East 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.

'I'm going to find out where they take me,

'in one of the most rural areas of Britain.'

It looks natural, but in fact, it's as man-made as our motorways.

Not just because they wanted a bit more land -

they wanted to get hold of extra special land.

'I'll be following in the footsteps of generations of locals.'

Damn!

'And paddling into hidden backwaters.'

I'm in the equivalent of a sort of Venice of East Anglia here.

I've come to the waterways of the east.

Yes! You see, that's the way to do it.

A blazer, perhaps a straw hat

and a little champagne,

major pieces of British architecture drifting by.

Generations of Cambridge students

have thought they were the last word in river-borne sophistication.

In fact, a real punt is a shallow, flat-bottomed boat designed

for working the shallow, flat-bottomed wilderness of mud,

ooze, reeds and water, and where few undergraduates ever ventured.

I'm off to explore the rivers of East Anglia.

I'm going to be crossing three distinct watery worlds.

From the Fens to the Broads,

then back to my home in Suffolk, via the Stour.

The East Anglian river I know best.

All three show the conflicting demands we make on our waterways.

I'm making my way now into one of the most extraordinary

and peculiar river landscapes in Britain.

These are the Fens, and the water here has been dammed and diverted.

It has been exploited.

It has been organised in every conceivable way

and continues to be so.

And it's as good a place as any, I think, to ask the question,

where are we going with our rivers?

-HE LAUGHS

-Or, where am I going on this river?

The Fens are the flat expanse of land that lies

between the hills of Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

70 miles from north to south and 35 miles across -

that's several hundred square miles,

much of which is below sea level.

This is Upwell, and like its sister village,

Outwell, about two miles up there,

it derives its name from Welle, which is the Saxon word for stream.

The river runs right the way through the middle,

like a watery high street.

-Hello. Have you caught anything?

-No.

-You must catch them sometimes, don't you?

-You've caught one.

-When?

-Today...well, your brother.

-HE LAUGHS

-Sometimes you catch them, sometimes you won't. It depends.

-It's all these people in canoes, innit?

-Yeah.

It's people come by and they ruin it by paddling through your fishing area. Yes, I can see that.

-THEY LAUGH

-It must be very, very irritating for you. Anyway, very nice to meet you.

-And you.

-It's a lovely evening.

-Beautiful.

What a great evening for ruining somebody's fishing.

It's all right, they'll be back.

Rivers like this once teemed with eels.

Until the Second World War, Fen men, or slodgers, made a living catching them.

In the winter months, they'd switch to shooting duck.

'Peter Carter is now the only licensed eel catcher left in the Fens.

'I've come to help him bait a line of 30 traps on the river, east of Outwell.'

The fantastic thing about them is they travel 4,000 miles to get here,

stay here about 20 years, then travels 4,000 miles back again.

Out into the Atlantic and across to the Sargasso Sea.

Yeah. They lay their eggs and die.

While they're here we call them barley eels, because they're a rich brown colour.

But when they head back across the sea, they change shape and they're a silver colour.

-Have you noticed a decline in the numbers?

-Massive, massive decline.

I could set traps before, and there'd always be eels in them,

but I get nights now I don't get nothing at all.

-It's made a massive difference.

-What do you, what do you put that down that down to, then?

The change in the sluice gates. They took out the old wooden sluice gates

-and put concrete ones in and so the eels couldn't get through.

-In the old days, medieval times,

-there were thousands of eels here, weren't there?

-Oh, millions.

Every village and town in the Fen had to pay the monasteries about

80,000 eels a year for their taxes and Ely cathedral

-was built from stone paid for in eels.

-How's that?

-Smashing.

So what time do we have to come back tomorrow, Peter?

We can come back at about eight in the morning, it'll be fine.

'Early next morning, before we set off to check the traps,

'I asked Peter what Fenland life was like today.'

Tell me about the driving test.

-Because the Fens are so flat, it's the only area you cannot do a hill start in a driving test.

-Really?

Yes, and it's quite funny, because most people don't use handbrakes

either, and often occasion you'll see the odd car going in a dyke,

because they've forgotten the handbrake.

Quite refreshing to be in a place

-where you don't have to use your handbrake, really.

-It is.

But it's a pain come the MOT, as most times it's rusted up and doesn't work.

-HE LAUGHS

-But you like it flat, don't you?

