Image Details

7thWave AI Assistant

For several years, I've completed a Writing Challenge with many people all over the globe. We write something inspired by prompts for 21 days, plus an introduction. This year, the prompts are about place, and I've chosen the River Porter in Sheffield.  These posts touch upon the river's history but they're also about what it means to me.  I'm not following the river in any order except that the first 10 posts are about the Porter Valley and the second 10 posts are about the Porter in the city.  I hope readers will participate and I have a couple of challenges; see the paragraphs in bold towards the end.

I asked the Spirit of the Porter about her past and future.  She wasn’t there for long but she said she could remember far far back.

We met on the bridge at the bottom of Frog Walk, just downstream of the Sharrow Snuff Mill and upstream of the General Cemetery. 

She called to me and asked what I thought.  I said I can visualise a few hundred years back but then it gets hazy.

Yes, she said, hazy it is.  Everything is the same, yet it’s all different.  How do we make sense of the change when yet it’s always the same?  I’ve always flowed from Dun Hill to the Sheaf, she said, yet it’s not always the same.  You’ve written about me, what do you think?

I think there are many ways to know a river.  And yet taken together, you see how little you can know.

There’s the first encounter.  That place on the river that you first think of when you think of your river.  Some rivers are so long you’ll only ever know a bit of it.  I know parts of the Don but only where it flows through Sheffield.  Where it flows from and where it goes to are conjectures (although I suspect it goes to Doncaster). 

Then, if you’re lucky or your river is short enough – maybe you do know where it starts and finishes.  The Porter is only about 10 miles long.  You can walk it inside a day.  And although it’s possible to trace its course, it’s impossible to know every inch.

And then its history, what was it like 100, 200, 1000, 10 000 years ago?  Even longer.  It's hard to know a river that way.

There’s geography, the rocks, the valley slowly etched by continuous running water.  It’s floodplain.  And the animals and plants in it and alongside it.  I remember a lesson at Hunters Bar school, where we went to Endcliffe Park and turned over stones in the river bed in search of caddis fly larvae and other things. 

Perhaps more precious than all these are the place of the river in my memory – all those times I’ve walked up and down the valley and more recently round the backs of buildings in the city.  Most forgotten, yet enough remembered and valued.

And then there’s all our memories taken together.  The folklore of the river.  This is something I need to research – beyond the history on interpretation boards and websites, what were the stories told about this river? 

I asked her but she had gone, carried by the waters towards the Styx.  I’m glad I made her acquaintance, however fleeting.

One thing remains (if you don’t include the research to come) and that is to offer a 17-syllable haiku to summarise the whole of this sequence:

“From its source Porter

Flows through Valley and City

To Midland Station.”

How might posts of this type be used for marketing?  Think about how you might use this post or a post like it to promote your business.  I add a few thoughts after each post, like this:

The image at the head of this post was a work of art that appeared in the Porter and then slowly disappeared as the waters slowly eroded her.  I've no idea who made it or who they imagined her to be.  And so I imagined her to be the spirit of the river.  The river Don has its spirit or goddess called Danu.  I don't know how gods organise themselves.  Does Danu rule over the Don and all its tributaries?  But the Don itself is a tributary to the Humber, so I don't see why the Porter shouldn't have its own goddess.  It most likely did a very long time ago, possibly there are no records.  

What has this to do with business promotion?  Perhaps little or nothing.  Perhaps, though, there is a hint here that to make your business stand out you need memorable stories.  If you can anchor your folklore in something real, you may create something memorable.  Have faith in your market as they can work out what is real and what you've created.  You can see I made up the conversation with the Porter goddess but does that invalidate the message in the conversation?  (I have a much longer conversation with a toad in Endcliffe Park.)

My other challenge is for Sheffielders.  Do you have anything to share about the Porter?  Your experiences along it, bits and pieces of history you've uncovered, folklore you've heard?  If you remember something, please share it in the comments.  (Or maybe you are more familiar with other rivers in Sheffield, you could share those too.)  Let's see what we can find out over the coming weeks.

This is the twenty-first of 21 stories about the Porter.  The last story was: Invisible River.  The next post will share a few resources about the Porter.