, he never washed for 17 years.

And worse than that, he never took his clothes off.

He ended up in Newry workhouse.

And they had to cut the clothes off him.

They had to cut the very boots off him.

His very toenails were growing into the leather of the boots.

Lovely stuff. These lightermen, did they live on the boats?

Often they lived on the boats.

Often they reared their families on the boat.

Sometimes they slept in the little bothies.

The horse would have been stabled down below

and the lighterman slept in the loft above.

When did the canal finally give up the ghosts and pass into history?

The canal was officially closed in 1939.

But really the closure began much earlier.

In the middle 1800s, with the coming of the railway,

that was the beginning of the death knell for waterway transport.

Kind of sad in its own way, we've been left with a lovely amenity.

There is still a highway there.

You can cycle it, you can walk it,

-you can make use of it as a natural space now.

-You can.

When you think there was a proposal in the 1950s to build a motorway

from Portadown to Newry and it was to be

over on the bed of the Newry Canal, thank goodness that didn't happen.

Thank you!

I've been cruising the Bann for years

but Brian has really opened my eyes to the history that flows

with the river through Portadown.

And as Shillington's Quay glides by,

there are echoes of that past as I head five miles on, to Lough Neagh.

Locals of a certain age will still remember with great affection,

the Bannfoot ferry - a rickety contraption taking vehicles

across the river on a wooden platform, pulled by ropes.

Today's health and safety experts would faint at the sight of it!

I'm meeting up with Kirstin again at the old ferry crossing,

to find out why the Upper Bann spills into Lough Neagh

at this particular spot.

Well, to answer that question we have to take a bit of a look over towards

the west a couple of miles, and over towards the east a couple of miles.

Because we're actually surrounded by a rock called basalt.

Basalt is a really hard rock. It's formed some volcanoes

and it's very resistant to weathering and erosion.

But we're standing at a gap in that basalt,

a gap probably about five miles wide,

and that is filled in with clay material, which is very, very soft.

So, if you get a river coming along here, it's much easier to wear away

a channel within the clay than within the basalt

and that's why it's coming in at this point into Lough Neagh.

But what about the lake itself?

We've got the biggest lake in the UK and Ireland. Anything about it?

It's actually a really interesting feature

in the Northern Irish landscape. If you want to think about Lough Neagh,

think of it - literally - like a big basin. And the reason why that formed

is because around about 65 million years ago we were still near enough

connected to North America. So Europe was pulling away from North America

and whenever that happens, the land that we lived on stretched,

and whenever it stretched, a bit of that land sunk in and that formed

that basin, and that's the basin that Lough Neagh now occupies.

What about the River Bann whenever it leaves Lough Neagh?

How do you know that it's the River Bann?

The simple answer is you just don't. When you're talking about rivers,

if they go into a lake and they come out again, it's not the same river.

You just look at the biggest one that comes in

and that therefore makes the biggest one that goes out.

But chances are it's not actually the same river at all.

So it could be like the Lower Blackwater?

It could or it could be a different river altogether.

Why does it go out at Toome?

It's because there's a slight weakness in the rock.

It's what geologists call a "fault"

and a fault is a crack in the Earth along which there has been movement.

So, if you want to think of it

a bit like a fossil earthquake,

there was movement along that fault

around about 65 million years ago

and that's created a weakness in the Earth. The water from Lough Neagh has

simply just taken advance of that

and it's formed the exit channel for the River Bann.

And that's where I'm heading now,

to the weir that marks the birthplace of the Lower Bann.

It's a playground for extreme paddlers bravely riding the waves

below sluice gates that control the water level for the entire lough.

Even in summer, it's a seriously impressive current

but in winter, it's huge -

nearly half of all the rain that falls in Northern Ireland

gushes out this plughole.

The community here has a special link with the lough and the river,

and one particular species of fish,

best described by our most celebrated poet.

"Behind it all and underneath it all

"Like a silver thread holding together

"the whole history of the Bann there swims the silver eel."

Seamus Heaney knew the banks of the Bann like the back of his hand.

He was reared just up the road from the eel fishery at Toome.

"My first sight of the Bann came from the bridge at Toome.

"You looked out on one side towards the floodgates

"that lay like a gag on the mouth of Lough Neagh.

"And on the other side was the eel fishery."

Fergal Kearney is a neighbour and friend of the Heaney family.

One of my earliest fishing memories as a child was being

out on Lough Neagh with my dad.

