North Rivers with Griff Rhys Jones

'We are a watery nation.

'Rivers shape our landscape and they made our history.

'But today they seem like forgotten highways into the back garden of Britain.

'This week, I'm crossing from coast to coast.

'I'll be steering an Olympic medal winning yacht.'

We've got the main up,

and Humber Bridge is approaching at great speed.

'Feeling the force of nature at one of England's grandest country estates.' Aargh!

'And discovering toxic beauty beneath a great city.'

That looks like the whole of doom down there!

'As I explore the working rivers of the north of England.'

It's five in the morning and we are, at the moment, a few miles off Anglesey.

We're about to make our way up and into one of the major rivers of Britain

and we're going to do it on a container ship over there.

This is one of the biggest ships on the Atlantic,

the 58,000-tonne Atlantic Conveyor.

Zero eight zero.

'I'm going aboard in the company of Jeff Rafferty,

'whose job it is to pilot the ship safely into the port of Liverpool.'

-Good morning, sir.

-Morning.

-We go in the lift and up ten decks.

-Where we meet the master who is steering the boat.

'The Atlantic Conveyor is carrying 15,000 tonnes of cargo from three different countries.

'This is the most critical phase of her entire voyage, as we enter the mouth of the Mersey.

OK.

The river reaches right out to the sea.

Its waters create treacherous sandbanks and as this ship crosses the bar,

she has just under two feet of water beneath her.

But for Jeff, the most difficult bit is still to come.

The lock is 130 feet wide and the ship is 106.

In simple terms, there's about 12 feet on either side.

Now I can only see one side.

We don't really have any brakes either!

HORN BLOWS

So we've got a bit of breeze now, Griff, just on the starboard quarter, blowing us off a little bit.

-There's our mark on the quay there.

-And what will you line it up with?

There's a stripe painted on the side of this ship!

Oh, I can see the stripe. Do you want me to tell you when it's there?

You need a lot of loose change to park here.

The conveyor is charged by the foot and by the hour.

Overstaying your welcome can be an expensive business.

-Ease right down now, she's got about ten metres to go.

-Phew!

Yes, OK, thank you.

So there we are. Dead on time, absolutely snug in the lock.

We are still two miles from the harbour that was once one of the most important in the world.

But it's as far as this mammoth ship needs to go.

Well, a very neat job of getting us here, Jeffrey, I must say!

Thank you very much. 10 o'clock tonight she'll be leaving here for Halifax.

'Once, cargo ships would have gone further into the Mersey itself and unloaded over a period of weeks.

'Now, thanks to the clever concept of containerization, everything is done in a matter of hours.

'This port actually handles more cargo than the old docks ever did.

'40 million tonnes a year.

'Does this mean that the working life of the rivers of the north is finished?

'To find out, I'm going to Manchester, across the Pennines,

'following the furious Derwent to the Trent

'and effectively taking what was once one of the most important short cuts in Britain

'to the port of Hull on the east coast.

'But before I leave Liverpool, I want to ask engineer Dave Sandman

'about another aspect of the working life of this river.'

For a long time, the Mersey was not just a working river in terms of being a transportation river

and there were lots of ships going up and down it, it was a very useful drain.

It was just an open sewer, basically.

You just pull the lever and this is where it came to, there was nothing at all that stopped it.

Any waste, at all, throw it in the river.

'Dave is part of a 25 year campaign dedicated to cleaning up the Mersey.

'In fact, he's now so confident of its success,

'he's invited me to join him in one of his favourite sporting pastimes.'

It doesn't look sort of sparkling, does it?

It's not your Mediterranean, I'll give you that!

We're going for a swim.

-How many times have you swum across this river Dave?

-I've done it about nine or ten times now.

-Right the way across?

-Right the way across.

-Rain or shine.

-And how long does it take you?

Between sort of 24 minutes, 40 minutes, depending on the tide and how rough it is.

Even the best of swimmers can get swept up the river so to speak.

Is it cold?

It's cool. 15, 16 degrees maybe. I've got a special thermal cap for you.

How marvellous! One part of my... one part of my body will be reasonably warm. What a good idea.

Actually, the head is where you lose all the heat, don't you?

-Honorary cap.

-Thank you. I'm going to stick this on now.

That means we can see you when you're drowning!

Most people that you've swum with have made it OK, have they?

There's a few that haven't. There's some that have to be taken out.

Sometimes they get motion sickness.

The sea's moving around and one thing and another,

or the cold will get them, they'll take a little too long to get across.

