Changing times

The mud has gone, the weather is warm, and the warblers are arriving. By the Arun a Lesser Whitethroat and two Reed Warblers are performing, both new in since yesterday. The Millstream seethes with the sound of Willow Warblers, Chiffchaffs and Blackcaps. But loudest of all are the Cetti’s Warblers, asserting their place and scolding the new arrivals from deep cover.

This is an odd candidate to be a resident bird, a swamp warbler first recorded in Britain in the 1960s that became a regular breeder over three decades later and has continued spreading since. There appear to be more here than last year, at least two additional birds beside the river over the mile or so each side of Arundel, filling the gaps in areas of suitable habitat.

Such changes are a reminder that the valley is always in flux, day by day, season by season, millennia by millennia. And the changes are not limited to birds, or one-way traffic.

The river was once a hive of activity, trading goods along the south coast and to London and beyond. By the thirteenth century it was a departure point for passengers to France. By the fourteenth century Wealden timber was loaded at Pulborough for naval dockyards and other users, while in the sixteenth century local grain was exported to Ireland, Portugal, France and the Low Countries. And all the time the movement of goods downriver was matched by imports: luxury goods such as glass and wine, basic commodities such as coal and salt.

Even the river path is part of that history, built as a towpath under a parliamentary act of 1793. This was the heyday of commercial activity on the Arun, ships of up to 300 tons reaching Arundel on spring tides, barges carrying goods upstream to London following completion of the Wey and Arun canal in 1816. But already economies of scale meant the sea trade was shifting from the river to the coast, while the arrival of the railways in the 1840s was the start of the end for the inland trade, and the river found a new role as a sleepy backwater.

Now all that remains are the foundations of wharves that emerge at low tide, the timber stumps providing perches for Kingfishers, while the clogged channels behind them have become the home of Cetti’s Warblers.