ROTHSCHILD'S WALK - MAPPING NATURE BY STEVE WATERS
The fens divide – ecological disaster or hope for the future? Inspiring wonderland or boring flatland? In Steve Waters’ ‘play in progress’, we see two sides in four dimensions, the last one being time. Waters’ dramatic monologue is essentially a love letter to Nathaniel Charles Rothschild (1877-1923); a bucolic billet-doux to the watery world on our doorstep.
Born into the famous banking family, Charles (as the storyteller always calls him) is a forgotten pioneer of the nature reserve. Indeed says Waters, Charles invented the notion. He is the very man behind our own now beloved Wicken Fen and in terms of nature conservation, well ahead of his time.
The conceit behind the play is a simple one: the playwright/performer took a 39 mile walk along what is called ‘The Rothschild Walk’ which links Wicken and Woodwalton Fens. The hour long piece was inspired by this trek across wondrous wetlands and gave Waters the inspiration to write about Charles, his titanic contributions to the natural world and the often hidden gems of the fenland landscape – a ‘lost world’ of immense biodiversity, majestic birdlife, rare butterflies and plants. It is a rich and rare world and Waters’ play makes us (or at least me) reconsider its manifold attractions not least the Swallowtail and Large Copper butterflies which in recent years have returned to our county thanks to the rejuvenation of their unique watery habitats.
Throughout the gentle play, Waters as storyteller talks directly to the long-gone Charles, bringing him up to date on both man’s neglect of the waterlands and the hopeful signs of recovery. Two sides to this story. Rothschild’s legacy is constantly recognised. Donating monies earned from issuing bonds to pay for the Great War, Charles used the cash to gift land to the nation. Our narrator asks: ‘Have capitalism and conservation ever come this close?’ His journey explores both the fens and snapshots of Charles’ life including his surviving bungalow in Woodwalton. Waters’ walk is described in loving detail and there is a simple pastoral beauty in his language: ‘There’s the dark line of Holme’s birch forest marking the limit of the wetland towards which this reserve is advancing. Ah – lapwing, oyster catchers, swallows lacing over tussocks.’
Much is made of that great booming bird, the bittern whose ‘blessing’ our storyteller needs to continue on his journey into the deep interior of the fens. There is mystery and imagination here and a sense that the fens are an undiscovered pleasure not as some pretty theme park but as a marker of nature’s rumbustious resistance. It is a brooding and mysterious landscape yielding its gifts only to those with sharpened senses.
We are told that Rothschild’s Walk is so seldom visited that much of it is overgrown and in danger of being lost to impatient farmers. I am sure his audience at St Mary’s Church in Ely felt like racing out there with sickle in hand and hobnail boot on foot to clear the path. That said, apparently Charles would not have liked too many folk disturbing the buzz and chatter of nature sans man.
Waters also wallows in the very musicality of the fennish flora and fauna: cetti’s warbler, lady’s bedstraw, the early purple orchid…We learn of far flung places with mellifluous names: Wistow Wood, the East Bank of the Old West. The fens are a gift for writers.
Though the rewetting of the fenland is a sign of great hope for the future, Waters never blinks from musing over what is lost – the ‘insectinction’ of the depleting bug world. Vermuyden’s draining of the fens is given short shrift. Man has a lot to answer for but it is not too late to make amends – and many are doing just that. The fens are advancing thanks to Charles Rothschild and his many 21st century heirs.
By the end of his fluid narrative, the socially distanced audience gave Waters much deserved applause. A beautiful, poetic, heartfelt paean to nature, a gracious homage to a noble pioneer and a reminder that we are living on the edge of something and somewhere very special.
‘Rothschild’s Walk’ is a play in development and no fixed performances are yet planned.
