It must be high tide at Tynemouth, 19 miles away, where the Tyne flows into the North Sea. Here, the river has responded by rising to its full height. Grey seals, born on the Farnes, sometimes swim upriver into these brackish waters, and in late summer, beyond the bend in the river at Newburn, the muddy banks are enlivened with blue and yellow sea asters. The Tidestone, a mile downstream, marks the 1783 boundary of tidal ebb and flow, but since then, dredging has pushed its limit further upstream, to the weir at Wylam.
In six hours, the river will be fast and shallow again, rippling between gravelly spits, but now it’s deep, wide and sluggish. Opposing forces of a rising spring tide and floodwater rushing down from the Pennines have almost fought each other to a standstill: the water is still rising but the current is barely flowing.
After days of heavy rain, the river is the colour of brown Windsor soup, loaded with suspended sediment, topsoil eroded from agricultural land upstream. The footpath along the edge of the precipitous riverbank is slithery with mud, and I’m so preoccupied with staying upright that I don’t notice a cormorant, sitting on a tree stump, until I’m just a few yards away.
At first it doesn’t fly, but looks at me with eyes as blue as sapphires, then back towards the turbid, silt-laden water. Underwater visibility must be reduced to inches, making feeding nigh impossible for a diving bird that pursues fish. It seems to have been perched here for a while; wet cormorant plumage is black but this bird’s feathers are preened, dry and immaculate, revealing their true colours, indigo and bronze. When I edge closer for a photograph it takes flight, away downstream, perhaps to try its luck at the coast.
Last week I watched goosanders catching fish here, but they’ve gone elsewhere. A morose heron remains, close to the edge of the muddy water, folded wings wrapped around its body like a tailcoat, head drawn down into its shoulders. Then it too takes flight and lands in a waterlogged field, a fisherman reduced to eating worms until the tide turns.
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