And I remember, as Seamus Heaney wrote,

"pulling in the eel line hand over fist."

And eels were really important to him, weren't they? And this place.

All his writing, everything spiritually that came out

in his writing, is based on the place that we're standing now.

"I even found the sound of the name dark and mysterious now -

"Toome. It's like an echo of the past."

He lived just two miles up the road.

This was his playground as a child and it became the place

that was with him all of his life, right up the end.

The journey the eels made was incredibly important

and its symbolism - that great journey from the Sargasso Sea

all the way to Lough Neagh, in obscure little Northern Ireland.

What a journey.

And he used that symbolism almost as a metaphor for the journey of life.

And that was something he instilled throughout his work over the years,

using nature as a metaphor about the journey of life and death.

Seamus Heaney was an image maker, but it was the image of the mind.

It wasn't camera, it was the imagination.

"One of the fishermen said to me,

"they're as hard to get at as the stars in the sky."

The Lough Neagh Sequence, obviously, was a huge piece of work,

which I think he invested an awful lot of time in -

many months, if not years.

And it really was tracing almost in meticulous detail that journey

that the eel made from Sargasso Sea as an elver,

right through to arriving here at the eel fishery and Toome Bridge,

where, unfortunately, most of them ended their journey

and obviously were boxed up and sent off to Continental Europe.

But others were allowed to escape and propagate in the lough

to continue the journey, if you like, of life.

"They're busy in a high boat

"that stalks towards Antrim, the power cut.

"The line's a filament of smut drawn hand over fist,

"where every three yards a hook's missed or taken.

"And the smut thickens, wrist-thick,

"a flail lashed into the barrel with one swing.

"Each eel comes aboard to this welcome:

"the hook left in gill or gum, It's slapped into the barrel numb."

With his words hanging in the air I'm conscious of travelling

the same waters many years after Seamus Heaney took a boat journey

towards Lough Beg.

It was a place loved by the poet and by an old friend, Seamus Burns,

who's taking me bird watching.

There are so many herons along this stretch, Seamus.

There are indeed. It's the sign of a really good quality wetland habitat.

Herons are one of the many features that we get along the Lower Bann here

as we go up into Lough Beg.

And the whole connection with Lough Neagh really makes this place

quite special. It's just amazing the variety of nature

that you find along the river like this.

Especially in a day like today

where it just seems like life is in full flow here.

This is really special, this trip that we're taking here today.

This reminds me of a period of time - over 30 years ago -

as a very young boy at primary school.

I came up the river here with my Uncle Tommy on a boat from Toome.

I come round this corner and entered Lough Beg for the first time,

and that landscape opened up in front of me.

Now, this is a place that's only 15, 20 minutes from where I live,

and I didn't know this place existed. And I didn't realise at the time

but that was going to be a life-changing moment for me

and it led me into a career in nature conservation.

Lough Beg here is the central part of the work that I do for the RSPB.

It's about looking after landscapes like this, working with the people

that manage these areas, the people that own these landscapes.

On the western shore of Lough Beg here you've got 500 hectares

of pristine marshy grassland habitat.

And that's home to a range of nature.

Irish lady's-tresses orchids,

only a handful of places in Ireland do you find that rare plant growing.

Well, it's growing in here in its hundreds,

because of the quality of marshy grassland that we have here.

That's the lifeblood of this whole place.

We spent a very early morning together here

looking at whooper swans for Autumnwatch a few years back.

The moon's out. Dawn is creeping over the horizon.

What are we going to see here in the next half hour?

As the light breaks here, these birds are going to leave the water

and go to feed in the fields nearby.

BIRDS CALL

-They're on the move.

-Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're the first to leave, they're heading straight for the fields now.

Wintertime this place is such an evocative place.

From Scandinavia come dabbling ducks and wigeon.

Shoveler, teal

come in here in their thousands.

And this place is really, really special right throughout the year.

Look at that view today over to Church Island

and all the birds, the lovely sunshine,

and you must say at times, "They're paying me to do this."

-I can't believe it.

-You're a lucky man.

-Very, very lucky."

It's time to leave the peace and tranquillity of Lough Beg behind

and it's only a stone's throw from Newferry to the Big Splash,

at Portglenone.

Three, two, one!

Try going forward!

It's the big event of the summer.

The locals love messing about on the water

and it's a lovely place, too, for tourists to explore.

