Reservoirs haunt our literature, our landscapes, even our dreams. And some of them can be endlessly fascinating…
There are places in Wales I don’t go: Reservoirs that are the subconscious Of a people, troubled far down With gravestones, chapels, villages even… RS Thomas
NO-ONE WROTE better about the British landscape than that flinty but lyrical Welsh clergyman and poet RS Thomas. But you will find few sun-dappled bowers and ivy-clad cottages in his verse. His is a world of scouring rain on bare hillsides, lowering clouds over twisted rocks. And reservoirs, as in those atmospheric lines above.
He’s not alone in being fascinated, haunted even, by these places. The great New Zealand short story writer Janet Frame has a masterpiece called The Reservoir in which the silent, gloomy water five miles from home is the limit of her child narrator’s universe, a place of mystery and danger. ‘The Reservoir was the end of the world; beyond it, you fell… the Reservoir haunted our lives. ‘No child,’ the neighbour would say, ‘ought to be allowed near the Reservoir’.’ Jon McGregor’s Booker-longlisted Reservoir 13 concerns the disappearance of young girl amongst the high moorland reservoirs of an unnamed, bleak northern county. Even Quentin Tarantino found inspiration among reservoirs, though his resulting piece seemed to be more about cutting people’s ears off than large-scale civic water storage.
I find them fascinating and eerie. A couple of weeks ago I rode England’s most scenic bus route, the 559 from Keswick to Windermere (this is fighting talk, but I defy you to name a more beautiful bus ride). And as we passed Thirlmere, I regaled my travelling companions, aged six and four, with tales of the drowned villages of Wythop and Armboth, whose houses lay below the inky waters. Eyes widened; jaws dropped. That’s the thing about reservoirs. As RS Thomas noted, they’re places of secrets and mystery, the echo of communities and travellers past.
Hill country between Lancashire and Yorkshire is dotted with a chain of these high, lonely waters. For all their desolate atmospheres, they have long been playgrounds for city folk of the conurbations below: Oldham, Rochdale, Manchester, Huddersfield, Leeds. On weekends you’ll find walkers making their way up to Dovestones or reservoirs of the Woodhead Pass. Of course, some are about as sombre and desolate as Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Hollingworth L
