This Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland.

Is a river alive? That's the question posed by writer Robert McFarlane in his latest book,

which describes his experiences and encounters with three very different river systems in Ecuador,

India and Canada, as well as his local spring in Cambridge.

Rivers the world over are under threat from human activity, but as he discovers, there's also

much hope to be taken, not only from the rivers themselves, but the people who are involved

in protecting them and bringing them back to life.

I'm Helen Needham, and in this edition of Scotland Outdoors, I met up with Rob in Edinburgh when he was

there for the book festival recently. We chose to meet at the Water of Leith, but it was a shared

connection to another river, close to my heart and house, that we mused over first. The Dee keeps calling me back. It began as a love affair with the Kangorms, and then suddenly began to focus down on those wells of Dee up on the Breroyard Plateau. I think a spring is just one of the most simply, plainly, magic places in a landscape. in a landscape.

That river runs through me, runs of my life at sea level in a very flat landscape of chalk and that has my heart because that's my home

but then the mountains are what always call me back

and mountains and rivers live in this very ancient conversation with one another.

So it's that river that along with the ice has carved and shaped that section of the kangorms.

That fascinates me, the huge power.

Your home is in Cambridge and there's a place very close to where you live that forms a sort of arc throughout your book is a river alive.

So this is called Nine Wellswood and the spring that rises there has been flowing for probably about 10,000 years

since the permafrost eased its grip on the land

and then it flows down, reaches the river Cam,

which is really the reason Cambridge, the bridge over the cam is exists,

and then it flows to the Great Ouse and then to the North Sea,

and it flows through the years

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