Love it. I think it's gorgeous.

The landscape, the skies. Fantastic. They're massive.

You can't believe how big the skies are.

And when I go down places like Cornwall and that,

I look forward to coming back to the Fens,

because I get claustrophobic down there.

I want to bring this in alongside.

It doesn't feel very heavy.

'We worked along the row of traps.'

No, on to the next one then.

'Nothing doing.'

I'm beginning to think I've left my patience at the hotel. Stick with us, viewers!

-Here we go. Next one here.

-Here's another one.

'We checked all of the traps we set last night

'and also some that Peter had set.

'Eventually, we found something.'

Well, there is definitely something down at the bottom there. How do we get him out?

Take the bung out the other end and then we'll pour him in here.

Go! Let's have a look. There he is.

Not a big one, but it's an eel.

He's a bit too small to make a snack even.

Yeah, I think he should be allowed on his journey.

'The Great River Ouse flows along the eastern margin of the Fens.'

'East Anglia is drier than much of southern Europe,

'yet the rivers that flow across Fenland to the North Sea

'formed this extraordinary landscape.'

Cadbury, look! Look! Look!

'In the warmer climate that followed the last Ice Age, water tables rose,

'creating large floodplain wetlands, through which the rivers meandered.'

'Plant materials accumulated in these wetlands,

'becoming in time rich, dark-brown peat.

'Here and there islands of boulder clay

'broke the surface of this waterlogged world.

'Gradually people formed settlements on them.

'The best known is Ely, the isle of eels.'

We're coming in to cabin cruiser land now.

It's funny how motor cruisers

seem to feel the need to express their fantasies.

Look at this. This is Moonraker.

A sadder boat you've never seen really.

It doesn't look as if anybody has been aboard it

for the last five or six years.

All covered with green mould. Oh, look at that!

That must be the home of Babylon.

Babylon. In Ely. How have the two come together?

I'm just going to cross to the other side.

There are some great ones over there. Look at this.

Hot Gossip. What did the wife say when he bought that one?

"So, darling, I'm going to call the boat Hot Gossip,

"cos the neighbours, they'll be saying, 'I see you, Ted,

" 'in your boat, out there, I see you

" 'just entertaining a whole bevy of young ladies with gins and tonics.' "

HE LAUGHS

That was embarrassing, wasn't it?

I was disparaging his choice of name, and he appeared!

The other thing that happens

is an outbreak of outrageous punning takes over.

So Kanbedun is of course Can Be Done.

Sugar D. Sugar Daddy, one assumes.

Le Pourquoi Pas. The Why Not.

Why not, indeed?

'The river enabled Ely not only to develop as a Cathedral city,

'but also as a market for Fenland produce.

'Cadbury and I went to explore the town.'

Look at the cathedral.

It's positively gigantic in what is actually quite a small town.

Which rather shows that, at one point,

this was an extremely rich institution,

in what is always thought of, because of the wetlands,

as a backward place.

And look, I'm walking uphill...in the Fens!

The stone used to build the cathedral was carried here

from Barnack in Northamptonshire along the network of rivers.

The cathedral was the flamboyant headquarters

of a mighty organisation, the Church,

that was responsible for a long and successful period of drainage

and reorganisation of the river systems

which produced the wealth that built this edifice.

It's known to this day as the "Ship of the Fens".

The flagship of the Fens, in fact.

I'm still getting up early. It's before dawn

on a bird census day at Wicken Fen, six miles south of Ely.

'This nature reserve is one of the few remaining places

'where you get a sense of what the Fens

'would have looked like in medieval times.

'I'm here to help find out which of the 200

'different types of birds that visit the reserve

'happen to have got caught in the nets this morning.'

I'll just open the net up a bit. And once it's out of the net,

it goes in a bag, so that it's kept fairly calm and dark.

'Today, it's black caps,

'chiffchaffs and willow warblers.'

-Let go of it.

-If he let's go of me.

And then we pull that drawstring and take a knot round it.

And then we can carry it back to the ringing base.

Over this summer, how many birds will you ring?

A few thousand.

It's a comparatively heavy ring for the bird.

In human terms, it weighs something in the equivalent

of the weight of a slipper and it has that unique identity on it,

so we're going to give it effectively its own name.

And now we're going to weigh it by putting it into this little pot.

-Head first?

-Head first.

-And that disorientates it, does it?

