Walking in the mud
Discovering what the river reveals at low tide
Hello walkers and writers 👋🏻
Before we get into this edition, I’m excited to share that I’ll be taking The Writer’s Walk to Wellness in the Wild festival in Suffolk over the weekend of 14 to 16 June. It’s one of several in-person walking and writing events that I have planned this year and I’d love it if you can join me.
Here in the UK the sun has finally made an appearance and the rain has been minding its own business for a change. But you know what happens after it rains? Mud. So in this edition we’re going to try out mudlarking.
Walking
Mudlarking is scavenging in the mud of tidal rivers and harbours, looking for any items that can be reused, repurposed, sold or preserved for history. It dates back to Victorian London when the original mudlarks, often children, would scour the River Thames at low tide looking for anything they could salvage and sell, like metal, rope or nails. It was filthy and dangerous work, done by the poorest people as a way to survive.
Thankfully, modern mudlarking is much different and is more about archeology and preserving history. Some mudlarkers are historians and for others it’s a hobby.
Nowadays there are rules about mudlarking along the River Thames and, perhaps unsurprisingly, you can’t simply go down to the foreshore at low tide and poke about in the mud to see what you can find. And some areas of the foreshore are off bounds entirely. So if you want to mudlark along the River Thames you need to:
have a permit from the Port of London Authority (at the time of writing this, they’re not issuing new ones, but they might change this in future) or
join a guided tour that covers you with their permit and/or has consent to run educational tours on the foreshore.
I don’t have a permit, so I went on one of Thames Explorer Trust’s In the Footsteps of Mudlarks tours along the Wapping foreshore in east London. The tour started with an intro to the area and its history to give some context for the kinds of things we might find. Our guide explained that mudlarkers tend to categorise their finds by material – things like, metal, leather, ceramics, brick, bone and glass. She had lots of examples with her, from old leather shoes, fragments of pottery, nails and glass bottles. She gave us a safety briefing and told us how to look for objects, explaining that mudlarkers often stay within a very small area, moving slowly as they search just a few metres of the riverbank. This was going to be a slow walk!
Armed with my walking boots, gloves and a tray for my ‘finds’ I set off across the mud. I wasn’t expecting to find much, but I remembered what our guide had said about taking a few minutes to scan the area around your feet to ‘get your eye’ in. I glanced down and – wait, was that a pipe?!
It turns out that the River Thames is positively littered with fragments of these old clay pipes. Most are broken, with the bowls shattered and their long stems snapped into several smaller pieces. But whole ones do surface once in a while.
I carried on walking and soon I was spotting things poking out from the mud in every direction. I spotted old bricks, tiles, rusted nails and the bases from old hand-blown glass bottles. But among the sludge and murk, I kept spotting tiny fragments of blue, which turned out to be broken pieces of ceramics, from things like plates, tea cups and bowls.
Like the clay pipes, these fragments are common and our guide explained that Londoners used to use the Thames as a literal rubbish bin, chucking in anything that had served its use, which is why there’s so much of this household ‘waste’.
Unlike the stretch of London that was originally inside the city’s walls, there’s rarely any older treasure to be found around Wapping. So there was little to no chance of us finding any Roman coins. But I did find a few modern objects, like this barbell weight:
We spent a couple of hours on the foreshore collecting anything that looked interesting and by the end we’d found a surprising amount of objects, which our guide organised according to the type of materials they were made of.
If you don’t have a permit you’re not allowed to remove anything from the Thames foreshore – and even if you do have one it’s against the rules to make a profit from anything you find. So at the end of the tour our guide returned our treasure to the river.
It felt a bit weird doing that. I’m used to collecting trash from trails, so deliberately leaving items behind that, when looked at a certain way, are the trash from a different era, seems at odds with that. But by leaving what we found, and only taking photos, it means that other people get to discover these objects again and again.
So for your walk this time, I invite you to take a slow walk along a river bank or beach to see what you find. And as mudlarking tours are a distinctly London thing, here’s a few other ways of doing it.
Beachcombing – look for interesting items washed up on the beach, like shells, sea glass, or driftwood.
Fossil hunting – there are many places around the world where you can find fossilised remains like bones, shells or plants. They’re often in quarries or cliffs.
Metal detecting – great for anyone on the hunt for buried treasure. You need some kit for this but there are groups that run tours if you just want to try it out, so it’s worth seeing if there’s one near you.
Geocaching – I’ve written about this before. Geocaching is a treasure hunt where you use an app to follow GPS coordinates to find stashes of hidden objects. It’s unlikely that you’ll find any Roman artefacts or Tudor haberdashery but you never know!
Now on to the practical stuff:
Dress for the weather and come prepared – you might get down to the riverbank, harbour or beach and find that it’s colder or hotter than you expected.
Wear boots or shoes that’ll keep your feet dry and that you don’t mind getting wet or muddy. Wellington boots, hiking boots or old trainers can do the job. Stay away from flip flops and sandals.
Watch your footing as it can be very slippery on the mud.
Be mindful of waterborne diseases – don’t touch your mouth or face after you’ve been touching items you find, don’t eat or drink while you’re mudlarking, and wash your hands as soon as you can when you’re done.
Wear waterproof gloves and bring hand sanitiser.
Check, and follow, the local rules – make sure you have permission to mudlark, beach comb, fossil hunt or metal detect. And follow any rules about touching, moving or taking what you find. It’s better to ‘leave nothing but footprints and take only memories’ (and photos) than to take something that you don’t have permission to remove.
Writing
I have 2 writing exercises for you this time.
What’s the story?
Choose an object you found on your walk and imagine the journey it took before it became hidden in the mud or sand. Who made the object? What was its purpose? Who owned it? And how did it pass from them and into history?Message in a bottle
Imagine you want to leave a message in a bottle for someone to find 100 years from now. What would you write in your note?
As always, I love getting your messages and comments and hearing your stories. Have you ever been mudlarking, fossil hunting, metal detecting or beach combing? What have you found and how has it inspired you? And have you ever found a bottle washed up on a beach with a note inside…
Until next time, happy walking and writing,
Sarah
More from the Writer’s Walk
If you liked this walking and writing theme, then you might like the edition where I talk about geocaching.
So cool! What a great word, "mudlarking." I wish I could remember the name of the novel I read which was based on treasures found in the mud of the Thames.