2. More about rivers.....

 This is more of a housekeeping post for me; looking at terminology, definitions, origins of terms along with a few musings. There's also the start of a bibliography section.

When is a river not a river?

A moving body of water running from A to B must be some sort of river, but what species or sub-type? There are streams, brooks, creeks, bourns, rivulets and rills, not to mention canals. A stream may become a river, but when? There are definitions to be found, although it's not clear that naming if waterways always follows rules. At a minimum a river must have a source, a mouth, a river bank and a river bed. One source describes the cross over from a to river as 15 metres width. I'm sure most rivers will have a width of less when close to their sources, probably it is that the eventual width should exceed 15 metres. Here's a cheat-list from Chat GPT on rivers nomenclature that I'll follow in this blog:

River source (headwater). The origin of a river, typically in highlands or mountains where rainfall, snowmelt, or springs feed the beginning of a river.

Mouth. The end point of a river, where it flows into another body of water such as ocean, sea, lake or another river.

Tributary. A smaller stream or river that flows into a larger one. Tributaries contribute to the flow of the main river.

Distributary. A stream or river branch that flows away from a main river, most commonly found in river deltas

Confluence. The point where two rivers or streams meet and merge into one.

Watershed. The entire geographical area drained by a river and its tributaries. also called a drainage basin. 

Riverbank. The sloping sides of a river, typically lined with vegetation, soil or rocks.

Riverbed. The bottom surface of a river, over which the water flows, usually composed of sediment, gravel or sand,

Floodplain. The flat area adjacent to a river, prone to flooding during periods of high waterflow.

Delta. A landform formed by sediment deposits at the river's mouth where it fans out into multiple distributaries before entering a larger body of water (usually the sea). 

Estuary. A partly enclosed coastal body where the river meets the sea, creating a mix of freshwater and saltwater.

Meander. A curved bend in a river, formed by the natural erosion and deposition of sediments as the river flows.

Oxbow lake. A crescent-shaped lake formed when a river meander is cut off from the main channel due to sediment deposition.

Rapids Sections of a river where the water flow is fast  and turbulent due to a steep gradient and obstacles like rocks.

Channel. The path or course in which a river flows. It may be natural or artificially modified.

Alluvium. Sediment deposited by a river, typically found in flood plains or riverbeds.

Bifurcation. The division of a river into two separate branches or channels. 

Streamflow. The volume of water flowing in a river or stream over time, often measured in cubic metres per second.

Levee. A natural or artificial embankment built along the sides of a river to prevent overflow and flooding.

Catchment area. The region from which a river collects its water, similar to watershed, but usually describing smaller scale.

To these I'll add:

Intermittent (or ephemeral). Rivers that cease flowing for part of every year, or at least two years in every five. They drain large arid or semi-arid areas around the globe.

Riparian (or Riverine). Areas or zones of land that border a river and the transitional areas between water and land. Riparian nations have rivers for at least part of their borders.

Hydronomy.

This is a new word to me, but seem a form of etymology, seeking. to understand name origins of seas, lakes and rivers. The name itself is from two Greek words - hydor (water) and onoma (name). Four famous river examples:

Danube - derived from the celtic word dānu meaning 'to flow'

Nile - derived from a semitic root nahal meaning 'valley' or 'riverbed'.

Ganges - derives from the sanskrit word ganga a Hindu goddes of rivers

Thames - derived from the celtic name tamesis, meaning 'dark water'.

More about river hydronomy in future posts, and indeed in the next section........

Same name, different rivers

The UK has many examples of this, largely due to ancient language roots, and the tendency of ancient tribes to to take their names with them when changing settlements (think how many place names from Europe shifted to North America with immigration). So, for examples:

River Avon - there are at least nine of these in the UK, the best known passing through Bath and Bristol. The name derives from the Welsh word afon meaning, simply, a river. Tautology?

River Ouse - There are several examples from Yorkshire to Sussex. Another celtic word origin, implying water or river.

River Derwent - Several in northern England, deriving (apparently) from a Brythonic word for 'oak tree river'.*

River Calder - There's a few of these, again, mainly in northern England, originating from Brythonic words for 'hard water' or 'rapid water'.

River Stour - in southern England there are well known Stours in Dorset and in Kent, but there are others in the Midlands and East Anglia. The name means 'stirring' or 'moving', and may derive from Latin stauro meaning 'strong' or 'powerful'.

Same river, different names.

Au contraire, some of the great European and Asian rivers acquire different names as they follow their course.

The Elbe is also the Laube, before its confluence with the Vltava (Moldau!), then the Ihr, then the Elbe.