Well, it'll go into the dark so it'll keep it nice and quiet, we hope.

-Gracious!

-And then if you put it on the scales.

Which comes out 7.8 grams.

Is that plus or minus the little pot?

No, that's the weight of the bird. The scales are already zeroed.

The scales are already zeroed.

Lift the left hand up.

Early on a summer morning, we bird counters are the only people here.

But wetland landscapes like Wicken

were never originally empty of people.

The local population were known as slodgers.

They had stilts like this with which apparently

they gambolled about the boggy areas.

Attending to their duties,

hunting wild fowl and making a perfectly good living.

Originally,

this whole area was a Fenland harvesting area,

because these wet fields were full of sedge.

The sedge that grew here was so useful for thatching

that this ground has never been drained and ploughed.

When the market for sedge collapsed at the end of the 19th century, the National Trust,

then only recently set up, stepped in and bought two acres for £10.

Naturalists from Cambridge had realised that the place was rich

in rare Fenland plants and bugs,

and so it became one of Britain's first nature reserves.

You want me to fall over, don't you?

Well, I'm indubitably getting much more confident now.

Damn!

Honestly, they are worse than stilettos and I've worn those from time to time as well.

The slodgers have gone and so has the slodge.

The Fens are now some of the richest farming land in the UK.

They grow enough wheat here to produce 250 million loaves a year.

This is the bread-basket of Britain.

They began draining the waterlogged soil before written history began.

But in the 17th century, the Duke of Bedford

saw the potential to create a huge outdoor factory.

He went where they knew all about dykes and drains, to Holland.

And with other investors, he brought Cornelius Vermuyden here to turn Fenland into profitable farmland.

And, remarkably, it was all dug by hand.

'The best way to see Vermuyden's scheme is from the air.

'I've been offered a trip in a microlight by Ben Robinson,

'an archaeologist who works at Peterborough Museum.

'The centrepiece of Vermuyden's scheme

'was the creation of two new waterways.

'These by-passed winding rivers which overflowed their banks

'and made the land impossible to plough.

'Water had never before been manipulated on this scale.'

There's something of Arkansas here, there's something of the Mid-West.

It's incredible, isn't it? This is essentially the two schemes

that Vermuyden put in place and all done by hand.

It's 20-odd miles. Just an incredible effort.

It proves they really, really wanted to do it. It was worth, they felt,

investing all that time and energy and money into doing it.

And it was a precarious enterprise. No-one could say whether it'd work.

And partly, this was not just because they wanted to get hold of a bit more land,

they wanted to get hold of extra-special land.

This had to be productive land. Whether it was summer pasture,

whether it was sown for crops, there was a serious commercial purpose to it.

As I come through this journey, I'm seeing there is a choice,

but that the preservation of nature is one choice.

The idea of a historic landscape is another choice.

Amenity use is a third choice.

Beauty is actually a choice that we need.

Natural beauty we want to preserve, because it's a beautiful landscape.

These choices are not easy to stick under one umbrella.

-Aren't they competing?

-We have the luxury of balancing these choices,

to make sensible decisions based on evidence and understanding of what we've got.

That should be our standpoint - to try and balance these interests

and make sure that we don't do something irreparable.

Reconciling competing interests is the key to the future of our rivers.

During the English Civil War, competing interests clashed head on.

Fen men refused to have anything to do with Vermuyden's scheme.

'They could see that it spelt the end of their wetland way of life.

'Guards were mounted over the drainage cuttings to prevent them being sabotaged

'by a resistance movement known as the Fenland Tigers.'

I'm in the Forty Foot Drain now,

which is for a very long time,

exactly 40-foot wide and as straight as a die.

It was built by prisoners of war, Dutch and Scottish,

and they were given white suits made of wool,

so that if they did do a runner,

they'd be easily visible in the Fens.

'At first it seemed as if Vermuyden had tamed nature,

'but in fact, he'd made a fatal miscalculation.

'If peat is allowed to dry out, it shrinks.

'Parts of the land began to fall below sea level,

'yet such were the profits to be made that more and more water

'was extracted and pumped into the waterways.'

The whole system needs constant monitoring and management,

and the land on either side is shrinking lower and lower,

and the difficulty of pumping the water up and into this drain becomes greater and greater.

But we've started it, so we've got to carry on.