Really? And the cold gets them.

-Got to put some Vaseline on just to stop things chafing and...

-Just to stop things chafing.

Five million people live in the catchment area.

They used to throw their sewage into this river directly.

But it's not just that, it's the bleach and the pesticides, persistent organic contaminants.

There are things called endocrine disrupters,

which come from plastics, which change the sex of fish.

50 years ago, if you jumped into this river, you were basically jumping into a lake of poison

and the only place you were going was to hospital.

-Take me to the water!

-Follow me.

'All the way across means between Monks Ferry at Birkenhead and the Albert Dock.

'That's just over a mile.

'A powerful swell, water the colour of a dead rat,

'and three safety boats only makes it even more terrifying.'

Aargh!

I'm trying...

to get used...

to this, um...

..coldness.

Some big ships coming down, aren't there?

'We've got to get across before the tide turns and washes us out to sea like any other rubbish.

'And as my body finally accepts the cold and lets me swim a little,

'here comes another danger that Dave forgot to mention.

'And it doesn't look like it's going to give way to pedestrians.'

The first thing we encounter on our attempt to swim across the Mersey,

is the biggest...

-Yes?

-..tanker...

I've ever seen!

'Under instructions from the Harbour Master, it is unfortunately time to vacate the area.'

We've had to give up. Very busy river.

There are lots of things coming and going.

Ferries, tankers, lifeboats, coastguard, cruise ships.

It's a difficult thing to point out to them, "Look out, we're trying to swim across the Mersey."

LAUGHTER

Did you get a taste of the lovely Mersey?

Yeah, yeah, yeah! I swallowed enough of it to get the idea. Yeuch!

'I've had a close encounter with an interesting fact -

'the docks may have moved away, but plenty of ships still use this river.

'Liverpool was originally an important dock because the cargo boats couldn't get further inland.

'The upper Mersey is shallow and treacherous.

'Or it was, until they built a little detour called the Manchester Ship Canal.'

The canal was built in order to be able to open a port in Manchester,

because the river itself was totally unreliable

for taking boats of this size, or in fact much smaller than this.

And now things which are over 170 feet in length

can easily get all the way to Manchester.

'Completed in 1894, the canal is a highly efficient artificial river.

'A stark contrast to the meandering, tidal Mersey at its side.

'And it runs all the way to the old industrial heart of Manchester at Salford Quays.

'Manchester, the world's first and principal industrial city,

'owes its importance to a confluence of rivers and waterways,

'although today's inhabitants may not be aware of their existence.'

There are quite a lot of other rivers that run through Manchester than we actually see.

Have you heard of the Croal?

I've not heard of that one.

-The Glaze? Have you heard of the Glaze?

-No.

-No? Heard of the Goyt?

-No.

-The Spodden? Have you heard of the Spodden?

No, no.

-Have you heard of the Etherow?

-The who?

-The Etherow.

-No!

'Where are they all? These rivers once built Manchester's wealth.

'Rushing out of the nearby Pennines,

'they drove the original wool and linen mills, and ushered in king cotton.'

When that textile industry turned to another source of power,

the steam engine and coal, then these rivers became redundant.

They were tuned into sewers, drains, waste disposal ditches.

In fact, the Irwell here grew by 5cm every year

because of the amount of rubbish that was simply dumped in it.

If I want to find out more about these rivers, I have to go where they went,

which is underground.

'Manchester's rivers are still at work.

'They're kept flowing by the Environment Agency.

'Mark Whittaker heads a specialist team which maintains 7,000 culverts and a multitude of confined spaces,

'pump wells and chambers all across the north west.'

-Hello, pleased to meet you.

-I'm Mark Whittaker.

Ah! I'm just looking around, this is extraordinary.

This looks like we're involved in some major operation.

We are because the space we're going to is classed as a high risk activity.

'Moston Brook provides a valuable function as a flood overflow.

'But it has also been contaminated by more dangerous industrial and sewer waste.

'So I have to be put into a fully sealed dry suit.'

-Oh, yes, I'm still a bit Michelin man, I've got air in my...

-If you bend down...

That was a very attractive experience. As I sat down, a great sort of rubbery fart came up.

And already, look, we've got bicycle wheels, we've got every conceivable form of rubbish down here already.

It stinks.

'Not only is it pitch black, but the ground underfoot is treacherous,

'with rocks, rubble and dangerous waste.

'Underground is a world of chemical beauty.

