I didn’t find what I’m going to write for this article until my last morning in Norwich, suitcases packed, headed out for a final breakfast. I’d walked through Westlegate tens of times even just in a few weeks of staying in the city. But somehow it was only that morning when I happened to cross the road to get to a specific coffee shop that I found the round plaque outside the Thai massage place circled in blue mosaic tile, marking the course of the lost Great Cockey and its companions: NORWICH WAS ONCE HOME TO A NUMBER OF LOST RIVERS, INCLUDING THE MUSPOLE, DALYMOND AND FRESHFLETE.

Stand still, the plaque urges, a river flows beneath your feet.

I knew about subterranean rivers, of course–just a few months ago I was gliding on a boat along one in a cave in Chiang Mai–but the idea that you could lose rivers beneath your city was endlessly compelling. I snapped a photo of the plaque, coffee in one hand, bag in the other, a juicebox pinned between my fingers. Unfortunately, I had to catch a train; I didn’t have time to do more research on these rivers in person. But the internet is a plentiful resource I’m used to trawling; I didn’t figure it would be too difficult.

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In Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne wrote, “It’s not what’s on this island, but what’s beneath it, that interests me.”

Verne captured the human inclination for adventure and the wonder for a world with vast secrets–so vast that there is another world beneath the one we already live on, and perhaps by extrapolation another one under that, and then another one, turtles all the way down. I have friends fixated on Norwich’s mystics–Julian, Margery Kempe–but I became inspired downward instead of heavenward. When the world feels unsteady I prefer, instead of divine guidance charting a destiny ahead, to seek foundation from what has come before. The assurance that everything we know and everything we are has been built on something before it since the beginning of time.

I spent my residency working on a historical book that’s tangentially about rivers. Metaphysical rivers, triplicates of rivers (the Three Rivers, or Samsui, region in China), the Singapore River as site of transformation and nation-building narrative. (This is home, goes our most popular national song, where the river always flows.) The book is partly about the pace of development and what gets buried in the process, and I’d occasionally reflected on Norwich as a juxtaposition to that–the medieval buildings everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of years old, an architectural lifespan basically inconceivable where I come from, where preservation and heritage have constantly needed to justify themselves against economic growth. The medieval city on one end of the yardstick, and the land-scarce metropolis on the other.

But the presence of lost rivers is a reminder that there is always a history beneath the history. Practically every major city is formed along water. There’s something incredible about these vast, impregnable elements of nature that have shaped the patterns of human civilisation being so easily buried, turned into a legend. What happens when a river doesn’t always flow? It reminds me that history is long and landscapes have always changed, and that the idea of preservation itself–and our anxieties around it–is a more modern concept.

Various tangents here, neither mutually exclusive: Concepts of preservation and even wilderness have roots in colonial management of indigenous lands. Preservation projects sometimes arise from postcolonial notions of national identity and the need for countries to have tangible–even commercialisable–heritage. There’s the desire to buffer nature and built history from the contemporary pace of development. There’s also the angle of preservation as privilege–who can afford to preserve, instead of reusing resources?

Rivers are ecological, political, economic, mythical. My 21st-century chagrin at burying a river for a city comes up against how creatively evocative that chthonic watery phantom is. I’ve always liked the word relating to rivers, riparian. It comes from Latin, ripa, which means the river bank. But homonymously it also evokes ripe, something fertile for growth, and even viper, coiled and intent. In all forms of the word it’s vivid and living, underground or over. I’ve always loved how, in the history of language, purely functional words become names and thus entities invested with their own history and meaning to the communities around them. ‘Cockey’ of the Great Cockey was just another word for stream or watercourse; the Wensum, which I walked frequently, once just meant ‘winding’, from Old English wendsum. If there was a river, then there were people who lived alongside it and plants and animals that grew around it. A lost river is an entire lost ecosystem, an entire lost world.

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The lost rivers, I find, really are lost, at least to the extent that there’s little easily accessible information about them. They’re no Thames, I suppose, but it makes me more intrigued. I’m uncertain when they were covered up, and no one seems to have a map that marks the Great Cockey, though there are maps of Norwich going back to the 1550s. An article about medieval churches places the Church of St. John over the cockey. Apparently it shows up as a boundary in old property deeds; in Saxon times it might have been fairly wide and marshy, perhaps a separator between Conesford and Westwyk. Another author suggests that the Great Cockey was redirected to provide urban water supplies perhaps in the tenth century. Yet another suggests that infilling activity by the friars–for the expansion of the city and to raise areas above flood risk–may have contained the Cockey’s outflow. Books mention it in relation to other landmarks: a vista for the guildhall attendees at St Peter’s, skirting the market, constricting the castle with its valley.

This search might be easier if I were still in Norwich. Online, I find guides from others following the speculated path of the Great Cockey through today’s city: flowing down Westlegate marked in more blue tiles, past the market and castle, past Debenhams and Jarrold’s, past a fishing shop, coming out on St. Andrew’s Street toward its convergence with the River Wensum. Probably, that meeting point is a still-visible culvert opposite the Norwich Playhouse, where I saw a production of Dracula and bought a T-shirt from the bar, on an evening that it snowed as I exited the theatre. If I had learned about the lost rivers earlier, I could have popped over to see the culvert and followed the trail by myself, imagined how pubs and paved roads might once have been water and wetland.

But I’m equally compelled by the idea that it’s all speculation–that the river is just as invisible to someone walking the ground in Norwich as it is to me, continents away in Singapore. There’s something romantic about a universal loss, a universal mystery. It lets us all imagine what we want onto it.

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Give a dozen writers the same prompt and you’ll get a dozen different stories; give a dozen writers the same residency and you’ll get a dozen different cities experienced.

I know writers for whom their stay in Norwich was one of learning and research; the stay unlocked their book or made it possible. I did not get all that much writing done; I don’t feel like I learnt that much either, by traditional definition of knowledge.

I flew to my residency needing a new course to take. It was a liminal pivot; I’d recently made some rather large upheavals that were going to require me to reorganise my entire life and the direction I wanted to be going in. I was badly burnt out, needed time and space to re-find myself and relearn discovery. And so I merely quietly found a rhythm, wandered the shops and sites. I let myself find joys in making mundane routines, recognising roads, and watching the spring flowers start to open. Winding, carving, moving through an ecosystem again, feeding and being fed.

I like the idea that I was completing a quest I didn’t know I was on until that last day, stumbling across a plaque like a milestone. Yes, perhaps I was looking for rivers all along. It felt like a little take-home mystery from the city to keep me from closing my stay out completely: here is a wellspring, now go follow where it leads. Toward looking down at the pavement more, perhaps, or picking up a vital current again.

Wen-yi Lee

Wen-yi Lee is the author of The Dark We Know (Gillian Flynn Books, 2024) and postcolonial historical fantasy When They Burned the Butterfly (Tor/Wildfire, 2025). Her speculative writing has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Reactor, and Uncanny, as well as various anthologies. Find her @wenyilee_ on social media and otherwise at wenyileewrites.com. Her residency was supported by NAC Singapore.