Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain

Deakin swam his way across Britain, taking in moats and tarns, the Fowey estuary, Hampstead ponds, the sea off Scilly, and the medieval moat around his own Suffolk farmhouse, and in doing so founded wild swimming as a movement. The book is part travelogue, part natural history, part sustained argument that water is the last commons, written in prose as unhurried as a breaststroke.