LITMIR.BIZ

      I’ve lived on and around rivers pretty well all my life, but it wasn’t until my fourth decade that I finally saw an otter. And even after all that waiting, that first sighting wasn’t under particularly auspicious circumstances.

      I had just bought an abandoned water mill that straddles a small chalkstream in southern England, called Wallop Brook. It did, and still does, comprise two buildings – the miller’s cottage and the mill building. The former was just about habitable and the latter was really nothing more than a foursquare brick structure rising over three storeys, completely empty bar one important element: the mill wheel itself. I gleaned from the villagers (not all overly friendly when I first moved in …) that the corn-grinding mechanism had been stripped out years before, the last production sometime soon after the Second World War. A few things remained to remind a casual visitor of a past that stretched back over a thousand years – you will find the Nether Wallop Mill listed in the Domesday Book. The side wall of the building was hung with slates, faded white signwriting emblazoning in two-foot-tall letters the legend F. VINCENT’S NOTED GAME FOODS. The mill had produced both bird food for a wider market and, on a lesser scale, flour for Nether Wallop and the surrounding villages. Out in what is now the garden, where in the past sheep grazed up to the back door, there can be found a complicated array of a mill pond, pools, hatches, carriers and relief streams. It might look antediluvian to us today, but in Mr Vincent’s time, and long before that, too, these old-fashioned devices controlled the flows that were vital for driving the water wheel and sustaining the milling industry. In more modern times, and for my purposes, they are far from defunct, their control being the difference between me having a wet or dry house in times of flood.

      As I write this today my feet are poked under a giant cast-iron spindle, the central core to an even more giant cast-iron mill wheel, the height of two men, that is separated from me by a low wall, topped by a glass partition to the ceiling. Effectively my office is divided in two – one half for me and the other half for the mill wheel. Despite the constant pummelling roar of the water next door (yes, every minute, of every hour, of every day, year in year out), I chose to build a desk over what used to be the drive mechanism for the grinding stones. If I look up I can see the marks in the ceiling beams where the power take off gear connected to the spindle to the grinding gear. Behind me is an old-fashioned winding handle that turns two cogs, which in turn lift an iron gate that controls the flow of water into the stream that powers the mill wheel. I only need turn the cogs two or three notches and the wheel will turn. It is a slow, powerful, creaking turn, the thirty-two buckets (the official term of a mill wheel paddle) taking nearly a minute to go full circle. I have to remember to keep my feet clear of the turning spindle when it is in motion.

      But it wasn’t always like this. When I first arrived, the wheel was stopped and had been that way for years. In some distant past it had slipped out of level alignment; for a while it obviously continued to turn despite being out of kilter, cutting circular gouges in the wall that are still plain to see. But at some point it must have jumped out of the shoe in which the nub of the spindle sat, to lean at a crazy angle jammed up against the wall. The iron control gate had rusted away to nothing, the cogs that raised and lowered it long gone. You’d think that it was a hopeless case. Plenty suggested that I might just as well sell the iron for scrap. However, I am not that easily deterred. Believe it or not, there are still skilled wheelwrights working today. Men with boiler suits, toolboxes full of mighty spanners and hands perpetually ingrained with grease. They took one look at it, pronounced it sound and returned some weeks later with newly made parts that made the wheel operation whole again.

      You might wonder why this is relevant to my first otter sighting. Well, there is a vaulted tunnel where the mill straddles the river, carrying away the water after it has powered through the wheel. After years of disuse that tunnel was virtually blocked. We had donned waders to check it out, jammed as it was with logs, mud, brushwood and all sorts, but really it was too dark and confined to tell much. I was all for some extreme raking to clear it, but the millwright guys assured me that the water would do all the work. So with great ceremony the iron gate was lifted for the first time in decades. The water flowed, the mill wheel turned and the tunnel gradually filled with water until the force was so great that a plug of ancient detritus burst through into the mill pool below. Suddenly the pool went from shallow and clear to deep and dirty. Tree roots, bald tennis balls, reeds, twigs and all sorts swirled in the surface, but something in the back eddy caught my eye. It looked like an over-inflated, half-sunk, part-hairy, grey and pink balloon. I dragged it closer with a stick.

      I guessed it was something dead. At first I assumed it was a badger, but the long tail, denuded of hair in

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