The Danube marks the boundaries of numerous central and east European (riparian) nations, and has a whole clutch of variant names: Donau (Germany and Austria), Dunaj (Slovakia), Duna (Hungary and Ukraine), Dunav (Croatia and Serbia), Dunãrea (Romania and Moldova), and Dunave (Bulgaria).

The Brahmaputra begins as the Tsang Po in China, then Siang in northernmost India, then Brahmaputra through most of its course before becoming the Padma as it empties into the Ganges delta in Bangladesh

Sources (not of rivers).

As already stated, this is a personal and self indulgent project, but open to anyone (provided I can get the technology right). My sources are the obvious ones that currently dominate our information age - Google, Wikipedia and, increasingly, AI. Surfing the net brings many fascinating byways, but I'm not intending to include every URL I meet.

There are numerous other river blogs, some technical, others for particular rivers or aspects of preservation / maintenance, and I will reference those where I borrow from their content blog.

Bibliography

Tamesis - Sacred River. Peter Ackroyd. The best book I have read on the life and times of England's most famous river

Rivers of Power. Laurence C Smith. A tour de force, and brilliant account of rivers' influence on civilisation and history.

To the River. Olivia Laing. A lovely account of a woman's journey from source to sea of the River Ouse in Sussex, retracing the life and times of Virginia Woolf, who drowned in the river in 1941 

* We live and learn.... Brythonic (also Brittonic) is a collective term for celtic languages spoken in ancient Britain. The three extant languages are Breton, Cornish and Welsh

1. Blogging rivers

The River Thames and Barnes Bridge at sunset

I’ve always been intrigued by rivers, and for many years I was not entirely sure why. That mysterious feeling of constant movement to some sort of inevitable destiny must have been part of it. In childhood games of pooh sticks and early books like Wind in the Willows, there was some indefinable aura about the course of rivers.

Now that a lot more water has passed under the proverbial bridge, it is perhaps easier to understand why rivers hold such fascination – and play such an important part in our civilisation – for me and many others. 

Arising from the highest parts of our world, they run inevitably to a conclusion – their dispersion into a vastness of salinity, in the seas that cover the majority of the planet – only to arise again sourced by rain and snow. Somewhere amongst them we find life; romance, history and environmental catastrophes. From earliest civilisation rivers have held symbolic importance due to their provision of life giving forces: water for life and agriculture, fertility and abundance, which imbue them with religious and mystical importance. And what greater symbolism than the River Styx and the transfer of the living to the dead, courtesy of the ferryman Charon? The inundations (annual flooding) of the Nile gave rise to the ancient Egyptian civilisation, and influenced every part of it. The river was viewed by the Egyptians as a god – Hapi, the deity of fertility. Think also of the rivers of Babylon and the role of the Tigris and Euphrates. And yet the Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with saying, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man”. So, constancy and centrality, and yet continual change. It’s not possible to ‘own’ a river for these reasons, although you can own a portion of riverbank. Control of rivers is, however, a different thing, and we will see many examples where control brings political or military power.

One person’s interest (mine) in rivers is hardly going to produce great new insights – so why blog about them? Think of it as occupational therapy for an old man, hence the title. It’s pure self indulgence, and if no-one else reads it I will be neither surprised nor offended. Of course there are other – and better blogs about rivers, and many books. I have dabbled with blogs previously*, and as with those, if a few people find them of interest that will be nice. Both previous blogs had rivers as prominent players in history – consider the Marne and the Somme as bywords for the gruesome horror of the Western Front.

As the long wet winter approaches, and shorter days gradually rule out long walks through local heath and woodlands, it’s time to pick up a desk based project on something of interest. What is the scope? Hard to be sure, but if I were to restrict myself to rivers I have seen, crossed or traversed, that would make only a minuscule sample of what’s out there. So I aim for a broader coverage – indeed from one of the world’s longest (5th actually) with one of the longest names, Mississippi-Missouri (3709 miles) to one of the shortest, with surely one of the shortest names, River Og (1.9 miles).

I will sample rivers that I know well, but probably many more that I have not the remotest chance of ever seeing. Some will be because of their topography/ecology; others for religious or symbolic interest, and most of all those with a significant role in history and politics – how many episodes could be devoted, in that regard, just to the Rhine, or the Danube?

Finally, I return to the river as allegory for our life courses.
From the promising arrival via spring or headwater to the finality of the sea, and the falls, meanderings and mainstreams that come somewhere between, rivers make an attractive focus for me, as someone much closer to the estuary that the source. I might stray into autobiography or reflections, but indulge me, in my Old Man’s Rivers.

The River Styx....

* World War 1 – I was there in Spirit (177 posts) tracked the centenary of the Great War of 1914-18; and Vanished Kingdoms of Europe (6 posts) was a smaller project describing kingdoms obliterated by strife and wars