Roger Deakin

Roger Stuart Deakin (11 February 1943 – 19 August 2006) was an English writer, documentary-maker and environmentalist. He was a co-founder and trustee of Common Ground, the arts, culture and environment organisation. Waterlog, the only book he published in his lifetime, topped the UK best seller charts, and founded the wild swimming movement. The house was without central heating but housed an Aga and wide open fireplaces. A colony of swallows lived in the main chimney and for several years chickens and ducks shared his kitchen. The nature writer Robert Macfarlane was Deakin's literary executor. He commented:

Roger was one of those rare people whose character and passion is to be found in everything he made, collected, drew or wrote. His notes, written to himself, provide an insight into a beautiful mind and a sweet man. This archive will capture what it was like to be a passionate, engaged, subversive country intellectual living through a time of profound change. It is very appropriate that Roger's papers will remain within his beloved East Anglia. it describes his experiences of 'wild swimming' in Britain's rivers and lakes and advocates open access to the countryside and waterways. The book also inspired a one-hour BBC Four documentary film Wild Swimming, in August 2010, presented by the anthropologist Alice Roberts. The film stated that he was the source for the voice of the swimmer in Alice Oswald's 48-page poem Dart, about the River Dart in Devon.

Deakin's book Wildwood appeared posthumously in 2007. It describes a series of journeys across the globe that Deakin made to meet people whose lives are intimately connected to trees and wood. In November 2008, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm was published to high critical appraisal. Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker, Suffolk critic and novelist, co-edited a collection of writing taken from Deakin's personal notebooks, largely focused on the wildlife and ecology of the area around his farmhouse.

Deakin was a founder director of the arts and environmental charity Common Ground in 1982. Among his environmental causes, he worked to preserve woodland, ancient rights of way and coppicing techniques of Suffolk hedgerows.