The Appeal of Mrs Toogood

When last we met, I was walking along the River Lud in order to have a look at the water that eventually reaches my apple trees near Ticklepenny Lock. I had followed what I thought everyone in Louth knew to be the course of the Lud through Hubbard’s Hills but had been shocked when my phone told me I was by  the wrong river. I didn’t dare share the news with anyone. It’s one of the things that make Louth the town it is; the River Lud and Hubbard’s Hills. Tourists come from yards around to wander through the park and race melting Fab lollies. I even saw someone from Nottinghamshire here once.

Whatever the truth may be, I decide it’s going to take more research than I can be bothered to do on my phone so I put it to one side and carry on with the business at hand. Unfortunately, the path onwards through Westgate Fields seems to be less wide and clear than it was when I was a young lad. Either that or I am wider and clumsier. Definitely one of the two.

Despite being frequently forced away from the riverbank, I still find several of the pools where I used to fish as a lad. I remember once landing a Rainbow Trout here and being unable to get the hook out of its mouth. I ended up close to tears and stopped using bait after that. I carried on fishing because I wanted to look like part of the in-crowd and enjoyed spending my pocket money on new floats from Woolworth’s but I didn’t want to risk catching a fish. There are no young anglers here today and I can’t see any fish in the river either. One of those things makes me sadder than the other.

At one point I find my way barred by a mound of earth crowned with a prodigious dog turd. It looks like someone has buried their pet only for some uncouth mongrel to later demonstrate what it thought of the deceased. I consider a moment’s reverie but the smell and the flies put me off. I scramble around the burial site without disturbing the earth or its excremental centrepiece but don’t get much further before I’m forced away from the stream again.

Soon the river emerges from the park and passes under a bridge so I chuck in a stick and wistfully watch it float away. It’s time for the longest detour of the day. Whilst I head along the road to rejoin it on Bridge St, the Lud plots a course between the massive gardens of Westgate and the even massiver gardens of St Mary’s Lane. Trespass laws didn’t deter the younger version of me: I once paddled through here on a tractor inner tube with the same so-called friend who later shot me in the arse. We ducked down low as we passed Mrs. West’s house, pretending she’d care if she saw us.

The river continues to wind its way through Louth, passing St James Church and Northgate Co-Op, both shrines to something or other. I catch up with it on bridges and in mini-park seating areas until we eventually reach Ramsgate. This is the last stretch of the Lud proper before it becomes the Navigation. In case you care, a navigation is any navigable inland waterway, so all canals are navigations but not all navigations are canals. Probably.

The Old Mill bridge looks like it was designed for passers-by to have a bit of a sit down, so I decide it’s high time I had some lunch. There is a depth chart below me and I note that the water level is about a foot below the first marker. The mill itself has been converted into flats but there are still paving stones below the water marking the site of the ford. It must have been quite a sight when the work was in full flow. It’s difficult now to imagine this fragile stream powering such industry but to give the Lud its fair due, it is still here and the mills are not. How’s that for a sobering take on human existence?

Navigation House next; another disused mill that serves as the headquarters of the Louth Navigation Trust, a community group dedicated to restoring the canal. This is also where the river stops being called the Lud and starts being called the Navigation although there’s no confluence or reservoir. I’m not sure why the name changes now rather than further upstream where they actually split. This is just the Lud as victim of identity theft.

Onwards I go, now on the last part of my walk. Once the tumult of Riverhead Lock is behind me, the only remaining sound is the jarring staccato of a naffed off Magpie. I wish I knew what was wrong. The water itself seems to barely move at all here so I do my best to imitate it, walking as slow as I can, breathing in the atmosphere of the river. I wish I could lie back in the water and let the current carry me. I can feel my mental health gauge ticking upwards with every step and wonder why I don’t do this more often. Laziness, that’s why. Even the massed ranks of Himalayan balsam on the far bank look pretty as they slowly expand to cover and consume all life on earth. Hopefully the Environment Agency will come along soon and murder them.

The place where the waters divide sneaks up on me like it always does. There’s a hidden grill and tunnel that siphons off a small portion of the Navigation to form the Lud once more. If there’s been a lot of rain, we get the overflow and the Lud roars again but that’s a rare sight these days. The rest of the water carries on towards Tetney as the canal proper, following a course dug by men and once plied by commercial barges. It’s easy to yearn once more for those gentle days of river travel, cholera and soaring infant mortality. Well, maybe not the last two bits.

I scramble down the bank to get a proper look at the Lud reborn. The branches above me turn the sunlight green, building a verdant hiding place for me and my river. Just as I’m about to sit down on the rocks, I feel an angry buzzing from my wrist. My watch says I’ve already done twice as many steps as it told me to do when I woke up and I still need to walk home. I’m not quite sure when I put it in charge of my life but it can back off because I’m not far from the orchard now and this part of my walk is over. I think I’ll come back one day and follow the river onwards to the sea but it’s too hot for that now.

Having said that, when I get home and check the most up-to-date maps I can find, I discover that the Lud doesn’t get to the sea any more. Instead it empties itself into the Seven Towns South Eau just a few miles from Louth and is gone forever. Another manmade watercourse preying upon a centuries old chalk stream. Human endeavour has not been kind to my favourite river but I’m still grateful for the water it brings from the wolds to my trees.

As for its provenance, I can find only two references that call the stream in Hubbard’s Hills anything other than the Lud. Some bloke’s Facebook post calls it Hallington Beck, and a Ramblers Association route guide agrees but that’s it. The Ramblers mention in passing that that there is some debate over what is strictly the River Lud and what is strictly not.

To be honest, I feel a lot less aerated about it than I was. If rivers are sentient, which they are clearly not despite what certain hippies would have you believe, I doubt they much care what humans call them. To every child who has ever crossed its stepping stones and to every adult who has moved up here because you can buy a three bed semi for the price of a small shed anywhere else, the Hubbard’s Hill’s stream is the Lud. That’s what we call it and I’m not too bothered if the Ordnance Survey disagrees. It belongs to the people of Louth and to me, and we belong to it. But not literally. That would be weird.