ABSTRACT
The complexities of religious cosmologies sometimes obscure the way that they employ the formal characteristics of water to conceptualise human lives as part of larger systems and enable people to articulate concepts of order and disorder. Water as an ‘aesthetic object’ therefore emerges as a form of secular hydrolatry: the sanctification of water without the burden of religious dogma. The fact that the particular qualities of water encourage affective engagement may explain why it is central to so many recreational activities. All down the Stour, people described myriad ways of finding a sense of order through aesthetic interaction with water. The other most popular form of engagement with water is fishing, and the banks of the Stour are lined with anglers ‘reading the river’ through the delicate antennae of their fishing lines in a different kind of connection ‘with nature’.
