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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.

It’s possible to know the Porter as it is today simply by following it, especially if you don waders and walk through the culverted sections.  But time is another matter.

How can we visualise the evolution of a river from the earliest times until the present?  If we could take a snapshot of the Porter from the earliest times, once a year, we would see a river evolve and, for most of the time, in complete freedom from human interference. 

Tens of thousands of years ago, the Porter Valley did not exist.  The relatively flat land downstream of Endcliffe Park is the Porter’s floodplain.  It’s hard to visualise what it would have been like so long ago.

More recently, we have place names, maps and industrial archaeology, which tell us a lot about the last 2 or 300 years.  We can, in places, see where people and river have interacted for good or ill.

But what about a little further back?  Say 1500 years.  I guess the floodplain, the lay of the land, would be recognisable but the river would still run its course.  This is the river’s dream time.  We know little but there is the possibility of folklore from this period.

I’m thinking of the time when the Romans had left and the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had not arrived, when the Britons were left to their own devices.  (Perhaps paralleled by the Trump administration’s abandonment of Europe?)

There were several kingdoms; some larger ones are familiar, such as Northumberland and Mercia, kingdoms that shared a border at Dore, now a suburb of Sheffield.

The name Sheffield did not exist.  Hallam possibly did but I suspect it came later.  The name Porter did not exist either.  I’ve no idea what it was called.

There was a small kingdom called Elmet, based in West Yorkshire around Leeds.  Its boundaries are not clear, nor is its history.  All we know for certain is that Sherburn-in-Elmet was probably in Elmet.  Maybe its boundaries stretched to what is now Sheffield, an area falling under Northumberland and Mercia now and again.

We can’t know for certain but it offers the potential for stories based in this time of dreaming.

Go to the source of the Porter and start following the river and there is evidence of Romano-British industry (querns, whatever they are) and field systems.  I suspect the latter would be the main land use alongside the river.  There will have been some forest, with potential for hunting but it would make sense for farmsteads to function along the river.  I suspect there were no large towns but small clusters of property owned by families and their retainers.

I have yet to find folklore based along the Porter.  If there were stories, it seems they are long forgotten or hidden away in libraries.

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:

May aim in this post is to explore the unknown.  When we walk this river, any river, we see a snapshot of the river.  We don't see its whole history, we can't.  The same applies to the people we meet and indeed to our businesses.  Storytelling may offer us some idea, but it is hard to convey its entirety.  

The challenge of marketing is knowing what our customers need to know to become customers.  They may need to know something of the business's story but certainly not all of it.  Usually, you need to tell short snapshot stories to convey the nature of the business.  But perhaps there is occasionally a need to explore what is not known.  What history is relevant prior to the date the business was founded?

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 sixteenth of 21 stories about the Porter.  The last story was: Cats and Dogs.  The next is: Pocket Parks.

This post is about the river in general and so I've chosen an arbitrary image.  If you cross the road from Endcliffe Park at Hunters Bar, the river enters the property of a set of almshouses.  Follow the link and the images towards the end are over the road behind the photographer.