'This is Holme Fen. In 1848, just before a nearby lake was drained for more farmland,

'a post was hammered into the peat here.

'The tip was then at ground level.'

They put these supports in to stop it falling over,

because the ground around the post started shrinking at an astonishing rate,

more than two centimetres a year.

And this quickly became the lowest point in England.

It isn't actually the lowest point any more,

because this nature reserve now has stopped the ground disappearing any further.

But over there, in the agricultural fields,

it's still going down at the rate, they say,

of the height of a man in the life of a man.

'Holme Fen is now part of the Great Fen Project - a scheme to buy up

'farmland and return it to its original wetland state.

'But again, locals are protesting.'

Man has used all his ingenuity to get the water out of the land -

how can we afford to lose some of the best soil in the country

at a time of increasing concern about food supplies?

Others see the project as the Fen- dweller's revenge on Vermuyden

and his aristocratic patrons for destroying the way of life of their ancestors.

Competing interests still have to be reconciled.

For all its strange, lonely beauty, after a while, you think it would be nice to see more people.

We're taking the long straight road out of the Fens

to go north and east to somewhere which is a bit more windy,

but strangely, still shows the influence of man.

I'm only going 60 miles, but I'm entering a sinuous and wooded playground

where farming seems to take second place to fun.

Five navigable rivers cross this Norfolk landscape -

the Yare, the Bure, the Ant,

the Thurne and the Waveney.

And these rivers flow into, or alongside, lakes

which give their name to the whole area - the Norfolk Broads.

It's the landscape of Arthur Ransome's Coot Club,

and since I happen to be addicted to sailing, I'm going to explore it by cabin yacht.

This is Wroxham, one of the main setting off points for holidays on the Broads,

and the entire place seems to belong to Roy.

Well, obviously, I'm extremely excited to be back in the world of renting boats

and I know there are several things that will be big issues.

I have to plan my route, and that'll take some time.

I'll have to get to learn the rig of the vessel.

That's going to take some time as well, but obviously one of the most taxing and problematic elements

of any charter is... is in fact provisioning.

Fresh fruit, salad, vegetables.

We won't be needing any of that.

For me, small boats have a lot to do with what my father taught me,

and he always stocked up as if he was off again into the Burmese jungle.

Not by small boat, obviously.

I think a Broads holiday essentially is a dads and boys thing, really.

And these are the things... These are the things that my dad used to love.

He used to love these things.

All Day Breakfast in a tin.

We're talking about a one-pan man.

That's the quantity of Spam we'll need.

Evaporated milk, quite honestly,

I thought had gone completely, but here it is.

Evaporated milk, it makes tea almost undrinkable,

but this with... Of course!

That's what I need. Cling peaches!

Hunter's Yard at Ludham by the River Yare.

'The boats for hire here were built in the 1940s and '50s

'beautifully from mahogany. There's not a fibreglass fixture aboard.'

-Hello.

-Good morning.

Give me a guided tour on what I can look out for on my next few days.

'I was shown mine by Ian Grapes.'

-You've got your cooker, in there, two burner and grill.

-Lovely.

-Your gas.

-Yes. That's off at the moment, is it?

-That's off at the minute, yeah.

-Right.

-Your water supplies will be in the back end.

-Right. Is that full?

-That's full.

-That's full? Thank you very much.

No electric on board, so you have an oil lamp.

Tucked away in here is a baby Blake's toilet,

which you've come across before.

-What's terribly clever is that the whole of the roof lifts up.

-Traditional Broads design.

-Hold on there...

-Push those in.

Bring your material in... and you're there.

'During the 1800s, holidays had to be invented to stop employers

'making their poor workers just carry on regardless.

'Then came school holidays and a need to get away somewhere.'

You can just imagine, it introduced the idea of the "dad holiday".

Dad saying, "I have a great idea, we'll get a little boat

"and we'll go off, sort of, exploring in the Broads."

Some loved it. Some were not so sure.

John Betjeman wrote some rather moving poems

about how difficult he found it to bond with his father

as his father dragged him off to the Norfolk Broads for a quick cruise.

There after supper lit by lantern light

Warm in the cabin I could lie secure

And hear against the polished sides at night

The lap, lap, lapping of the weedy Bure

A whispering and watery Norfolk sound

Telling of all the moonlit reeds around.

That's Spam with a "crusteon" of pork luncheon meat bits.

Delicious!

