Regenerative River Activism and belonging with place

Walking the Avon: A Pilgrimage story from Source to Sea

  

Hope in the dark

Hope in one hand

Grief in the other

We dance into action

For earth our mother

 

A valley returns

Back to life, back to health

In this fertile grove

We find true wealth Hamish Evans, Winter 2025

This is the story of a pilgrimage along the River Avon, from source to sea. It is a pilgrimage of water, soil, homecoming, and belonging. The journey became a living classroom: an embodied exploration of how gratitude, grief, and action intertwine; how rivers teach resilience and reciprocity; and how activism rooted in place can regenerate rather than burn out.

Out of this journey grew a movement, We Are Avon, dedicated to restoring relationships between people and water, and to nurturing a culture of river guardianship across the watershed. The pilgrimage of this sacred river is becoming an annual tradition once again, walking the lines of the water each year to monitor, observe, deepen relationship, take informed action and re-weave ancestral paths. Not so long ago, pilgrimages following water courses were embedded parts of our culture on these lands. When (re-)walking these steps there is an undeniable ancient familiarity speaking through the trees, water bodies and communities of place.

The reflections gathered here follow the rhythm of the 2025 pilgrimage from source(s) to mouth. This is presented as a short story and collection of the inner and outer journeys that unfolded through this walk. It is incredible what can become from the simple act of an intentional walk. In the past, wars have been prevented, rights been won and entire nations shaped from the simple act of political pilgrimage. Now is the time to do this for our rivers, as many fellow pilgrims are beginning across the UK.

The Avon became a teacher, a mirror, and a companion. To walk her length was to learn that rivers are not inert landscapes, or even eco ‘systems’ but living webs of relations - part of our own circulation. Walking a supposedly linear route from source to mouth turned out to be a fiction, instead we traversed a maze of meanders, multi-source confluences, spirals and re-routing - deepening my understanding to a more circular and interconnected perspective of life, towards a bioregional perspective. All of Avon’s flows and multiplicity of sources present more of a web and a watershed movement, bringing love and water across the whole catchment.

These bioregional water flows touch every individual’s garden, home, street or farm; we are all impacted by the Avon’s water cycles, and we all in turn impact them through our actions and steps on this earth. Pilgrimage itself is a cyclical process, never a destination is reached – after many twists, turns and tributaries, I arrived at the mouth over 100 miles later to greet the sea, with more questions than I began, and a lifetime of purpose and sacred instructions ahead of me.

Beginnings - an ancient Pilgrimage

The Bristol Avon begins unimaginably, as a seasonal trickle in series of often dried out ditches. The recognised longest source of the Avon is near Tetbury, amidst the limestone and oolitic slopes of the Cotswolds, east of Malmesbury. From there, it meanders south-west through Wiltshire and Somerset, gathering tributaries and histories as it flows through Chippenham, Melksham, Bradford-on-Avon, and Bath, before turning north-west through Keynsham and Bristol, and finally widening into the Severn Estuary at Avonmouth. Though often called the “Bristol Avon” to distinguish it from other English Avons, its name simply means “river” — from the old Welsh afon. The tautology hints at age: this was already the River River when the first Celtic and Brettonic tongues named it (Environment Agency 2022; Britannica 2024). The tribe of Dubonni were some of the original human stewards of this landscape and river catchment – known to be a tribe of peaceful fisher and farmer folk who chose not to take up arms and were violently displaced in the Roman era, their sacred waters co-opted for the leisure of the upper classes (later, tourism) and the rivers flows used to fuel an industrial era which would further disconnect people from the true source of Afon and Awen (life-force in welsh and old celtic languages). I thought of the Dubonni people, and other ancestors came to me as I walked these old steps of sacred pilgrimage.

To trace Avon’s course is to walk through overlapping eras. Roman engineers channelled its springs to feed Aquae Sulis (Bath) and growing agricultural demand. Medieval millers dammed and diverted its flow for grain and cloth. The Industrial Revolution built factories and canals along its banks, transforming its floodplains into production factory lines. Twentieth-century agriculture and sewage systems burdened it with effluents; the twenty-first has seen both decline and renewal with signs of despair but also glimmers of hope - otters, fish and beavers returning, alongside public outrage at pollution levels. The Avon remains a mirror of society’s relationship with the more-than-human world: a mixture of care and neglect, dependence and forgetfulness.

