Llyn Padarn is the last place we would have swum as teenagers – not especially clear and, back then, not very clean either, being as it is next to a sewage works. I was bemused when my old local lake, Llyn Padarn, at the foot of Yr Wyddfa (or, if you must, Snowdon), popped up in a New Yorker article about the vogue for outdoor swimming, via an Observer piece recommending the best winter spots. ‘My old local lake, Llyn Padarn, at the foot of Yr Wyddfa (or if you must, Snowdon) popped up in a New Yorker article about the vogue for outdoor swimming.’ Photograph: Robin Weaver/Alamy Now you can buy a Wordsworth-themed wild swimming package holiday and join her. My friend’s nan has been swimming in Windermere for decades. To the many rural-dwelling Brits who prefer to swim in a natural setting, it must seem strange to see something that is simply a part of many people’s routines become an activity to show off about on social media. These days, social media is flooded with posed photos of attractive, middle class urbanites in natural lakes and rivers. We thought nothing of it the idea of it being a “trend” would not have made sense to us. I spent much of my childhood swimming outdoors, because we were spoiled for beautiful, clear, deep bodies of water, in the form of mountain lakes and river pools, quarry holes, waterfalls and lagoons. To call it “wild”, I feel, is to centre the urban, the municipal and the populated, and to place the rural and the natural at the margins. I’ve never been a fan of the phrase “wild swimming” in Snowdonia, where I grew up, we always just called it swimming. Is this a response to the climate crisis and the pressures of modern living? It feels as though we are entering a new era of high romanticism, but unlike the past, the proponents of the trend – at least in the often twee fascination with it online and in the media – seem to be white, upper and middle class urban-dwelling women.

This, together with a boom in nature writing, a new trend for “forest bathing”, a general obsession with going “off grid” and internet-free retreats, and the introduction of a new natural history GCSE, all seems to indicate an increased popular engagement with the natural world.

The outrun liptrot