RICHARD JEFFERIES AND COATE RESERVOIR

RICHARD JEFFERIES AND COATE RESERVOIR

BY J. B. JONES

From the Worthing Calvacade 1946

“It is a beautiful sheet of water, approaching a mile in length, and has so much the appearance of being natural that it is difficult even upon examination to consider it the work of man. The illusion is kept up by the numerous trees and the romantic scenery around.” 

These are Jefferies’ own words. They by no means hold good to-day, for, since the reservoir was acquired by Swindon in 1914, it has been grossly mismanaged. The permanent lowering of the water level to avoid the expense of repairs to an aged embankment has reduced much of the site to the condition of foul swamp. At the present time, 1945, there are good grounds for hoping that a more enlightened policy may restore to the reservoir, or Coate Water as it is locally called, its pristine beauty.

The River Cole, or Dorcan, Jefferies’ Roman brook in 'Bits of Oak Bark' issues from springs in Chisledon village. It passes underneath Coate Reservoir, which its own waters create, cuts Ermin Street at so-called Nidum, and joins the Thames near Lechlade. A tributary rivulet from Burderop Park runs by the thatched cottage where The 'Gamekeeper at Home' lived. Jefferies had the windings of the Cole by heart, and remembered it mournfully as he lay dying in distant Sussex— "I have not forgotten the brook, but the brook has forgotten me. I wonder if anyone else can see it in a picture before his eyes as I can.”

Coate Reservoir was originally intended to supply the neighbouring Wilts’ and Berks’ Canal, long since disused. About two miles below Chisledon is Lawrence’s hatch, where the Cole is split; one part is allowed to follow its natural bed; the other, destined to fill the reservoir, has had a channel dug for it. The two lead roughly parallel courses, but the gradient for the new “ brook” as Jefferies always poetises this feeder, is constructed so that the supplanter arrives at the reservoir at a higher level than the true Cole close by. All the way from the hatch the “cut” can be recognised by its straight lines “by its banked-up sides at first” and by more or less fragmentary brick bridges and tunnels.

Two earthen embankments “with trees on their ridges and outer slopes” enclose the impounded Cole water. The lower, or northern dam, some 200-odd yards long, hinders the stream from flowing toward the Thames; the upper, about half the length and a half-mile distant prevents the water from flooding back up the valley in the direction of Chisledon. Broome Manor lane, separating the lake from the Bird Sanctuary, may be looked on as forming a third embankment. Altogether the reservoir once had an area of 80 acres.

Riparian rights, the authentic though depleted Cole, and presence of a small but persistent spring which, like the one in 'Meadow Thoughts,' mesmerised Jefferies, presented the reservoir builders with some pretty complications of an already stiff problem. They handled them ingeniously; the last two items, according to a civil engineer, uniquely.

To provide a single underwater passage for both spring and Cole, a brick culvert of circular section, 44 inches in diameter, was built along the bottom of the reservoir, following for the most part the old river bed. Down this dark subway the two small streams are directed, to reappear under the main embankment which fronts the Swindon road. There is a legend that someone trying to crawl through lost his life. An iron grating at the inlet, framed pleasingly by masonry, keeps out floating rubbish. The lower end is left plain: Jefferies has seen coots and moorhens enter here.

This brick tube has cracked more than once. It is generally leaking, but it must be remembered that it is considerably over 100 years old, and so may be regarded as having worn well. Bales of hay and bags of cement have plugged holes in the roof before now. Plans for the thoroughgoing restoration of the main dam, due in 1948, a date coinciding with the centenary of Jefferies’ birth, must also take into account the question of the culvert, essential feature of the Coate Water system.

The reservoir is evacuated, when desired, by the main sluice near the turnstiles. Here also is the keystone bearing the date of opening, 1822. Silting is an unusually great nuisance, for the feeder runs over a stratum of gault which is plentifully splayed as sediment upon the lake bottom. At the end of Coate Water the filth is 5 or 6 feet thick; should it happen to be exposed it cakes, over deceitfully but never dries up. Cows breaking through the hard crust have had to be dragged out by horses or lorries. The present writer, attempting to make a short cut in front of the upper dam, was halfway across when he sank in up to the knees, and would have gone deeper. Fortunately, he threw himself at once on his face, and, by distributing his weight, just managed to crawl to firm ground. As he pulled his legs out, the ooze let them go with a sickening pf..ew ! All these cases occurred in 1944. Sport and Science, a chapter in Life of the Fields, describes the same danger spot.