For me, the Avon is also home. I have lived alongside her banks and waterways for over a decade, on a boat called Solstice moored among the Willows and Alders near Bath. From there, I have watched floods and droughts, kingfishers and sewage slicks, summer swimmers and winter herons. At age 16, I moved onto my own tiny canal boat (6ft wide and 23ft long, called ‘Harry’), in part yearning for a more nature-rich and community-abundant life, and in part for a more economic way to live where I don’t exist to work a meaningless job to pay a landlord and utility companies each month. Instead my energy comes from the sun, water from the spring, my heat from collected firewood, security through community, nourishment through nature and food growing with hands in soil. Travelling the canals and rivers has been idyllic, and of course at times challenging; a real relationship with nature with all the ups and downs that any deep love entails. This was the beginning of a belonging to place journey for me, despite moving every 14 days (according to old gipsy/traveller rules that canal authorities still enforce), I felt an incredible sense of rooting and ‘hefting’ to place – a deep knowing of the cycles of seasons here, the arcs of sun and moon in the valley, the first fruits, mushrooms and foraged foods in every beloved field, forest and bog of the bioregion.

The best thing that ever happened to me was to begin a relationship with place. This does not require permanence or rooting, but presence and connection with where you are now, unconditional of time span, current ecological condition, knowledge or fears. Rooting in place was the foundation of everything for me, and from this I grew into convivial community nested within the other beings of this place, from sacred tree groves to my beloved boating community where I grew up and initiated into adulthood. This rooting also allowed me to develop relationship with land, beginning on a community garden project then establishing an organic farm and successful land-based livelihoods (Middle Ground Growers CIC).

After years of intense focus on the lands and establishing multiple farm sites, I heard the calling of the river. From daily swimming that healed my farming back pains and injuries, and living on the Avon through each season, I began to shift towards from an Earthly focus to a new watery phase of life. The river may have saved my life multiple times, with mental health struggles being soothed by her waters, ecological grief held and processed, and bodily pains and injuries healed beyond belief. I used to swim in the river and just got used to the fact I would feel a level of healing from her - physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. And it took me embarrassingly long to begin to ask the question: what can I give back? Even when I plunge into the water, I now reflect on what I am bringing to the Avon, am I just depositing my grief and bodily tensions, then emerging renewed and taking this for granted? Or am I sharing vulnerably with her like a friend, in an equal interaction of listening and offering, sharing vulnerably my sorrows and also my joys.

Another example lies in that elusive and dangerous term, hope. I have always felt renewed hope from the river, who flows abundantly and works around or through any obstacle. And only recently I feel like I also offer some glimmers of hope back, through my actions and energy as I enter the water, I know that the Avon see’s the restoration work and protest activity in service of rivers now, and I know that some hope is restored mutually. This theme will was lived along the pilgrimage, as the river’s journey from source to mouth epitomises the rising and falling of hope throughout both temporal history and physical space in the watershed.

The pilgrimage extended from my early intimacy with place and the deepening relationship that unfolded. This is growing into a more reciprocal kinship over time and dedicated service, and I am only at the beginnings of this journey. Having lived on the river and experienced so much transformation from this water, I had an inescapable urge to know her even better, to be able to trace back the source flow of the water that passes under me as I sleep each night, a wish to understand the water cycle that connects the ponds on my farm to the water in my taps to the rain that falls on my face as I sleep outside by Avon’s banks - a deep wish to meet the river not as background but as kin, to walk her entire body from source to sea, listening to her voice and to the voices of those who live with her.

More than this, I yearned to discover the whole catchment from the river’s perspective, to walk mindfully through communities, histories, floodplains and farms with the river’s perspective at the forefront not background of my thinking. My thinking shifted more on this journey than any other journey. Having experienced many plant medicine ceremonies, indigenous rites of passage and regularly practiced Celtic Druidry for years in seasonal ritual, I can say with assurance that no other experience has shaped me like this river pilgrimage, and I offer this short book as an invitation to others to join me on this journey and take their own watery pilgrimages.

Across the UK, such journeys are becoming part of a wider movement of hope. Citizens’ groups, wild-swimmers, farmers, and ecologists are reclaiming rivers as living commons. In Devon, campaigners walk the Dart; in the East and North, guardians gather for the (now legally enshrined) Ouse and Wharfe; in Wales, the rights of the River Dee are debated in local councils, and the river Wye successfully wins a court case against industrialism. The UK Rivers Movement now links dozens of catchments through citizen-science monitoring, storytelling, and restoration work (The Rivers Trust 2024). I recently attended the UK rivers summit, with over 40 waterways represented and each of their human communities displaying incredible active hope for a future of abundant, clear and thriving water cycles. These are bioregional awakenings - people learning again to live by watershed logic.

The Avon valley is a fitting bioregion marked by ecological boundaries shaped by the river Avon and her tributaries over millennia: from chalk springs to estuarine mudflats, it contains farmland, ancient woodland, urban sprawl, and tidal saltmarsh. Its people depend (and always have done) on the river for drinking water, recreation, agriculture, inspiration and spirit. To walk it is to walk through an ecological and cultural cross-section of this healing biotope in southern England.

This is an introductory draft chapter to my new book : Walking the Avon: A Pilgrimage story. Let me know what you tink and if you'd be interested to read more! Hamish