It's funny how Spam becomes doubly pink when you cook it.

It must be something to do with the dye they put in it, probably.

When it's cooked, it comes up extra pink.

I'm surprised Heston Blumenthal hasn't made a dish

out of this particular combination of flavours.

Mmm.

Ah...boyhood!

'The next day I was joined by Tom Williamson,

'a landscape historian from the nearby University of East Anglia.

'Tom is familiar with the different interests at war in the Broads.'

-This is a Broad.

-Yeah.

The rivers run through them and they're quite large areas of water.

Usually the Broads sit a bit back from the rivers, not always, but they usually do.

'The extraordinary thing is that it wasn't until the 1960s

'that historians realised that the Broads were man-made.'

The key things are the sides are vertical,

which immediately rings alarm bells if you think they're natural.

Second thing is that many of the Broads, including Barton here,

had parallel ridges of uncut peat running under the water,

and it's the peat, of course, that's the giveaway.

These things are basically great big peat extraction pits.

They've taken thousands of cubic metres of peat out of this stuff.

It seems to start probably late Saxon times to 11th century probably,

goes on through the 12th and 13th, stops in the 14th.

And it's at that point that these flood.

So they are gigantic equivalents

-of open-cast mines, really.

-Yep. Absolutely.

Tom, one of the things that's sort of been forced on me in a way

as I've come through the rivers is,

there's lots of people want something from the rivers.

-Yeah.

-There are lots of different interests.

More true here than anywhere. It's not just simply agricultural industry versus nature conservation.

But it's the impact of tourism and particularly the kind of impact

of people who think they're kind of proper tourists

who really "understand" the Broads as it were

versus the people who they perceive as the great unwashed having fun.

And way back, that conflict arises.

Jennings, who was the guy who first wrote a lot of books

encouraging people to come to the Broads back in the late 19th century,

he's talking about the quiet, the solitude, the nature, and all that,

and all that does is attract more people to come and see it.

And there's a fantastic passage when he's moored on Wroxham Broad...

-Are we about to go round again?

-We have to go round.

And this is in, I think, 1880 and...

Nice one!

-LAUGHTER

-No, we're all right! Just sometimes it gusts up a bit, but we're OK!

-Moored on a Broad.

-Yeah?

-Woken at seven in the morning by someone playing a piano on another boat.

This has always been a problem. People aren't doing what they're supposed to.

So this is a contested landscape, always has been.

This has always been a prosperous landscape too.

A church like St Helens at Ranworth, glimpsed across the Broad, might seem remote and austere,

'but in the medieval period, it was a jewel box,

'a reminder of the wealth generated in Norfolk

'and the part played by the rivers in the export of its riches.'

'The church has several medieval treasures.

'The one over here was made 500 years ago

'by the monks at Langley, an abbey on the River Yare not far away.'

There's Jonah... making his prayer to God,

having been swallowed by a whale.

Of course, we should know that it's not specified to be a whale,

it's specified to be a big fish in the Bible.

And here, in this East Anglian antiphona,

the sea has reeds growing around it.

And Jonah is poking up from the biggest fish they knew.

A pike.

'I've never fished for pike. Charlie Bettell,

'Norfolk's top lure fisherman, took me out on Ormesby Broad to try and initiate me.'

So when we cast, if you just watch the spool,

and watch my finger, that's the only thing you're interested in watching.

That same finger acts as a brake as well, so if we're casting to trees,

any sorts of features, we can actually put the brake on.

-You're going out to catch these fish to engage in a psychological game with them...

-An adrenaline boost.

You want to be seen to be the person who's landed the biggest fish in the water.

And the most important thing is that camera, because that's your memory.

Not a stuffed fish in a glass case.

We've all got our own little things of why we like the Broads. I love the scenery. I like...

I mean, today, it's probably quite likely we'll see

marsh harriers flying overhead, we've had hobbies around here, um...

Talk of the devil, look! Marsh Harrier!

-Look at that!

-Beautiful.

I couldn't have talked that up better if I I'd wanted to.

It's almost like he's coming to say hello to you there, Griff.

The key to catching fish is being able to mimic the state the pike are in on the day.

We have got top water lures in the box,

we'll try those in a minute which are going to be very visual.

They're going to mimic anything that would be on the surface, like a rat, chick, vole...

Oh, I see.

Squirrels, stoats, everything that swims across the surface.

