[ Otter ] Island
This tiny island in mid stream I had thought would probably disappear in a few years.
I had made the apparently wrong assumption that tiny islands were tiny either because they
had only just formed - or because they were the remnants of larger islands in the course of erosion.
But this island seems to have persisted as it is, to my knowledge, for some forty years
and Alfred Church knew it in the 1830s.
The Island is apparently without name - so for purposes of my website I have named it "Otter Island"
1880: Isis and Thamesis by Alfred J Church -
four or five hundred yards above Mapledurham Lock, a little wooded island.
This I knew now more than forty years ago [ 1830s ] as the haunt of an
otter,
and it suggests a word of protest, useless I fear, as such
words almost always are, against the barbarous Philistinism which
is banishing, if it has not already banished, this beautiful creature
from the Thames.
It is ruthlessly trapped and shot because the
Angling Societies grudge it its tribute out of the multitude of
coarse fish with which, though they are increasingly difficuIt to
catch, the river still abounds. I should gladly see the passing of
an Act which would give an absolute protection to what may be
still left of the once abundant fauna of the Thames, the otter, first
of all, and with him too the kingfisher, the grebe, and the moor-hen,
now made the victims of useless massacre, "butchered to make a
Cockney's holiday".
It is a great thing to be able to say that otters are now making a comeback on the Thames, though I have no reason to say there are otters here. If you know otherwise Keep it to yourself!