Writer, filmmaker, cultural producer and friend of Clare Crossman, James Murray-White introduces this appreciation of Clare from Kate Swindlehurst and Bruce Huett, with news of an award in her name, created for the Rivers of Film Festival in Cambridge, which he curated in autumn 2025.
Rivers of Film
The Cambridge Rivers of Film Festival (from 23rd September to 4th October 2025) brought rivers, aquatic ecosystems, and their guardians into the spotlight. We showcased nine newly commissioned short films, all made that summer, alongside acclaimed documentaries, artistic explorations, and community events. Together, these were an invitation to celebrate rivers as lifelines of imagination, ecology, and action. Rivers run through all of us, and this festival was a chance to listen to them more closely, through art, science, story and community.
It was commissioned by Cambridge Past, Present & Future as part of the RiverCamCAN (Climate Action Through Nature) project, made possible with funding from the National Lottery Community Fund, and supported by Water Sensitive Cambridge and a network of community organisations, volunteers, and artists.
Clare Crossman Prize winner – ‘Rise and Fall’
The River Mel, running between the villages of Melbourne and Meldreth, where she lived, had a mighty industrial legacy, supporting several mills that would themselves have been big employers in the region. Now the mills are still, and the Mel is, in places, a shadow of itself, and it can be hard to visualise such intense milling industry powered by water. As Bruce writes below, Clare’s empathy with and desire to understand more of the Mel, grew into The Waterlight Project — a film and website exploring and unpicking this dynamic, and which Clare and her poems were at the heart of.
The Rivers of Film’s Clare Crossman prize judges — Iain McPhee (Clare’s husband), Bruce Huett, Dr Mark Wormald, senior English tutor at Pembroke College, and Dr Veronica Strang, esteemed water anthropologist — awarded the prize to artist, writer, filmmaker, and lover of wild things, James Roberts. We all loved his beautiful film, Rise and Fall, a five-minute short about wild rivers in England and Wales. James shot this on the rivers Dart, Wye, Lugg, Cleddau and their tributaries, using close-up and drone footage, and with a score by Nicholas Sargent.
I’ve asked her fellow friends and close collaborators, Kate Swindlehurst, a fellow writer, and Bruce Huett, anthropologist and Meldreth community activist with a close interest in the waters and rivers of the world, to write about the Clare they knew.
Kate Swindlehurst: my-friend-Clare-the-poet
Clare Crossman and I were friends for almost 40 years, nearly half my lifetime and more than half of Clare’s. We first met in a small market town in north-east Cumbria. I’d actually arrived by a roundabout route from Mexico City and, although Brampton brought me closer to my northern roots (I was born in Wigan), I was feeling a long way from home. Clare didn’t sound particularly northern either although I discovered later that she had moved from Kent to Cumbria with her family in her teens. Anyway, our first meeting was at a new reading group, hosted by Clare, and there were just three of us, our common ground a love of words. Clare was soon to become a published poet. It took me many more years to see my work in print but Clare remained a constant support and a steadfastly loyal friend. It was no surprise to hear, from all the guests I spoke to at her 50th birthday party, that Clare had changed their lives in some way.
My-Friend-Clare-the-poet was how I introduced her to others but, of course, Clare was much more than a poet. A biographer, playwright, lyricist, singer, activist, traveller, collaborator, performer and teacher, she set up creative writing groups across local communities. I attended workshops that Clare led as part of her ‘Nature in the City’ initiative in an empty shop, the grounds of one of the colleges, in the Botanic Garden in Cambridge and in a local village hall. She was always on the lookout for opportunities for local writers to perform and present their work and took part in the annual Bloomsday celebrations in Melbourne. No stranger to depression herself, she worked with people experiencing mental health difficulties and did not shy away from the difficult stuff. One particularly courageous action was to take on the directorship – is that the right word? – of a small group of women, all off-comers like ourselves though some had by this time made their home perched on the edge of those northern fells, and all of us with no acting experience to speak of, in a one-night-only production of Carol Churchill’s play Top Girls, in Hallbankgate’s Lacy Thompson Hall. The play explores the price women have to pay to be successful and begins with a dinner party for some of the ‘top girls’ from history, that descends into a kind of chaotic Bacchanalia. Apart from the thrill of taking part in such an ambitious project, my lasting memory is of the lone figure of Clare walking towards – almost into the laps of – the audience waiting there suspiciously in the darkness, to the background sound of Suzanne Vega singing ‘Tom’s Diner’, to introduce the play.