-So the pike will have a go at anything?

-He will.

-Including your hand?

-That's right.

A pike would mistake your hand for a fish flapping on the surface,

make a quick dart at you, and a pike can move at least 30 foot a second in a fast sprint.

And I'm afraid... Ooh!

-Oh, dear, that's a little pull there.

-Really?

-Yep.

Do you know I'm very, very convinced by my fish here, though?

My fish is coming in at the speed that looks so convincingly alive.

If I were a pike, I don't know how I would be able to resist it.

Wait a minute. Here we are!

-Oh, he's in! He's in!

-Yeah, now what do I do?

Just keep the pressure on him.

Keep your rod tip down a little bit more. Just to there, and just play him off of that.

So I keep winding in?

-Yeah, follow the fish round.

-Yes.

Just use your rod from here on, just use your rod.

No more winding.

No more winding.

-Now wait a minute.

-Here he goes.

-This is...

Yes!

You've got to give this fish a bit of respect because you can see...

look, that's her teeth holding that.

-So here's all her teeth in there.

-Wow!

-Nice and solid, into there.

-Yeah.

-Just push to camera with your other hand. I don't want to see the fingers.

-Yeah.

-Right. That's the shot I want to see.

-OK.

Just turn the tail to me a little bit.

That's the shot. Little bit more there.

-What's the expression I should have?

-Nice and happy.

-One of triumph.

Now put her cheek up to your... put her head up to your cheek more.

She's not a dog, she's not going to bite you.

That's it, there.

Look a bit worried again, I quite like that.

-Argh!

-See? I think I got that shot!

Now, Charlie, how big is that fish?

-That's about four pounds there, you've got.

-Four pounds!?

-Yes.

That seemed enormous to me! You mean they come this sort of size?

-A lot bigger, yeah.

-How do you hold on to those?!

Not easily!

-And there's the man!

-What?

Very beautiful. Very beautiful fish.

'Back aboard Wood Rose,

'I set off in the direction of the medieval bridge at Potter Heigham.'

We're coming down through Shed City at a cracking pace,

and ahead of me I can see the bridge that Ian warned me about.

What I've got to do, is get myself...to the side of the river

before we get there.

This will be a bit of a manoeuvre.

Take my rope...and jump.

What I have to do,

is I have to take down the entire mast and lower it on top of the rest of the sail.

That's the counterweight there. That swings up... Right!

I've just got to turn around with the wind behind us and not take us across to the other bank.

The wind is hopeless.

Come on. Steer. Come on.

Turn around. Come on.

Turn.

Have I made a fool of myself in public?!

I've got people shouting at me now, not advice, just abuse.

Just having a good old laugh at someone else being in trouble.

That's at least pointing in the right direction now.

This ruddy pole.

Agh! I've dropped my pole!

Luckily we've got quite a lot of wind behind us so...

I should at least charge the audience money for it.

Thank you very much.

There we are, that's the excitement of boating.

If I'd tried to come through that bridge about 50 or so years ago,

I might've been helped by a little man with a Lancashire accent,

in that way that Lancashire people sometimes can, that helpful advice,

"You don't want to do that, lad! Go to the left, you'll be all right.

"Bring yourself round a bit, round a bit! Ooh, look what you're doin' now!"

It was George Formby.

For many years, George had a holiday home at Wroxham called Berylea.

He named all his houses after his wife Beryl, and all their boats, Lady Beryl.

In the early 1990s, members of the George Formby Society lined the river's edge,

with their little ukeleles in their hands.

They were protesting against the council's plans to knock down

Formby's house, by then renamed Heronby, to make a by-pass around Wroxham.

# But this one I'd break any date for

# I won't have to ask what she's late for

# She wouldn't leave me flat

# She's not a girl like that

# She's absolutely wonderful

# Marvellous and beautiful

# And anyone can understand why

# I'm leaning on a lamp-post

# At the corner of the street

# In case a certain little lady comes by. #

It was time to leave the North Broads.

I had an appointment to meet Deborah Steele,

who's a Crown Prosecutor by profession.

-I'm Griff.

-I'm Deborah.

-Hello, Deborah, nice to meet you.

Deborah and her dog, Frankie, are members of the Norfolk Lowland Search and Rescue Team.

They practice on the River Waveney in the southern half of the Broads.