'The legacy of heavy industry above ground has leaked through the topsoil,

'concentrating toxins here, in the darkness.'

The water itself can be pretty hazardous, can it? There are bad diseases?

There is a disease to watch, given by rats, called Weil's disease.

That's a disease which simply comes from rats' urine, is it?

Exactly. One of our colleagues got contaminated from Weil's disease and he was off work for four months.

It's a serious disease and you can actually die from it.

-If I were to fall over into this water, what should I do?

-Stand up straight away.

Any residues of water on your face, we need to leave straight away, get you washed off.

Because there's a good chance it could get into your tear ducts, through your mouth, up your nose.

-So you need to get out, get washed off.

-I'd better keep my footing, hadn't I?

'It looks strangely beautiful, but chemical deposits like this can poison and kill.

'And crumbling them depletes the oxygen in the air.'

-It's quite deep in here. Watch your feet.

-Yeah.

Yeah, I'm all right.

Aah!

-You got wet?

-No, no. No, I haven't.

-You all right?

-Yeah, I'm all right.

-Did you hurt yourself?

-Not really, no, I don't think I've cut anything.

-Just catch your breath.

-I just tripped over on these footings under floor.

The torch has gone, but, luckily, I think all this has held, just gone up my glove a bit.

It's just impossible.

'The difficult conditions sadly obscure the real wonder of these lost working rivers,

'the legacy of the men who built them, the Victorian engineers.'

-And what is this?

-Well, this, Griff, is a sluice gate.

So what happens is when we close that, the water builds up, cascades over the side,

there's another 60 foot drop and the culvert carries on elsewhere.

-60 foot drop!

-60 foot drop.

That looks like the hole of doom down there!

And you go down just because things have gone down them and plugged them up?

-Yes.

-Your job here, you're like the sort of the guardians of the underworld for Manchester.

We are, yes, it's what we get out of bed for in the mornings, it's a good job.

Our 200-metre trip has taken over two hours.

Luckily our journey back to the surface will be a bit quicker.

OK, winch out!

Now I'm going up...

..in a rather straight forward way.

Out, as it were, of the underworld.

Leaving the smell,

the flies,

the gurgling water, and Mark behind.

-Bye!

-Bye-bye.

'We may have hidden some rivers, turning them into a vision of Hades,

'but we've created others which feel more like a garden of Eden.

'Manchester is enveloped in a network of small canals.

'Originally built in the 18th and 19th centuries as a cheap way to transport industrial goods,

'they are working on, but today as a waterborne playground for boaty folk.'

Two little ducks just squeezed through between the boats, taking their opportunity.

Two tiny little ducks making their way through.

Oh, there's one - whoops.

Almost everything about this man-made network of rivers

is utterly, utterly satisfying.

I think it's partly because it is man-made, because you can still see

the marks of the chisels on every block of stone that was put here.

It was at the very beginning of the industrial age so the whole thing is

an act of craftsmanship and I think partly because it has a sense of dignity

and propriety and fitness for purpose that comes from the time it was built,

the end of the 18th century. They built it to last.

'In those days it was three times cheaper to transport goods by water than by land.

'A madness for canal building swept the nation.

'A little bit of that mania seems to remain, albeit in gentler form.

'I'm hitching a lift with Chris Leah on this next leg of my trip.

'He'll take me from the outskirts of Manchester

'and out onto the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, as I head up towards the Pennines.'

-If you pull that lever there...

-Yeah, like that?

-Yeah.

..and rotate that in an anti-clockwise direction.

Push your tiller over and give her a bit of revs.

I've just realised I'm on the wrong side of my tiller here.

-Yeah, don't do that.

-Whoa.

-The thing is to stay in the...

-Stand in the step.

That's it! And then you don't get pushed off by the tiller.

'Chris's family skippered horse-drawn narrow boats in the 19th Century.

'His boat, Forget Me Not, still works the canals, collecting scrap.'

So, Chris, what sort of speed do you expect to move around the countryside in a narrow boat?

-The speed limit is four miles an hour on most canals.

-Is it?

But on most canals you'd be lucky to reach four miles an hour.

People think if they put more and more power on, they're going faster,

and they're not. When people are making loads of wash, they're not going much faster than 3 mph.

'The canal engineers, skippers and navvies worked at the cutting edge of technology.

'4,500 miles of working waterways connected the great industrial centres of England.'

All the way along here

we've passed the remnants

of an industrial complex,

mill after mill after mill, all abandoned.

Gosh!

Look at that.

