Malin Bridge is the meeting-place of six roads and two rivers. Each funnels its own detritus down hill and valley to gather in the pools and backwaters between the stonework piers.
Twenty years ago when I first moved to Sheffield, this space was an impenetrable mass of vegetation. Then the June 2007 floods came. While my wife laboured and our son took his first breaths, historic rain fell across the Upper Don and charged the adits and goits along Loxley and Rivelin. Field drains and sewer overflows ran full into swollen rivers. The flood tore through Malin Bridge, choked in the undergrowth and backed up, inundating properties upstream and sending broken trunks and boughs to join the havoc downstream.
In the aftermath, backed by the force and finance of the Pitt Review, the Environment Agency came and cleared everything here. The two confluential channels were reprofiled; stonework renewed; rock armour put in place.
As my children grew over subsequent years, so too did new vegetation. Colonisers, reeds and shrubs, took root in the sediments of the old mill races. Every time the river runs high, it spills into these relics and as it subsides it leaves a tidemark of torn stems, soiled brickwork and stagnant, oiled water.
The surface marbles like the endpapers of a book, its pages an almanac of concentration and deposition, accumulated narratives recorded in a watershed’s ephemera.