Available to listen to and buy at Bandcamp
Release date: 15 September 2026
Format: digital download. Artwork and typography by Landschaft.
Epitaph for the Leen Valley Mills:
The river Leen, a tributary of the Trent lies not half a mile from my door. The river has always fascinated me. It runs entirely, for it's short course in the county of Nottinghamshire. As a childhood playground and as an adult revealing a rich and storied history. Nearly all of it's course has been exploited by industry, from it's countryside origin through it's urban journey onwards to the Trent. As a source of energy it is remarkable, serving 17 watermills along it's 15 mile course. Near my childhood home it served numerous bleachers and dyers, a soap factory and a leather tannery as well as numerous collieries. It was said you could tell the day of the week from the colour of the river water.
I spent one summer among the ruins of one of the Basford watermills. There was no wheel, but the mill race and wier were in water and I fished them for fingerling rainbow trout - upstream of most of the dirty industry. The river was later strainghtened and this section was bypassed and infilled, stranding it. To those who know, the old course can still be traced along a chain of massive lapsed coppice willows, that remain, like the mills, an echo of the past.
Thus the mood of the piece I have composed resonates with this history, looking back 900 years. The Leen now rests quietly, much of it underground in it's lower urban section, but in Basford it surfaces, and between the iron and concrete bank supports, the trout still flourish - brown trout according to an Environment Agency employee I spoke to last week as he dragged out flood debris blocking one of the channels. Where a few minutes before I caught the blue flash of a kingfisher, disturbed by the commotion. The Leen in it's history memory is and always will be woven into my DNA. It has survived the interlude of industrial exploitation. All of that is now silent and the river has been returned to nature and the curious souls who remember it's past.