Like a cork in a bottle.

'At the height of the canal boom, no obstacle seemed too big.

'To connect Manchester with West Yorkshire,

'engineers drove the Huddersfield Narrow Canal straight through the Pennines.'

Come on, hurry up!

'So I could carry on by canal under the Pennines.

'But I'm not going to take its tunnels and bridges,

'instead I'm going to make a detour to see another way in which water has worked for man.'

-Cheerio, then.

-See ya! Have a good trip.

-Thank you.

Of course, water down there in a canal is a rather sluggish entity.

If I want to encounter water as a living, powerful, working force,

then I have to go up.

'I'm going to leave the industrial northwest of England,

'cross the Peaks and discover other ingenious ways in which rivers have been harnessed.

'I'm looking for what Daniel Defoe called "a terrible river,

' "a frightful creature when the hills load her current with water."

'I'm looking for the River Derwent.

'And it all starts in the mossy bogs of the mountain moors.'

There we are! There's the Derwent, looking nicely furious today.

The Derwent is only 50 miles long until it reaches the Trent

and it's a gorgeous rural river celebrated in poems.

'But it's been fully employed throughout its history.

'16 miles further downstream sits the Duke of Devonshire's palatial home, Chatsworth House.

'Even here, the river has to earn its keep.

'For centuries, Chatsworth has had a very special working relationship with the Derwent

'and the landscape that surrounds it.

'I'm hoping to discover exactly how, as a guest of the duke and duchess.'

-Welcome, very nice to see you.

-Very nice to be here.

'Yes, lovely, in fact, because I'll be sleeping in the Sabine Suite,

'Chatsworth's version of the spare bedroom.'

Fantastic is a word that I use far too often, but this is fantastical!

It's the sort of room where I'm going to feel embarrassed to get undressed.

I don't think my own naked body will live up to the naked bodies that I'm surrounded by,

painted on all sides.

And I have a terrific view.

Look at that,

there's the Derwent.

And I'm walking from one mythical representation here in the room, painted mythology,

to another mythological representation out in front of me,

again a completely artificial creation.

It just shows what God would do if only he had the money.

With their wealth, the Chatsworth dukes could afford home improvements on the monumental scale.

These are three pictures going this way of the development of the house

and its relationship with the river because this bridge is not the bridge I crossed, that's gone.

The river was completely different, much straighter and more of a ditch,

and a working river with a big weir and a mill feeding into what were essentially the back gardens.

And then along came Capability Brown and he cleared away all of the gardens in front of it.

They moved the bridge right up to here, made it a more rustic affair,

and they opened up the landscape to make it look more natural, but in fact it's artificial.

The river was dammed in order to get wider

and the course of the Derwent was shifted

so that it looked...

more...beautiful.

And today, when they did a survey,

they asked people what they most liked about Chatsworth,

most people say that it's the setting in the landscape

except that the landscape, which is made to look like natural river scenery,

is in fact a fantasy river scenery.

'Water is in fact central to Chatsworth.

'Successive dukes have made great use of this liquid resource

'that rolls off the moors and through their back garden.

'Chatsworth even has its own spring which supplies the house and restaurants.

'Both the Duke and myself drink a lot of the stuff.

'We consider ourselves bottled water aficionados.

'Now we're going to find out how much we really know.

'Jonathan, our water sommelier, is going to test our geological palates.'

Have a slurp of that.

'On its journey from earth to surface,

'spring water filters through bedrock, which helps give the water a flavour.'

And then we've got our second water here.

-Hard pressed to tell any difference.

-As near as damn it identical.

If you swapped them, I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference between them,

but they're both very nice and wet.

Well, I think that's a little...

this is a rather weird idea, but I think that's a little flatter than that one.

That is to say that first water we drank seems to me to be... tarter.

First one was bottled near Balmoral. It comes through granite and the pH is quite low,

which means it tastes quite acid, so you were absolutely right.

The second one comes from just down the road from here, Buxton.

There you're looking at a more alkaline water, so it tastes much less sharp.

-That's come through limestone.

-And this one's come through granite.

That has an extremely strong chemical taste.

That is pure H2O.

It's for batteries and steam irons. This is water that they've stripped everything out of.

Everyone says, "Ah, well, you know, all waters taste the same..."

But if they didn't have something in them, they'd taste like this.

I'd have to say that against all the odds I thought that was quite nice

so I should put that on order at my wine merchants.

I should say, "I'll have some of your finest sparkling water

"and send up some top-up de-ionised water for steam irons and batteries, whilst you're at it, as well."

