A visit to the rapid where she lost a cherished friend unexpectedly reignites Amy-Jane Beer?s love of rivers setting her on a journey of natural, cultural and otional discovery.brbbrOn New Year?s Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer?s beloved friend Kate set out with a small group of others to kayak the river Rawthey in the Howgill Fells. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored.brbrFinally visiting the Rawthey years later, Amy-Jane realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when she was close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration.brbrThe result is a book of many rivers and many voices. The voices are those of friends, writers, poets, singers, conservationists, adventurers, river managers, campaigners, farmers, artists, historians, archaeologists.brbrThe rivers are primarily British, including West Country torrents (the Dart and East Lyn), swollen giants (the Severn and Thames), rocky Welsh canyons, Pennine white water classics, the salmon highways of Scotland, the gin-clear chalk rivers of the Yorkshire Wolds, and the astonishing slot canyon of Hell Gill. The strange course of the Yorkshire Derwent (which rises near the sea and turns inland) meanders through the book. Rarkable for its history, ecology, and legal status, the Derwent prompted the highest court in the land to ask: what is a river? brbriThe Flowi is a book about water and, like water, it runs through myriad lives and landscapes, with tributary thes of nature and adventure, loss and recovery (of people and ecosysts), friendship, motherhood, mythology, cyclicity and transformation, history and prehistory, farming, rewilding, flood managent and access to nature.