It's exactly the same as mountain rescue, but it's lowland rescue,

because we don't have mountains. We're called out by the police if

somebody's been out on the river, not turned up,

family member's gone missing, can you come out and help us search?

-And what do the dogs do?

-The dogs are air-scenting dogs.

So the dogs are trained to indicate human scent.

So, what are we going to do now?

We're going to put somebody out on the river bank

and then we'll get the canoes out,

and the exercise is, put the dog in the boat, and we're looking for the dog to indicate where that person is.

Adam's been off and hidden and so, what Frankie's going to do is

-indicate to us that she knows where Adam is.

-That's right.

-It's a game of hide and seek.

-And how long does it take to train them?

It's about 18 months, 600 hours. A long time.

Good girl. What you got?

Can you slow the boat? FRANKIE BARKS

Good girl! Frankie! Yay!

What did you find?

'Very impressive.

'But now it was Cadbury's turn.'

You're going to show what a clever dog you are by finding me.

Are you listening, Cadbury?

If you find him, you can have the whole container.

Is it a deal, have we got a deal?

'Well, if we have, it'll be a first.'

Done deal!

All right, guys, so what do I do?

I just go and lie down with my head down to keep out of the way.

Whoops, here we come.

OK, thank you very much, I've got my mat here.

I'll get myself down and wait for developments.

We'll go this side.

Where is he, Cadbury?

Can you go around in a circle?

We had an indication...over there.

He did a lot of sniffing over there.

Let's see if we can land Cadbury and see if he can find him.

Right come on then, Cadbury.

It's our big moment. Oh, good boy!

Help! Help!

Go find him, Cadbury.

Hooray! What you got, Cadbury?

You don't even care when you do find me!

You got him, good boy! Show me.

Well, we're driving south, in a sort of south-easterly by south direction

on a wonderful winding road at the moment.

Join another East Anglian river, one of the loveliest in the country,

so much so that I actually live on it.

So we're going to hope that the River Stour

will carry us home.

I'm joining the Stour at Sudbury, one of the first towns on the river.

The scenery is quite different again from the Fens or the Broads.

My first rendezvous is with Major Ian Graham,

a landowner with a fight on his hands.

Excuse me, I'm not disturbing you, I hope.

Can I ask you what you are up to?

This is a game conservancy mink raft.

And this is a clay pad here so that any creature that runs through here

will leave its imprint.

And if it's a mink, then we bring this into operation and quickly get him.

And when we talk about the mink,

we're really talking about the mink that Granny wanted to have as a fur coat?

Absolutely. The mink is not a native.

It originally came from North America and it was introduced

into this country many years ago, for mink farms.

And I'm afraid it is probably well-intentioned but ignorant and stupid people

who go under the banner of animal rights who released the mink,

and this is why untold damage has been done to the water vole population throughout Britain.

We started this trapping for mink in 2001

and we accounted for about 100 mink in the first year.

And now if we were to find five to ten mink, that is the highest numbers we're likely to get.

And I'm quite sure that if we and others can keep up the pressure on the mink,

that the water vole can be restored in good numbers to its earlier habitats.

Even on this idyllic Suffolk river,

conflicts have had to be resolved.

This time between man and predatory nature.

I'm now heading downriver towards Bures.

The Stour was one of the first English rivers to be made navigable.

Barges travelled on it pulled by horses.

Silly, quiet, peaceful Suffolk was a leader in the Agricultural Revolution.

Its fertile soil produced the food that fuelled the expanding population of the 18th century.

A river like the Stour enabled grain to be swiftly transported downstream

to ports at its estuary and ultimately to London.

From Sudbury the journey took about two days.

But as a navigation system, the River Stour had a fatal flaw.

It was never provided with a continuous towpath.

Landowners were too worried that their cattle would wander off to allow one to be built.

As a result, the horses pulling the barges had to keep switching banks.

And because there is no uninterrupted towpath,

we canoeists today have to negotiate our way round its locks and weirs.

Now I have to portage, I think of it as a French-Canadian word meaning, basically,

hump your own canoe across an intervening section so you can put it back in the river further down.

I've seen...

..illustrations of how you're supposed to get a Canadian canoe up

on your lap, and then with one deft movement, up onto your back.

But I think this is a two-man canoe.

So my best bet... You see?

I have a polythene bottom, Mrs!

No, I think it's probably safer not to have a go at running that one.