'Chatsworth also boasts 27 baths, 55 wash-hand basins,

'29 sinks, six wash-ups and 56 lavatories,

'which, after a day's water tasting, is a useful statistic.'

One of the most demanding and mystifying elements

of any visit to a country house is undoubtedly the plumbing.

In this case, earlier, when I used the loo,

I found the business of flushing it extremely complicated indeed.

I worked out that this was the handle that releases what I need.

TOILET DOESN'T FLUSH

But...

RUMBLING

TOILET FLUSHES

Dramatic, isn't it?

And that's because... that water is coming...

from about five miles away... on the east moor,

and the process that it comes here is one of the miracles of Chatsworth.

And tomorrow, I'm going to go and see how it works.

'The source of Chatsworth's spring water is a sandstone ridge high above the house.

'Here, three great lakes store water which is put to ingenious uses.'

All the water is used several times on its journey

from here to the river.

'The biggest of these lakes is called the Emperor,'

built by the 19th century master architect, Joseph Paxton.

There are six fountains at Chatsworth, but the eight-acre Emperor Lake

feeds the daddy of them all -

what was once the highest fountain in the world, powered purely by gravity.

How high up are we here?

381 feet above the actual canal pond where

the Emperor fountain sits.

-The pressure from this lake shoots down that pipe.

-For half a mile.

It emerges through a four-inch jet.

How high does it pressurise the fountain to go?

267 feet in height, which is 81 metres.

The spray from it drifts about half a mile.

It drenches everybody so we've got to be really careful

whenever we have it on full that visitors don't get drenched.

Oh, of course! That's one of the things they come here for, if not to be drenched!

-This here, that's the flow from the lake we've just been at.

-Yeah.

And this is the magic sluice that opens to take it down the hill.

-Come on, Griff.

-So I've got to get hold of this, have I?

Oh, I see. Oh, my God, I can't get...

HE GRUNTS

-That's it.

-OK, come on.

We've got to run down and see it.

Paxton started work in 1843.

This is it coming in now.

-Are we going to be able to chase it?

-Yes, let's go.

'It seems the duke wanted something more splendid than his waterfall.

'He wanted something more picturesque than his classical aqueduct.'

And the water's going to tip... Whoa!

He even wanted to outshine his baroque cascade.

In fact, he wanted something so impressive,

it would drive Tsar Nicholas I of Russia mad with jealousy.

Each bay is a different length to give this illusion of a babbling brook.

'Sadly, the Tsar never got to see it.

'I, on the other hand, one-and-a-half centuries later, get to turn on

'this marvellous garden ornament.'

Whoa, whoa. Yes, it is, er... I can hear something.

HISSING

Thar she blows!

Look at that! That is spectacular.

Paxton made the gardens at Chatsworth the most famous in England,

by using water and gravity to create pressure.

This is something the humble miller had been doing for hundreds of years already.

The 11th century Doomsday Book recorded 5,500 water mills in England.

That's one mill for every 300 people.

Just like Paxton's lake, millers built ponds and leats

with sluice gates, to channel river water and then drop it with the maximum power.

Now here we are, this is a classic leat.

It's a tiny channel, seems such a small amount of water,

but in fact there's a massive amount backed up there

in order to be led through to service one mill.

And that mill's been working here for 700 years.

Stainsby is one of the few working mills left in the country today.

So there's the big wheel turning by the weight of water, more than anything,

which is turning that great big wheel there.

And that is now being transferred, that slow progress,

to a cog which is whirring around there and turning an axle.

So, look at this, this is the definition of sustainable power from the water.

It's turning these massive cogs here, that's being transferred

to this little cog here, and then taken upstairs, where it's going to be put to use.

Now, that power is transferred up here

and used to drive these mill stones here, hugely heavy things,

but actually, that's not the only thing the power is used for.

It's a sort of engine that drives other things in the mill.

And if we're going to make flour, we need some grain.

'This mill is now run by volunteers, and Mack is going to show me the ropes - or should I say, chains.'

Here we go, Mack, there's my bag of grain. Where's it going now?

It's going through these trap doors to the bin floor, the top floor.

-How are we going to do that?

-We're going to haul it up on this chain.

-Right-o.

-Pull this cord,

transfer power from the water wheel to a chain drum on the top floor

and that will haul this sack up through the floors to the bin floor.

And the reason that mills are often so tall

is because they essentially use the system

of starting the product at the top, as it were,

-and working its way back down.

