I’ve always loved stories. I wasn’t a big book reader as a child, my passion was poetry! I think I loved poems because they could tell an entire tale in a short space of time, and I was a busy child. My brain fluttered quickly from one thing to the next and so I was always eager to get to the adventurous parts of the story. I liked how each word in a poem would be imbued with meaning and how poems would make you feel.

All poetry was fine by me: silly poems, happy poems, sad poems, long lyrical narrative poems. I liked them all! They gave me time to pursue the other things I liked – dancing, showing off a bit and, being the youngest in my family, playing on my own at home, mostly outdoors in our garden. I created dens in the long grass and new worlds out of my imagination. I now work as a storyteller, so words are now my business, and I am still creating new worlds out of my imagination!

I grew up in Wiltshire in a thatched cottage opposite a white horse etched into the grass to reveal the chalk on the downs. The downs were a wonderful, natural playground and I’d often come home with pieces of chalk stone stuffed in my pockets. Chalk had all sorts of uses; we would write with it, crumble it in our fingers, rub green moss and dirt into it to stain it and, mostly drop it into water to watch bubbles magically pop out of the stone. Chalk was everywhere, even in the water we drank! Wiltshire was a wild and windswept place to grow up, full of stories and legends. I loved it but, by the time I moved to London to go to drama college, I was happy to leave the wilds behind.

My twenties were spent in London, working as an actor. It was a lot of fun, but when I had my first child, the wilds were calling, and we wanted some green back in our lives. So, we moved to Test Valley in North Hampshire. We settled in Andover, with its easy access to London, which was necessary at the time because of work. I became a professional storyteller, juggling life between childcare and being self-employed.

Moving back to the countryside was great but, when I first lived in Hampshire, I missed the wildness of Wiltshire. Hampshire felt smaller somehow, more well-kept, dare I say it … quaint? Don’t get me wrong, Hampshire is beautiful, but rather than exploring the lanes and villages, I would find myself always venturing upwards, looking for wild windy places like Danebury Hill.  

I don’t think I noticed the rivers at first, which is strange because they are everywhere in Hampshire, even when we can’t see them, they are underground winding their way through the rock. It wasn’t that they were invisible to me – having young children meant we were always out and about visiting the ducks in Wherwell and pretending to be goats trip-trapping over the long wooden bridge, watching the huge trout swim lazily in the sunshine at Mottisfont, or paddling in the stream in Chilbolton and feeling the flinty gravel from the river bed catch and dig into our toes.

My children loved playing in the cold water, I never thought to question why the water was so cold- even on a hot summer’s day. I think I just took the rivers for granted at that time; I suppose that often happens when beauty is on your doorstep. Over the years however, I did begin to notice the contrasts in the landscape and how diverse Test Valley’s habitats are, from pretty country lanes and meandering rivers to windswept hills and ancient woodlands. As time went on, people began to tell me old tales of the area - I was a storyteller after all; they hoped I may be interested. I was!

These stories helped me feel more connected to the landscape, they made want to protect it and notice it more. I began to learn about local folklore, I liked how the lines between reality and magic in folklore are fuzzy. Folklore seems to be able to do two things at once – it transports us out of our everyday lives, while helping us to understand our community and history. It gives us a sense of place, and there is often a good reason that a belief came about in the first place, developing over time from one generation to the next. I find it fascinating!

As my interest in folk traditions grew, I introduced them more and more into my creative practice. As a storyteller, a main part of my job is going into schools and bringing stories to life - telling them interactively and finding interesting ways to make them engaging and inspiring. Folktales are a wonderful way to share ideas and ignite a child’s imagination, and because children are still able to see the magic in our world, they instinctively understand the themes these stories share. My favourite stories for schools often have an environmental element, children respond so positively to environmental issues. They want to help. They want to protect what we have, and folktales are such an effective way to launch that conversation.

Then in 2019 Test Valley Arts Foundation asked for project submissions to celebrate Test Valley as part of their 2020 Borough of Culture Festival. I thought, what better way to celebrate this beautiful part of the world than through its stories, so I put in a proposal. Unfortunately, 2020 arrived and we all know what happened then! Things were inevitably put on hold. Then in January 2021, I was thrilled to be awarded an Arts Council Grant for my proposal, 'Test Valley Tales', which was an integrated project of an illustrated book of short stories, a storytelling podcast and school storytelling workshops.