Jefferies’ birthplace, a farmhouse, is adjacent to Coate Reservoir, otherwise the Longpond and New Sea of 'Bevis', the glorified lake of 'After London', the mere of 'Wild Life' and of 'Round About a Great Estate', and the Tezzievoy of Coate natives. 'Bevis: The Story of a Boy' is Jefferies’ story of himself as such, though written when he was a man with children of his own and living away from Wiltshire. These pages bear little resemblance to topographical reality; the feeder which fills the Longpond is the Nile and the outflow is the Mississippi; there are Pharsalia’s cliffs on the eastern bank, with huge gulfs and islands in the offing. Some American soldiers, recently road-laying for battle practice in the swamps which were once Coate Water, will order 'Bevis' if they ever get back to the States.

The lake figures largely in 'Wild Life in a Southern County', yet, strange to say, neither in this nor in 'Bevis' does Jefferies speak of the mystery Cole travelling independently along the very floor of the reservoir. He must have suffered from claustrophobia, or he would have made his Bevis venture up its tunnel. He does refer to the culvert at some length in his 'History of Swindon', but only as a conduit for the spring outside the upper dam, whereas the disposal of the uncaptured Cole water, which he seems quite to forget, was the engineer’s chief preoccupation. But Jefferies was a poet, not a Dryasdust. For him the feeder which forms the reservoir is invariably a brook or stream, and you sometimes wonder whether Jefferies did not lose sight of facts on other occasions than on Liddington Hill. From Coate lakeside he walks straight into Marlborough Forest, confounding readers of his 'Wild Life in a Southern County'. He furnishes two totally contrary explanations of the formation of the Long-pond’s “cliffs.” But these lapses, or artistic touches, are everywhere in his writings.

His carelessness had unfortunate results for Edward Thomas, his biographer, who looks on the reservoir “cut” as a natural brook. Certainly, frequent impenetrable hedges mask its real character. None the less, Thomas’ misplaced lyricism is amusing where he dilates on “the brook that enters the reservoir; for its bed is of the narrowest, and is among willow-herb and calthropped sedge, and under the overhanging brier and thorn which the delicate white bryony climbs over.” Jefferies, of course, could distinguish between the two Coles, but, failing to do so in the printed word, misled Thomas, who consequently took the spurious “ brook “ of 'Sport and Science' as a child of nature.

Alfred Williams was similarly sent astray. Writing of the reservoir, he pokes gentle fun at Coate people for imagining that an actual river ran under their big pond, and “kept its waters unmixed with those above it.” Yet they were entirely correct, and the poet of South Marston was the one in the wrong. Had he supplemented Jefferies’ incomplete description by the use of his own feet and eyes as was his wont, he would not have opened Chapter II as he has done in his 'Wiltshire Village'.

We cannot explain Jefferies, only accept him. He had the gift of the sacred fire whose possessors with all their vagaries are the salt of the earth. Who else could unify types of beauty so disparate as nymph and woodland flower? Yet when Coate fields and Burderop Woods throng round the Stooping Venus of Doïdalses in a Paris salon, the miracle is wrought. Jefferies’ realisation of this old-time dream of his is detailed lovingly in the greatest of all his essays, Nature at the Louvre. The Stooping Venus, or l’Accroupie, derived from Bithynia; an ancient copy, the one in Paris, was found at Vienna in the Rhone valley; now the tragic, gifted Wiltshireman breathes again the breath of life upon her gracious, if broken form. Doïdalses, her creator in the 3rd Century B.C., has missed his noblest reward in the impassioned eloquence of Field and Hedgerow.

Jefferies’ emotional crises or sowings of his mystical wild oats on Liddington Hill above Coate are recorded in his deathless Story. Too much attention has been paid to them. By far the most important part of that celebrated work is its later chapters. In them he has a message for the wide world: ‘There is not the least trace of directing intelligence in human affairs. This is a foundation of hope . . . How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a humane intelligence!” Jefferies, brave fighter in the van, is still in the far forefront in 1945. The catastrophic upheavals of world society in our days endorse his words beyond all contradiction.

At present the world is still in the primitive belief-stage; some day, as Jefferies hopes, it will outgrow this and start yet another thrilling adventure more in line with reason. Even then its path will be hard enough but, with the scale weighted on the side of intelligence rather than superstition, some amelioration may be expected. The unconquerable human spirit has a grandeur all its own; in this our light.

The wonder of Richard Jefferies is only glimpsed as yet. Young Sorley, brilliant poet and Marlborough College boy killed at Loos in 1915, was dazzled by it. He worshipped the “Man from Coate” as he styles his master, and genius alone could have enabled him to pen, at the age of 17, so profound an appreciation as:—

He knew the healing balm of night,
The strong and sweeping joy of day,
The sensible and dear delight
Of life, the pity of decay.*

(* From Marlborough and Other Poems.)