-Gravity feeds all the systems,

to the ground floor again. It's gone through.

Oh, I see! So what you do, it opens the hatch automatically

and then it can sit back down on that hatch.

Yes, that's what a trap door does, it traps it above.

So the sack can't fall down on top of our heads again.

-That's right.

-And it's been trapped!

-Correct.

-By a trap door!

-Exactly.

-That's why it's called a trap door!

-Yes, exactly.

-I never knew that before, that's terrific!

'Having hauled the sack up to the top floor by water power,

'it's then the turn of gravity to send it back down to the hopper.'

So, Mack, here's our grain.

That's right, it's come down the sleeve from above.

You actually need grain in these stones all the time.

Always. The stones are dressed with a pattern called a harp

which carries the grain from the eye to the rim, milling it all the time.

-It's literally shooting it out bit by bit.

-Yes.

Here is the flour.

At the birth of the industrial revolution,

the first factory owners recognised the potential of the water wheel

and they put it to good use, powering spinning machines in cotton mills.

They changed the course of the water and of history.

And it happened here on the banks of the Derwent, ten miles south of Chatsworth, at Cromford.

# ..builded here

# Among those dark Satanic mills. #

When William Blake wrote those words,

the dark satanic mills he was talking about were water mills,

and by the end of the century there were 30 cotton mills

powered by water along this stretch of the valley,

and the industrial revolution was off.

Richard Arkwright's cotton mill was just the first wave of mechanisation,

bursting free of this valley, out across Britain and then the world.

I'm leaving the Derwent

to continue my journey along another working river - the Trent.

The two rivers converge near the town of Shardlow,

where the Trent gathers size to flow towards my ultimate destination,

the Humber estuary.

But first, I'm taking a small detour a few miles up river.

And now we're on the mighty Trent.

This is the third longest river in Britain.

It takes a great sweep

across the top of England.

The River Trent really was a massive barrier, and for a hundred years, in the Middle Ages,

this side of the river was known as citra Trent and that side was known as ultra Trent.

That side was THIS side of the Trent and the other side was known as the OTHER side.

Well, I'm going to try and cross now from the other side.

And I believe

I'm going to do it by an extremely dangerous method.

Swarkestone Bridge and its medieval causeway is an extraordinary piece of engineering.

It has been one of the main routes across the Trent since the 13th century.

First it snakes its way three quarters of a mile on land,

across the Trent's boggy flood plain, before finally bridging the river itself.

I'm going to try to do what people for seven centuries have done,

and simply walk the footpath along the bridge.

But it's not as easy as it sounds, and I've enlisted some local assistance.

They are going to give me some modern pilgrims' protection.

You'll need to wear one of those for safety's sake.

There's quite a lot of traffic.

It is taking in excess of 20,000 vehicles a day.

It's like the Great Wall of China stretching away there.

It's a grade-one listed building, it's a scheduled ancient monument

and if somebody time-travelled from the 14th century, they would recognise it instantly.

Medieval bridges are amongst our most important national monuments.

But, unlike other heritage treasures, they still have a hard job to do.

-It's not a pavement - it's more like a ledge, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-Oops!

-It's the wing mirrors you've got to watch for.

-Yes, I know!

-We're lucky to have survived so far.

-We are indeed.

Aaah! Look out, there's one coming at us at 100 miles an hour.

Yes, look at that.

He looks as if he's going to do us damage. Gracious!

This is obviously the scene of some former accident.

'People like Barbara think we are asking the bridge to do too much.

'She's campaigning to preserve Swarkstone before it gets bashed down altogether.'

-Oh, look out for this one! Whoa!

-Whoa!

I feel any moment I'm going to topple into the road. Meet my doom.

'The fabric is in a poor state in places and needs constant maintenance.'

Here, there's obviously restoration work going on - so there is SOME restoration work.

Oh, yes.

Not before time.

Swarkstone has outlived the Black Death, Bonnie Prince Charlie and two world wars.

The Historic Buildings Officer for Derbyshire Council thinks the old warrior may be flagging.

-We are putting quite a lot of trust in medieval stonemasons here, aren't we?

-Indeed, indeed we are.

Some of it, I think, is not going to stay together for much longer.

It's unique in England, it's the longest causeway

of its type in England, and it's been here for 700 years.

It's got to be absolutely priceless in those terms.

Maybe you should re-introduce the idea, cos when they built

this bridge, the ownership of this bridge was quite a lucrative thing.