We are getting more and more people coming down here parking overnight

with their boats, going up into the village, buying a meal,

buying food, buying different things in the village,

and that's helping the economy of the village alone.

Norman's a man of many parts - Big Splash organiser,

pastor in a local church,

and skipper of the community rescue service.

The villagers are a lot happier to use the river now,

from the point of view there is a rescue station in Portglenone.

Before that they were quite frightened of it

because a lot of locals had actually lost their life on the river.

We would like the river to be a lot more central

but we're working on that and we feel that already we've achieved a lot

in the last 10, 15 years.

Norman and his 22 volunteers are part of a much bigger organisation.

Community Rescue Service answers over 200 callouts

across Northern Ireland every year.

They have a fleet of fast boats.

And the man at the helm is my guide to the river in Coleraine.

I didn't realise that bridge was as old.

Yes, it's almost as old as I am.

-TOGETHER:

-1844.

That's something that you never really associate with Coleraine

these days, the fact that it's a sea port with a great big ship in it.

Yeah. We still see the ships come up the harbour

but not as many as there used to be in years gone by.

When I first came to Coleraine when I was 16

and started work in the harbour, which we're now going past,

I was a young, young man working with all these older dockers in Coleraine,

we heard all the stories of the many sailing ships used to come in

and they had many photographs of that and round the harbour opposite.

And Kelly's Coal and the famous coal yards here, the different ships

from that line were in and out of here every day most days of the week.

You can see we've got quite a large ship here.

This scrap that's being loaded here, which is

one of our exports now is probably going to Spain.

And you're saying 16-year-old, working at the harbour here.

You've a long association with this river.

-Is it a special place for you?

-Absolutely.

I was only here a matter of days when I fell in love with the River Bann.

And I've been working on it most of the time ever since.

Always a full-time job. Sometimes in this job as a part-time volunteer.

So, it's not as busy now

but I suppose there'd be far more leisure activity on the river?

Oh, absolutely. As you've seen on your journey, I'm sure, that

the hidden gem in Ulster and Northern Ireland is actually the River Bann.

So what are the big challenges of operating in the longest,

biggest river in Northern Ireland? This has a huge amount of force

-in it, particularly in the winter, doesn't it?

-Absolutely.

The largest volume of water of any river in the British Isles

is the River Bann.

It takes more water to sea any day and empties Lough Neagh, which is the

largest freshwater lake, so it has to get that water out to sea someway.

Then again we have the tidal challenge here,

and a very narrow waterway to work in.

Our teams are often responding at two and three in the morning in the

middle of winter and we've full-size trees floating down the river.

So, it's a lot of challenges here in trying to ensure people are safe.

But I'd want any viewers to understand that is

an extremely safe environment to work in.

It's an extremely safe environment to go out and have your leisure in.

Safe, challenging and endlessly fascinating.

MUSIC: At The River by Groove Armada

# If you're fond of sand dunes and salty air

# Quaint little villages... #

On a hot summer's evening, the Bann Estuary is a glimpse of paradise.

Wow, look at that for a view.

We started this journey up in the Mournes,

in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty

-and look at the view from here.

-Absolutely stunning, isn't it?

Just to think the size of that wee river up in Slieve Muck

-and coming down to here.

-I know. And that is the famous Barmouth.

We've got Portstewart there,

Castlerock here, and the river emptying into the sea here.

Anything geologically speaking that's spectacular

-or interesting at this point for us?

-I think the most interesting for me

is think about the actual name. What does Barmouth mean?

Everyone who lives in this area has heard of the Barmouth

but do they really think about what it is?

The mouths of any river are active places,

they're really exciting.

You look at them and perhaps you think there's not much going on.

But think about that massive river that brings with it sand, silt, clay,

gets down here and, if you like, when it hits the sea, it's like a wall.

Hits that wall and everything's just dumped in a big pile, a big bar.

So at the mouth of the river there is a bar.

And that's where the name comes from.

In the winter whenever there's a great volume of water

coming down here, I imagine it would actually clear that bar away.

Well, it does a little bit.

But if you strip back the layers and you look on the sea floor

there isn't really much evidence of the River Bann.

You'd expect to have a huge big channel that was way out to sea.

-That's not the case here.

-I always imagined you'd get something like

a big delta that stretched way out towards Scotland.

I'm afraid not in this case, but it is nice to think that a little bit

of the water of the Mourne Mountains is still in the Atlantic Ocean.

-I know. And a lovely mystery - where does the river end?

-Absolutely.