For the project, I researched and re-imagined ten folk tales and legends, linked to ten locations in the Test Valley borough area. Each story was accompanied with facts, folklore, artwork… and a map! I hoped people would be inspired to venture out to the story location and enjoy discovering the landscape in a new way, through the eyes of the story, maybe even imagine something magical could happen to them. We were all coming out of lockdown, it was definitely a time to reconnect with nature.

I have to admit though, when I first had the idea for Test Valley Tales, I thought there were more folktales specifically linked to our local area than there actually are! I knew there was an amazing dragon legend - ‘The Wherwell Cockatrice’ about a half dragon, half cockerel mythical beast hatched out of a duck egg and defeated by an unlikely hero. (Now that’s a great story). There are also some wonderful local legends twisted over time which I was keen to address, as well as a glorious ghost story set in the time of the plague. But when it came to finding stories about our local rivers and waterways, here in Test Valley, I couldn’t find any.

I had been sure there would be some fabulous trout tales to discover - Test Valley seems to be all about the trout (we even have a festival), but there wasn’t. So for these, I decided to re-imagine some more generic folk stories, stories whose origin has been blurred over time and have been re-told in so many ways, that it would be ok for me to put my own interpretation on them, and create anew for Test Valley. (With sources included of course!).

And that is when I first became aware of Watercress and Winterbournes! You see, I now knew lots of amazing facts about the local landscape, I discovered Danebury’s yew trees and their ancient mysteries of rebirth, I found out how to tap birch water from birch trees in our local woodlands, very nutritious apparently. But when it came facts about our rivers, I needed help.

A couple of messages and a few phone calls later and I was lucky to meet with Sophie and Maggie from Watercress and Winterbournes. Through their knowledge, they were immediately able to open my eyes to the uniqueness of our watery places and the importance to protect both them, and the wildlife they support. For example, I had no idea that my local paddling spot was in fact one of only about 200 chalk streams worldwide, and that most of those made up the landscape here in the South of England. That was amazing.

Then there was the wildlife. So many creatures had such wonderful names – pea mussels, river limpets, sticklebacks! Being a storyteller, I couldn’t help but find myself anthropomorphising these creatures and their underwater world. I imagined our white-clawed crayfish as knights of old in their bronze armour, hiding under rocks to protect themselves from predators, their little black-bead eyes watching for enemies, ready to fight them with their giant claws!

Discovering how endangered these fierce little warriors are, and knowing the mineral rich chalk stream water is essential to strengthen their exoskeleton, made me want to shout to the world that these special habitats need protection. But the fact which really blew me away was the chalk. By now, I knew that our local chalk rivers and streams are special. I’d even finally understood why the water was so cold, and so ‘gin-clear’. (It’s all about those huge underground chalk aquifers, filtering the spring water through tiny holes like huge subterranean sponges!)

But what I didn’t know, was how chalk was actually created in the first place. I had no idea that millions of years ago, when the South of England was covered in seas, they were full of tiny shell creatures called coccolithophores. Or that when these tiny creatures died, they floated to the bottom of the ocean where their shells made a kind of soupy sludge. It was this sludge which, over a very long time hardened and turned into chalk. And because chalk is made from tiny shell fossils all squidged together, it is full of holes!

As soon as I heard this, I was transported straight back to the kitchen of my childhood in Wiltshire, dropping chalk into glasses of water and watching tiny bubbles miraculously appear out of stone. Now I finally knew why. Sometimes facts are more magical than stories. That’s why I love folklore and folktales; it’s the mixture of fact and fiction and the fuzzy edges which make me smile and feel at one with the natural world.

"...If you stop and close your eyes to listen to the songs of the warblers and lapwings and the tinkling noise of the river, as it swirls and splashes its way forwards, it is not hard to imagine this is a place where magic could happen..." - The Magical Fish of Mottisfont, Test Valley Tales

Cherishing our chalk streams

Huge thanks to Amanda for telling this beautiful personal story - if you'd also like to share your experiences of our rare and precious chalk streams, please get in touch. You can read more stories on the Tales from the Riverbank project page, and explore chalk streams through the Watercress and Winterbournes scheme.