Oh, yes, taking tolls. 50 pence for every car that's crossing here now, we'd take in quite a lot of money.

Just this afternoon would probably pay for this section of wall to be repaired.

I'll put it to the bosses!

On the hill, overlooking the causeway,

I walk straight up another aspect of the medieval transport system.

This is an original...

medieval trackway leading away from the bridge.

And it shows us how rivers effectively...

influenced not just river transport, but also road transport,

because, as you can see, it heads straight away from the bridge

up towards the high ground.

Most major medieval roads went upwards as quickly as they could, to where they were well drained

and safer for travellers than boggy, overgrown low roads liable to flooding.

Which is why I am, perhaps, now walking on the original "high way".

And from up here, I get an excellent view down the valley.

Swarkestone Causeway

crosses a great flood plain carved at the end of the Ice Age,

when the Trent was a vast and rambling river of meltwater.

It carried huge amounts of sediment, which today we quarry as gravel.

That's why gravel pits can be found all along this river plain.

These pits have become home to a very particular kind of monster.

'And now I'm after the biggest freshwater fish in Britain.'

-Hello, Jonny.

-Hello!

-Hello, how are you?

-How you doing, Griff?

-I'm all right, mate.

-Nice to see you.

-And you.

-Good stuff.

I'm joining a company of determined men for whom the elusive carp is the greatest prize of all.

Landing it can become a little bit of an obsession.

It's a giant fish pond, is it?

It's more than a fish pond. It's a very natural environment out there.

You would think it's stocked with fish, the owners look after it,

you would think it was very easy to catch. But you could be on here for weeks and weeks

without catching anything.

A few years ago, I did 300 nights in one year, trying to catch one fish.

Really? Did you catch others on the way?

Um, I caught about three, so...

-That's a lot of dedication for one fish.

-No, it's madness.

'Luckily, I may have access to a secret weapon.

'It's a gourmet chef for carp.

'Jonny's mate, Gary, makes a fishy delicacy known as a "boilie" to try and get the edge.

This is Griff, Gary.

I won't shake hands!

What you've created is something so strong tasting, they can barely resist it.

Yeah. We've got eggs, we've got flavours which give the smell and the promise of food.

There's an intense sweetener to improve the taste,

like salt improves the taste of fish and chips.

There's a really creamy flavour, there's a liver flavour.

And in cooked maize, a vitamin and mineral supplement added,

into that, also I'm putting what is a bird-food conditioner.

Makes your canaries shine brighter.

-Does it?

-Yeah. And then we've got the food source itself,

which is a reasonably complicated mixture of powders and additives.

And what does boiling do, then? They like cooked food?

Yeah, oh, yeah. The better the food you give 'em, the more likely you are of them eating it.

It's just such a funny idea that you go to all this trouble to cook food for a fish!

They actually taste better than something that Delia Smith might have made.

I'll take your... Go on, give me that then.

They're not offensive at all, are they?

No.

'The boilie has to reach the carp via a hollow throwing stick.'

Oh, there it goes - oh, wow!

It's just like throwing but you don't let go.

HE LAUGHS

'Carp apparently also like peaches, bananas...'

-Hup! There!

-Yeah! There you go.

'..and curry.'

If you do the 100 metres, you always want to run quicker.

With fish, you catch a tench, it might be five or six pound,

then you see a carp that's 20 or 30 pounds. You think, "You know, I really would like to catch that."

Maybe we're fishing in the wrong place.

There's a picture here of the last sturgeon recorded on the Trent,

caught in 1902, and it weighed 250 lbs.

So it makes these carp absolutely tiddlers.

Shows the size of fish they used to catch in the river!

It's hardly surprising, given that it take 300 nights, on average,

to catch one of these things, that I'm leaving empty-handed.

We launched huge quantities of scrumptious boilies

in their direction but the denizens of this particular gravel pit

stayed exactly where they were.

'Alas, I can't do the same.'

I've got an appointment with some gravel.

At Besthorpe pit, just up the road from the carp fishery, they are still excavating.

A half-mile conveyor belt loads gravel into barges for transportation down the Trent.

Each barge can carry up to 400 tonnes,

the equivalent capacity of 16 lorries.

Skipper Ian and crewmate Alan are taking this cargo up to Castlefield in South Yorkshire,

and they've offered to give me a lift as far as the Humber -

my final stage.

I'm starting as...sea-going or barge-going apprentices start.

I'm starting by sweeping the decks.

Griff! You missed a bit here!

