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Caught by the River

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Shadows & Reflections: Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Caught by the River ·

2025/01/05

For Kerri ní Dochartaigh, 2024 brought growth, loss and light. Tenderness warning: this piece contains details of pregnancy loss. Some years give us answers, and some years give us questions, and there are other years, still, that simply are. That are not there to ask, or to answer; that are there just because we are. […]

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Shadows and Reflections: Tim Dee

Caught by the River ·

2025/01/04

Throughout 2024, Tim Dee held daily meetings with a noisy green alien species. My name is Tim; birds are still my bag, but now I need to declare a parakeet problem. In January Tim moved home to England after five years in Cape Town. He today lives most of the time in southeast London with […]

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Shadows & Reflections: Matthew Shaw

Caught by the River ·

2025/01/03

From beneath a favourite oak tree, Matthew Shaw contemplates a year of garden paths and hospital corridors. As I follow the path, listening to the song of the robin, my feathered companion that flitters alongside me, the low winter sun is playing hide and seek between the rich orange autumnal leaves and I’m thinking about […]

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Shadows & Reflections: Nicola Healey

Caught by the River ·

2025/01/02

For Nicola Healey, in 2024, her father’s absence was like the sky. I think of the last year as ‘the second year’. After a significant bereavement, time stops and splits into ‘before’ and an unreal ‘after’. This rupture happened for me, my mother and my sisters in October 2022, when my father unexpectedly passed away. […]

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Shadows & Reflections: Bethan Roberts

Caught by the River ·

2025/01/01

Bethan Roberts celebrates her fourth winter on the Isle of Skye. They say that you have to survive three winters on Skye to know that you can stick living here. I’m heading into my fourth, and I am as ambivalent as ever, as changeable as the weather. At times over the past year I’ve felt […]

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Forest Bass: Dispatches from a cabin in the woods

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/31

Mark Mattock shares one last dance with the woodland cabin. Can I just have one more moondance with you, my love? – Van Morrison I’m stupidly and impulsively whittling my big toe nail with a large ridiculously sharp knife as I sit here on the edge of the deck. A female speckled wood is flitting […]

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Shadows & Reflections: Dexter Petley

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/29

Slugs in the cupboards, slugs in the bed: Dexter Petley, member of the quagmire gentry, reflects on a a swell year to take a home off the map. The apples were sour, hops had no smell. The mud didn’t dry, fish hardly bit. There were slugs in the cupboards, slugs in the bed. No swallows, […]

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Shadows & Reflections: William Arnold

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/28

Photographer William Arnold spent much of this year in public telephone boxes. In Defence of Public Telephony “… Let it ring a long, long, long, long time If I don’t pick up, hang up, call back, let it ring some more Oh-oh-oh-oh-ooh-oh If I don’t pick up, pick up The sidewinder sleeps, sleeps, sleeps in […]

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Shadows & Reflections: Annie Lord

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/27

In 2024, Annie Lord met, and marvelled at, Frank Auerbach’s Charcoal Heads. Throughout the 1950s and into the early 60s, the artist Frank Auerbach (1931 – 2024) worked on a series of portraits using charcoal and chalk on paper. He saw the Charcoal Heads series not as preliminary sketches but fully formed artworks. He nearly […]

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Shadows & Reflections: Bill Drummond

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/26

As many readers of Caught by the River will know, these darker months are the best months of the year to go fishing our rivers for that cruellest of fish – The Northern Pike. To mark this coming season, Bill Drummond has written his letter to these darker months. A CRAYFISH, A HERON, A PIKE […]

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Now Playing

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/25

‘Carol of the Birds’ by The Unthanks — with which we bid you a peaceful festive period, and wish for beaks to grasp olive branches right across the globe. Taken from the album In Winter, out now on Rabble Rouser.

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Season’s Greetings from Two Terriers Press

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/24

Proper Chilly: a season’s greeting from John Richardson at Two Terriers Press.

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Dog Walk Report: November

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/14

Rosehips, haws and crab apple jam: site editor Diva Harris and her long, thin dog walk (and eat) through the blazes of late autumn. Ground cover/branch cover: Rosehip, haw, and all kinds of berry. Cornflowers, buttery mushrooms, ginkgo leaves like dropped butterfly wings. We return from Japan, where the autumn we hungered for was delayed, […]

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Shadows & Reflections: Claire Todd

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/13

During a year of flux in the Scottish Borders, Claire Todd found constancy in the River Tweed. Visual response painted by artist, Jonathan Freemantle — ‘The river is whispering and the trees are listening (River Tweed)’. Last year felt like being set adrift on a coracle. There were spans of time where I felt aimless. […]

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Competition Results

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/12

Here are the results of our latest newsletter competition… Last week, we had three new paperback copies of Derek Gow’s Birds, Beasts and Bedlam to give away, courtesy of Chelsea Green. We asked: Which species of bird did Derek Gow help restore to the Knepp Estate? And the answer is: the white stork. The winners are […]

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Shadows & Reflections: Pamela Petro

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/12

Pamela Petro — daughter of Jack Nicholson — pays homage to her sunglasses. If my house were on fire, I’d put on my sunglasses first, so I wouldn’t misplace them, and then I’d rescue my partner and my dog. Sunglasses would cut down the glare from the flames. My sunglasses are so essential to me […]

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Give Peat A Chance

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/11

The Boggarts — a group of writers and artists united by a love of moorland (especially Walshaw Moor in West Yorkshire) — are currently crowdfunding their anthology Give Peat A Chance: a book of bogs. The project’s aim is to build a wider connection with the moors and bogs of Walshaw Moor and similar ecologies […]

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Shadows & Reflections: Nick Fallowfield-Cooper

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/10

This year, Nick Fallowfield-Cooper travelled back in time, courtesy of a 110-year-old-carp. It dawned on me earlier this year, what I have been looking for remains right under my feet, an unchanging place, a zone of memory. It is a space that has evolved — at first, just a workbench, a practical space to build […]

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Store the Puffball in the Belly of your Neighbour

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/08

Chancing across a puffball big enough to feed a village, Abi Andrews considers scarcity and excess. I’m not entirely sure what fields they own, but Poppet seems to know. She’s a pleasure to walk; a well trained gun dog. She brings me her ball and I throw it again for her. She is endlessly forgiving […]

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Dark Skies

Caught by the River ·

2024/12/07

In ‘Dark Skies’, recently published by Saraband, Anna Levin considers how we can learn from and nurture our relationship with the night sky, despite ever-decreasing access to darkness. Against institutional apathy, writes Karen Lloyd, the book is a call to arms; a way of reconnoitring our long evolutionary relationship with darkness, its essential benefits, and its […]

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530 results