A couple of years ago I had an idea for a project about river Mole. The idea was to photograph various parts of the river, walking from it's source to where it joins river Thames at Hampton Court, not far from my home. Not super original (Yan Wang Preston's Mother River and Chloe Dewe Mathews' Thames Log were top of my mind at the time) but it felt interesting to me to turn attention not to world-famous rivers, but one that most people have probably never heard of. What would I find? Could I talk to, and photograph the people who frequent the river? What role does a small river still play in today's communities - if any? How is it looked after? What happens when as a photographer you focus intently on just one (relatively unremarkable) place for an extended period of time? (I sort of answered that one earlier in Beauty Hunting, but it was interesting to see if I could repeat the experiment in a different setting and with a different motivation).
So I did a little research.
It turned out River Mole isn't as obscure as I originally thought. Not only it has been mentioned in official documents since at least 900s AD, including the Doomsday Book, and has been home to human activity going back thousands of years, it has also captured the imaginations of writers and poets, mainly for it's propensity to retreat underground in very dry summers (that said, it only happened a handful of times in the last 100 years or so).
Here's Edmund Spencer, writing in 1590:
And Mole, that like a nousling mole doth make / His way still under ground till Thamis he overtake
(Fun fact, the river's name actually doesn't have anything to do with moles, and appears to be derived from the Old English word æmen meaning misty or causing mists, or from the Latin mola - a mill).
Long story short, I did take some photographs but ultimately the river Mole project lay abandoned in a big pile of half completed thing - my capacity for coming up with ideas (so many ideas!) far exceeds my capacity to actually see them through to completion.
But last week, a local Facebook group told me that a large section of the river Mole has dried out, and that the volunteers from the Mole River Watch and the Environmental Agency have relocated the fish to where the flow was still decent - so I grabbed my camera and went on a familiar walk along the bank of the river in Leatherhead.
Here's what I found.
And as a bonus, here is river Mole in February 2024, when it flooded after a prolonged period of rain.