Heading north towards the Humber, the Trent seems to reflect its hard-working life.

This is a bare and functional river.

Coal was once a major freight. There was so much electricity generated

on this stretch of water, it used to be known as Megawatt Valley.

Fantastic sight, the cooling towers.

That's a redundant power station now,

but power stations were always built by rivers or near water

because they guzzle up the most extraordinary quantity of water

to cool their operations.

Apart from the gravel barges, there's little commercial traffic left.

Ships become more frequent only as we emerge into the estuary at Trent Falls.

To our left is the River Ouse, and to the right, the mighty Humber.

Hull, the principle port on this estuary,

will be my final destination.

The first port I encounter, Liverpool, once dominated Atlantic commerce.

At the end of my trip, Hull, facing the other way,

has historically served the trade to northern Europe.

Before I get there, I must pass under 2km of flying roadway.

The Humber Bridge is the only link between the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire.

Over 100 years of wrangling were needed to create this arc of magnificence,

involving 480,000 tonnes of concrete and uncountable other statistics.

And seeing as I've walked Swarkestone...

The pylons here are further apart at the top

than they are at the bottom because of the curvature of the earth.

The bridge is constantly on the move.

In high winds, it bends more than three metres in the middle.

The whole bridge weighs about half a million tonnes.

That's about the same as the weight of seven million people.

That's about the population of Switzerland, as long as the population of Switzerland

don't eat too much cheese and chocolate and go for a 2km run every day.

100,000 vehicles use the bridge each week.

This place was going to cost 28 million when it was built in 1981,

which rose to 98 million before they finished,

and 151 million before they finally opened it!

And in fact, they've now estimated

they're going to finish paying for it in 2032!

These great waterways only seem to get busy at all at these bridges.

Roads now do the work in Britain.

And like so much on the river, even this symbol of modernity

is scheduled to become redundant in about 100 years' time.

Luckily, some things are eternal.

Under the shadow of the bridge,

just as they have done for thousands of years,

they're making wooden boats.

-Hello, Joe.

-Hello.

'Wooden boats are unique as they can be restored piece by piece.

'Joe Irving brings old boats back to new life.'

So it used to be that all boats were built of wood...

There was a yard in every creek in Humber...

years ago.

Building barges and what have you, trading vessels, fishing boats.

I mean, Hull was one of the biggest ports around.

Are you the last of a dying breed, then, on the Humber?

There's a few boat builders around, um, but not many.

This is like those Airfix kits I used to do when I was a kid,

-only even more mad cos you're making the bits yourself.

-Yeah.

If everything goes well, I can make two planks and get them on in a week.

Two planks a week, that's a year's work.

Well, a little bit less, yeah.

Joe treats every boat with painstaking reverence.

But there's one restoration he's particularly proud of.

Gentlemen, good afternoon.

'This exquisite sleek beauty won gold in the 1920 Olympics.

'And I've been invited to help sail her down the estuary to Hull, to complete my journey.'

You can smell the sea, it's fantastic.

Yorkshire, Lincolnshire...

and between them, the Humber,

which takes a fifth of the water of England out to sea.

Two-and-a-half metres of depth.

We're going to put the mainsail up in just a minute, but we can't do that

until we get enough water underneath us - there's a vast sandbank running down over here.

'Just like heading into the Mersey estuary, heading out on the Humber is all about catching the tide.'

Go! go!

We've got the main up, we've got to get the foresails up,

we've got two to play with here, which will give us extra power.

And the Humber Bridge is approaching at great speed.

In her day, Ierne was the fastest yacht in her class,

and after 18 months' loving restoration by Joe...

Ooh, whoa!

..she sails like a medal winner once again.

Well, there we are, after chugging up the Mersey,

going underground in Manchester,

descending through the Derwent,

and sort of slinking along the Trent,

I'm finally on the Humber, making my way, sluicing down to Hull.

We've made all these rivers work for us in a multitude of ways.

We've used them as drains, we've built over them,

we've tapped them for power, for transport and for recreation.

We've conquered them by building bridges.

We've even created working rivers of our own.

In the past 300 years, we've harnessed rivers to revolutionise our world,

but we've depended on them since the dawn of time.

In fact, they've been so important, their names reach right back to the roots of our language.

The Humber is called the Humber after a word "Humbre",

which is so far back in time that it's aboriginal.

They don't know whether it's Celtic or Saxon or whatever.

It dates right back to the first men in their little wooden boats.

Humbre. Do you know what that means?

River.

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