Now, how do I go here?

Somebody doesn't want to make life easy.

How does the canoeist get his canoe...

I can't lift it up over here.

But... There's a set of canoeing steps here,

which would indicate that somehow we have to go through there.

Oh, God, my back.

And now, just like that, we're back in the water.

The Stour's fortunes declined with the coming of the railways.

By the 1930s, the barges had all gone.

It took a long-running campaign and a House of Lords ruling

before the Stour became navigable again in the 1980s.

(This is fantastic river journeying, this is superb.)

We're in the equivalent of a sort of Venice of East Anglia here.

I've now reached Dedham Vale,

perhaps the most famous, the most evocative river scenery in the world,

since it was painted by John Constable.

The sound of water escaping from a dam, et cetera.

Willows, an old rotting plank,

a slimy post or brickwork.

These are the things I love.

John Constable was making something rather beautiful

out of the reality he saw.

And of course the reality was a working river.

Constable returned time and again to the next few hundred yards of water.

He had a part share in the mill at Dedham.

Flatford Mill was his, it had come to him...

'My guide is Edward Jackson who runs the Field Studies Centre housed in Flatford Mill.'

And Constable painted what he saw, and what was here?

He painted from the head, but he also painted from the heart,

and he was basically just painting what he grew up with.

I've got some picture postcards here,

but one of the things that's quite interesting about Constable

is that although he's probably as famous, his images are as famous on picture postcards,

he wasn't really a picture postcard painter. There's an irony in that, which I like.

So if we look, where are we standing now in this one?

This is the painting he called Flatford Mill - Scene On A Navigable River,

because the River Stour was canalised, it was made suitable for barges to go up and down.

And we're just off the bridge, there's the edge of the old bridge, it's been replaced since then.

And he's looking down the river, couple of boats doing what they would do every day.

They couldn't get under the bridge with the horse attached to it,

so they had to unhitch the horse, the horse had to walk around the bridge.

The bargeman had to push really hard under the bridge and then they'd hitch up again.

So this was just an everyday scene that was going on two, three, four times a day.

It's a picture of a working river.

So this is what I know as Willie Lott's cottage. That's wrong, is it?

-It's Willie Lott's house.

-Now, where do we go

for perhaps the most famous Constable picture that it's possible to take up?

-We need to be...

-In fact... Look, my dog is now just

doing, I think, what this picture is actually partly about, isn't it?

-It's the dog in the foreground.

-Yes!

Although, I notice the dog in the foreground of the picture

is not getting in the water quite like MY dog.

So this isn't a ford, then - this is just the horse drinking, is it?

There's all sorts of theories as to why the haywain is in the water.

Was it the horses coming down to drink?

Well, probably not, because the water was at times brackish,

cos the tides would come up towards this sort of area.

Another theory is the cart's in the water to get water

onto the wheels

to make the wood swell and bite onto the metal rims,

but the local blacksmiths would say, we'll just have them in overnight,

we'll put them in a trough and away you go.

I get the feeling... Cadbury has gone for a plunge in the water.

I bet they're cooling the horses off

after unloading the wagon, cos the wagon's unloaded now.

-Could be that.

-That may be it.

Yes.

Constable captured a combination of a waterway, work, scenery

and the people who lived by and on it.

It's a sort of slow-handed tranquillity.

And when we ask what we want from our rivers,

'it seems an important value to bear in mind.

'I'm on the final stretch, six miles or so from my house,

'which overlooks the estuary.'

Come on! Out!

Argh...!

Argh...!

Argh...!

Argh...!

Ah!

Ah...

Oh...

Well...

some of the most celebrated river scenery in Britain -

in the world - comes to an end

with a bit of thump here in Cattawade.

Pylons, chemical factories, waterworks.

Essex & Suffolk Water extracts millions of gallons a day to supply the demands of the south-east.

A final reminder that the Stour remains a working river.

Come on!

'We make lots of demands on our rivers.

'Farmers, water authorities, anglers, paddlers, nature conservationists all want a share.'

What we've achieved over time is a sort of balance between these competing demands.

'I love rivers. I love their extraordinary variety. I love their histories,

'how they've shaped our lives as well as our landscape.

'I love their beauty and their wildness.

'But I also love their usefulness. You can float on them.'

Come on. Come on.

'We should make the most of our river inheritance, because it's made us who we are.'

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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