River Itchen - Origin Story

We showed a film recently:  “I am the river, the river is me” - the story of an encounter between members of two indigenous tribes (a Maori tribe in New Zealand and an aboriginal tribe from Australia) as they travel down the Whanganui River. Various rituals are shared, and many conversations reveal the deep attachment of the Maori to the river and the natural world around them. How it nurtures and soothes them; how its recent pollution has hurt the river and them; how they have fought (successfully) to gain legal personhood recognition for the river. The Australian aboriginal tribe had lost their river to industrial processes, including a huge dam, and were mourning its loss and eager to find out how they, too, could bring back the life-giving river they had lost.

It became apparent that both these groups were standing in a context of “knowing” where they come from. They have rituals and language and song and music that set them in a sense of place that has lasted at least 50,000 years. This emphasised their awareness of being “guardians” of the river and not “owners” of anything - a crucial distinction for them. They were intensely aware of the colonial language that was imported which takes the perspective of ownership (and profit).

So: What is our origin story? How do we place ourselves in the historic context of the River Itchen? What does it mean to us? What stories can we tell? How far back can we go?

We humans haven’t been settled in this part of the world all that long - in small hunting groups probably before the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago. Those groups would have roamed a dry tundra. After the Ice Age ended many more humans arrived, trees grew, plants grew. There is evidence of Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age sites and workings and funerary remains from that time.
Hampshire and IOW Wildlife Trust recently hosted an online talk entitled: Headwaters - the mental health benefits of temporary streams by ecologist, Tim Sykes. He collated and coded diaries written by people who frequent winterbournes, the streams that dry up each year and then return again. As well as demonstrating the clear wellbeing benefits from spending time near a winterbourne, the discussion also turned to the spiritual and historical significance of them. There was a suggestion that there are the remains of prehistoric funerary sites near the sources of the winterbournes. The winterbournes at Cheriton and the River Alre are sources of the River Itchen.

See some blog pieces here:
https://www.hiwwt.org.uk/watercress-and-winterbournes
https://www.taylorwimpey.co.uk/news/2023/december/we-unearth-ancient-treasures-at-new-alresford-down-development https://learn.folkestonemuseum.co.uk/questions/stone-age-to-iron-age-9-cheriton-urn-field/

Another influential conversation around this time was: Two ways of knowing: how merging science and indigenous wisdom fuels new discoveries - a conversation between Rosa Vasquez Espinoza and Nate Hagens. This showed that it’s never too late to discover our origin stories. We can learn to hold both ways of knowing when we take on the intent of becoming guardians of our precious river environment.

Add to this theme: Kinship, interconnection and spirituality - a conversation between Samantha Sweetwater (great name!) and Nate Hagens, in which a deeper dive into what “connection” and “separation” means - felt like a beautiful immersion in exactly how we, disconnected societies and individuals, can begin to “remember” what we’ve lost or forgotten. She says: Underlying the crises of crisis is the way in which we've structured our world according to the logic of separation or the idea that anything can be separated from anything else. We're in an epochal shift from the hero's journey as the primary narrative of personal development to what I call the kinship journey. The hero's journey begins when you realize that you need to understand yourself, which a lot of people's processes does begin there. And the kinship journey is a journey of recognizing that your life can't actually be meaningful if you don't find how you're part of the ecology in service to something larger than yourself.

Finding our origin story in 2026

All of the above was written in 2025. Looking online for historical records of the River Itchen we came across a survey and map of the river, drawn in 1618, and brought to our attention by a paper published in 2017 by Langdon and White - An early seventeenth-century river environment: the 1618 survey of the Itchen. The original map is held by Hampshire Records Office so we organised a group visit to have a look at it and other related documents.
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Three things stood out from the survey itself - (1) that the Itchen at Woodmill and beyond had been impacted by the 1532 Statute of Sewers which had removed obstacles in the river and prompted a huge revival of the salmon and (2) that the author(s) of the survey referred to the river as a person - who knew?! - and (3) we’ve been saying the same things about the river for at least 500 years!

The River Rights Committee visiting the Hampshire Records Office

16th-Century Legislation and Its Effects The 1532 Statute of Sewers, enacted under Henry VIII and championed by Thomas Cromwell, had a profound impact on the river's infrastructure:
Demolitions (1535–1539): The legislation mandated the destruction of mills, weirs, and fishing nets to improve the river environment. In Hampshire, the bishop of Winchester’s assets were early targets; Woodmill, Twyford Mill, and Brambridge Mill were all "eradicated" by late 1535. (St Denys Priory was disestablished in1536)

Late 16th-Century Reversal: The momentum of the statute weakened in subsequent reigns. By 1563, a license was granted to the Marquess of Winchester to resurrect Woodmill for grinding corn and supplying the navy. By 1618, many of these mills and dams had been rebuilt, which the survey had categorized as "nuisances" to navigation Effect on Salmon Migration The removal of barriers in the 1530s led to immediate ecological changes: Revival of Migration: A 1536 letter from Winchester officials expressed gratitude for the appearance of "kyppers" (young salmon) in the stream following the destruction of river-blocking infrastructure.

Fishing Boom: By 1538, the abundance of salmon was so great that it attracted fishers from up to 20 miles away, leading to complaints that the "new pastime" was withdrawing essential labor from the surrounding areas.

Subsequent Decline: As mills and weirs were rebuilt in the late 1500s, these obstacles once again likely impeded the movement of migratory fish, returning the river to a state dominated by milling interests rather than navigation or free fish passage. Personhood of the river As pointed out at the beginning of this story, the Maori - and most other indigenous tribes around the world - don’t objectify a river by calling it “it”. They call the river “she” or “he” or sometimes just acknowledge the being-ness of a river (1). The move towards capitalism in the early 17th century required society to begin to see the natural world as “other”, separate and exploitable for profit (and also did the same with enslaved people). In this survey in 1618, the river is referred to as “him” and “his” and the authors of the modern day translation of the medieval text say this: At several points we also removed the survey’s tendency to treat the river as a person, as, for example, when it was recorded that ‘the river changed his course’; in such situations we replaced ‘his’ with ‘its’.

1. See Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, p.48 - Learning the grammar of animacy

This is not a new story
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It’s clear from the survey that some of the concerns that we have today about the wellbeing of the river were expressed in similar ways all the way back to the reign of King Henry VIII and probably long before then, perhaps back to when Winchester Cathedral was being built or the Itchen was being used by the Romans and Saxons and Jutes? We all care for the river and its prosperity and abundance. All through time we have wanted the river to care for us too. Maybe a new/old understanding is developing of how we can begin to incorporate the needs of the river into how we view our future together?

1618 map: with permission of Hampshire Record Office

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