Polly Atkin looks back over a year in lakes.

I have been swimming all year round in the lakes, tarns and rivers of the Lake District where I live since winter 2018. I keep a casual diary of my swims through photographs and film, social media posts and notes to friends. So when I agreed to write a short book about swimming through the year, I expected it to be a simple enough proposition. I had the material, and the structure. And yet this short book became one of the hardest things I’ve written. I’m not sure why. Partly perhaps simply that I was exhausted before I began. But like a body of water of water I did not know, I could not find the way in. I spent a long time just standing in it, barely up to my knees. I could not get in far enough to float off. I watched leaves fall around as I stood, shivering, in its shallows. It was deep autumn before I could see my route forward. 

The year before I began swimming through the year, I had started running a monthly poetry reading group through the Wordsworth Trust. Each month we would gather to read and talk about four poems: three seasonal ones and one which reflected what was going on in the world at that time. We met by the fireside in Dove Cottage for the first couple of years, reading and talking about poems in that space haunted by poems and the production of poems, by the history of tourism and the history of literature, and the places where they overlap and leach into each other. In 2020 we moved onto Zoom, and continue to meet virtually. Eight years of reading seasonally and sharing seasonal writing – of talking about the seasons with others – has shifted my relationship with seasonality and transitions in the year just as swimming year-round has. I have learnt through immersing my body in bodies of water and other people’s bodies of work to feel the seasons differently, especially the autumn and winter months. 

I am a cold person with symptoms made worse by the cold. I struggle physically and emotionally with the short, dark days of a Northern winter, and particularly with the pressure to keep active through them. Come November my impulse is to sleep, and stay mostly sleeping till February. Every year I think I can make something useful of this time, when what I need is to not think of anything much at all. 

In the short days of midwinter, it is too easy for me to miss the light entirely. I get distracted working, or wait to see if the cloud lifts, or a hint of sun in the distance touches the village. Grasmere is a small bowl of a valley, a cupped palm, as I put it once. In midwinter, the sun barely reaches in at all, spends an hour or two before noon creeping down the fells and trees and houses, a couple of hours after creeping back up. 

Meeting daylight on its inward or outwards journey becomes increasingly unlikely if your body, like mine, is not amenable to movement in the morning.  So often I go just a little too late, reach the lake with the watery sun already falling away behind the fells, or a shroud of cloud lying over them. There is a heavy greyness on a day like that, all the colours muted. The water greyish-brown like the fells, like the woods. The vivid colours of November swept away by a bitter wind. 

But even on a cold, dank day, even when I miss the light, there is something to find at the lake. If I do manage to catch the light, I might be lucky enough to see the lake’s ghost rising from its body as mist and grey wagtail.

When the sun does shine, it is dazzling. It turns everything along the lake shore a pale gold in its glare – reeds, trees, walls.

There is so much colour, so much light to be found in this time I used to think of as a smudged void. That I used to want to erase, or erase myself from. 

So why was I finding so hard to write this? I don’t swim for challenge or for sport. I swim partly for exercise, but mostly for pleasure. That was what I wanted to share. Not a record of achievement or personal growth. I wanted to offer readers what I’ve found in other people’s poetry of the seasons – a path through the year – a way in and a way out again. But I needed to see my own way through first. 

I have found myself having to learn and relearn the same lessons, year after year. Slow down. Prioritise rest. Prioritise care for myself and others. Listen to what my body needs, and do what it asks, not what I want. Not what others want or ask. Maybe I haven’t taken these lessons to heart, or into practice. I realise this is a cycle too. Forgetting, remembering, being made to remember. 

This has been a year of being made to remember. I must attend better to what I already know. I must attend to it with my whole self, and not just my good intention. 

Each time I go to the lake in winter, it reminds me that the winter world is not asleep at all. The birds are as busy as ever. I watch them as I swim, and as I change they move around me. Shoals of long-tailed tits swoop from tree to tree, trilling. Noisy blue tits and great tits hop from bush to bush. A wren shouts from the sidelines. There is a robin carolling from the mossy oak, goldcrests cheeping. I love to be in their company, they who never expect me to explain anything to them, yet always have something to say to me. Best of all, I love the grey wagtails, who always remind me that light is still here, even in the darkest times, even if hidden under an outstretched wing of grey. 

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‘Swimming The Seasons: A Freshwater Almanac’ will be published by Saraband in May 2026.