There are easier ways to spend a February morning than rowing a single scull on the Ashwater in the dark.

The river at a quarter to six is black and flat and cold enough to make your teeth ache. The boathouses along the Lower Ashwater are shuttered. The footbridge looms overhead like a sleeping animal. The only sounds are the creak of oars in rowlocks and the soft, rhythmic slap of a hull cutting water.

Edith Wren has been doing this for thirty years.

“Edie,” she corrects, immediately, before this reporter has finished a sentence. “Nobody calls me Edith except the tax office.”

Wren is 58, a retired postal worker from Thornhill, and a member of the Ashwater Sculling Club for three decades. She rows six mornings a week, year-round, in a wooden single scull she built herself in 1999 from a kit she ordered from a boatwright in Edgeminster. She named it Early Post.

Last Saturday, at the regional qualifying event held at the Caldwell Rowing Basin, Wren placed second in the Veterans’ Women’s Single Scull — fast enough to earn her a place at the National Veterans’ Sculling Championship in Caldwell on 18 April.

It will be her first national competition.

The Accident of Racing

“I never planned to race at all, if I’m honest,” Wren said, leaning against her upturned boat at the Ashwater Sculling Club’s modest boathouse — a corrugated-iron shed between the Lower Ashwater footbridge and Bramblegate Steps, decorated with a hand-painted sign reading “ASHWATER S.C. — EST. 1923” and afflicted with a persistent damp problem that Wren says has been a topic of committee discussion for approximately twenty-seven of the club’s hundred and three years.

“I rowed because I liked the river. The racing happened by accident.”

The accident was a bet with her late husband, Stanley, who in 1997 wagered five florins that she couldn’t finish the annual Ashwater Head Race — a six-kilometre time trial from Millgate weir to the Lower Ashwater.

“Stan thought I was mad,” Wren said. “He thought the rowing was mad in the first place — he couldn’t understand why anyone would get up at five in the morning to sit in a tiny boat in the cold. But I’d been doing it for two years by then, and he’d learned not to argue.”

She finished seventh in her category. Stanley paid up.

“And then he started making packed lunches for my morning sessions. And then he bought me a better pair of gloves. And then he started coming down to the bank to watch.”

The Man on the Bank

Stanley Wren could not swim. Was, by his wife’s account, “absolutely terrified of water — wouldn’t even take a bath if it was too full.” But for twenty-two years, from 1997 until his death in 2019, he was at the riverbank every morning Edie rowed.

“Flask of tea, folding chair when his knees got bad, and a wave,” she said. “Every morning. Didn’t matter if it was raining, didn’t matter if it was freezing. He’d be there.”

She stopped for a moment and looked at the river.

“People ask me why I keep rowing, and I give them different answers depending on how I’m feeling. Sometimes it’s the exercise. Sometimes it’s the peace. Sometimes it’s because the river is the one place where nobody wants anything from me.”

Another pause.

“Sometimes it’s because Stan’s still on the bank, in his way.”

The Championship

The National Veterans’ Sculling Championship will pit Wren against approximately forty competitors from across the country, racing on the Caldwell Rowing Basin — a purpose-built course on the River Lenn that she has never raced on before.

She has no illusions about her chances.

“I’m fifty-eight, rowing a boat I built in my garden, against women with composite hulls and coaches and training programmes that cost more than my house,” she said. “I’m not daft. I know the difference between qualifying and winning.”

Her training regimen, such as it is, has intensified since the qualifier. She has added two evening strength sessions per week in her back garden, using a pair of dumbbells she bought secondhand from a notice pinned at the Bramblegate Market.

“I bought them from a very muscular young man who said he was upgrading,” Wren said. “I did not ask to what.”

On the water, her sessions have grown longer — an hour and a half most mornings now, up from the hour she has rowed for decades. She has also, for the first time, begun timing herself systematically, using a stopwatch borrowed from the club’s equipment cupboard.

“I’ve never timed a session in my life,” she said. “Never saw the point. You row, you finish, you go home. But if I’m going to race at national level, I suppose I ought to know whether I’m getting faster or slower.”

She is, by her own measurement, getting fractionally faster. “Three seconds per five hundred metres in two weeks. That might be the stopwatch’s margin of error. But I’ll take it."

"She Rows It Beautifully”

Gareth Toll, commodore of the Ashwater Sculling Club and himself a former national-level competitor in the 1990s, described Wren’s qualifying performance as “quietly remarkable.”

“Edie has never had a coach,” Toll said, standing in the boathouse doorway and watching the river with the particular attentiveness of someone who has spent a lifetime on it. “She’s never used modern equipment. She rows a wooden boat she made herself, and she rows it beautifully. What she does on the water is not something you can teach — it’s something you develop over decades of listening to the river.”

The club — which has thirty-eight members and operates on annual subscriptions of fifteen florins — is, Toll said, “extremely proud” to see Wren compete at the national level.

“She’s been the first person on the water every morning for longer than most of our members have been rowing,” he said. “Rain, snow, ice — Edie is out there. She deserves this.”

The club has voted to cover Wren’s travel costs to Caldwell for the championship — a sum that Toll estimated at approximately thirty-five florins for train fare and a night’s accommodation.

“We’d have paid more,” he said. “She said thirty-five was sufficient.”

The River Doesn’t Care

Wren walked this reporter to the footbridge after the interview, past the boathouse and along the towpath where the Ashwater bends south toward Bramblegate Steps. The morning was grey and cold and utterly still. A single cormorant stood on a piling near the opposite bank, wings spread to dry.

“Stan used to say that the only thing more stubborn than me was the river,” Wren said. “He was probably right about that.”

She was asked what she hoped for from the championship.

“I’m going to row my race,” she said. “If it goes well, it goes well. If it doesn’t, I’ll be back on the Ashwater the next morning either way.”

She glanced at the water — grey, flat, patient.

“The river doesn’t care how you placed.”

The National Veterans’ Sculling Championship takes place at the Caldwell Rowing Basin on 18 April. Wren’s race, the Veterans’ Women’s Single Scull, is scheduled for the afternoon session.