Clare and I shared a love of the natural world and Clare introduced me to the chalk stream, the River Mel and the Waterlight project, roping me in to write a guest blog. In some ways, though, we were never quite in step. Clare moved south with her husband Iain whilst I stayed in Cumbria, moving up the hill to Hallbankgate and watching for dippers as I walked in the woods by the red sandstone rocks of the River Gelt and following its path as a tributary of the Eden along the Roman Wall out onto the Solway. After I moved to Cambridge we saw more of each other, though Clare spent some time back in the north working on ‘New Water Old Water’, a collaboration with Cumbrian saxophonist Phil Furneaux and other musicians, tracing the journey of the Gelt from its source to the confluence with the River Irthing. By this time she and Iain had found the cottage on Shophill in Kirkhouse, the next village down the hill from Hallbankgate. When I think of our friendship, I imagine adjacent streams, running side by side, sometimes closing the gap, sometimes veering apart but never quite losing sight or sound of each other.
I’ve lived in Cambridge for nearly 20 years and consider myself settled here, but still… I think of Clare often and, whenever I reread her poems, she feels particularly present. I never asked her which of the places where she’d lived was the most important to her. I suspect, as for me, the hills and valleys and waters of the north somehow lodged themselves deep in her heart. I find confirmation in her pages:
Some places reach into us and we return,
so much of us imprinted on the air
and
The hawthorn and the rowan,
giving definition to what might be called
belonging, might be called home…
Extracts from ‘Gravel Kind’ (The Shape of Us) and ‘Heartwood’ (The Mulberry Tree).
Bruce Huett: Clare’s love for the local landscape
I am delighted to have been asked to say a few words about my good friend Clare Crossman.
We both had a love for the local landscape, particularly our local chalk stream: The Mel. This inspired the poems which form the background narrative to the Waterlight film, a celebration of her work and the wonderful flora and fauna of the river and its banks.
We first met at the Melwood Conservation Group in Meldreth due to our joint interest in Conservation. This is a small, designated Local Nature Reserve that has a surprising variety of flora and fauna for such a small space. Clare became a very active member of the committee and was instrumental in organising a number of events in the meadow which is part of the reserve. This included music, including a major concert, poetry readings, storytelling, nature rambles and generally bringing the local community together. She was linked to the local primary school where I think she did writing classes.
She also organised activities at Stockbridge Meadows, a nature reserve in Melbourn. She installed a caravan there and organised a range of interesting activities. These included reading and writing Japanese renga poetry. This typified her approach to engaging communities, as Renga is an ancient Japanese form of collaborative linked poetry. The participants contribute alternating stanzas (known as ku), typically following a 5-7-5 and 7-7 sound-unit structure, with each new stanza building upon the previous one to create a continuous, lengthy poem. This was a lot of fun. Some of the lines of poetry were then inscribed on metal sculptures, commissioned by Clare that are still present in the reserve. This required a significant amount of co-ordination involving the parish council, artists and installers. Another memorable event was a procession of local school children at Halloween with their homemade lanterns.
Linked to this interest in art in all forms was her support of the Tavern Gallery in Meldreth. This was a space for local and National artists to display their work and a venue for other artistic activities. Clare ran poetry workshops there as well as her classes in Cambridge and at the Plough at Shepreth. She held an event every National Poetry Day: the first Thursday in November.
She was also interested in folk music and was good friend of and collaborated with the folk musicians Penni Mclaren Walker and Bryan Causton, who feature in the Waterlight film. Linked to the film, she organised a marvellous evening of folk music at the Hub in Melbourn excerpts of which are in Waterlight.
