Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frog's-eye view of the country's best bathing holes - the rivers, rock pools, lakes, ponds, lochs and sea that define a watery island. Charming, funny, inspiring, an assertion of the native swimmer's right to roam, a celebration of the magic of water - this book will indeed make you want to strip off and leap in. Selected from the book Waterlog by Roger Deakin. VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human. Also in the Vintage Minis series: Eating by Nigella Lawson; Liberty by Virginia Woolf; Summer by Laurie Lee; and, Desire by Haruki Murakami.

Roger Deakin, who died in 2006, was a writer, filmmaker and environmentalist of international renown. He was a founder member of Friends of the Earth, and co-founded Common Ground. He lived for thirty-eight years in a moated farmhouse in Suffolk. Waterlog, which was first published in 1999, became a word-of-mouth bestseller, and is now an established classic of the nature writing canon.