Roger Stuart Deakin (11 February 1943 – 19 August 2006) was an English author, documentary film maker, and environmentalist. His 1999 book Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain, published by Chatto & Windus, was a bestseller in the UK, inspired the start of the wild swimming movement, and is generally regarded as a classic of nature writing.

• The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever more exclusively of water. Swimming and dreaming were becoming indistinguishable. I grew convinced that following water, flowing with it, would be a way of getting under the skin of things, of learning something new.
  • as quoted by Charlotte Higgins in: (2 August 2011) "Summer readings: Waterlog by Roger Deakin. This enchanting swimmer's tale captures Britain's most wild and beautiful places with a 'frog's eye view'". The Guardian. (quote from 1999 book Waterlog by Roger Deakin)

• From water level, I observed the mating dragonflies joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the dandelion clocks that drifted on the thermals over the moat.
  • as quoted by Anelise Chen in: (May 27, 2021) "Swimming in the wild will change you. One man’s journey through public waterways—whether sparkling or dirty or algae-filled—challenges us to look differently at the commons". The Atlantic. (quote from 1999 book Waterlog, published in the USA for the first time in 2021)

• It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it makes in the wind. If Waterlog was about the element of water, Wildwood is about the element of wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and in our lives.
  To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. Merlin sends the future King Arthur as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in The Sword in the Stone. There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and the trees.
  • "Introduction". Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees. Simon & Schuster. 2009. pp. ix–xiii. ISBN 9781439109946. (quote from pp. ix–x; 416 pages)

• Waterlog (1999), Roger's now-classic account of swimming through Britain, published twenty years ago this year, opens during a rain-storm in the spring-fed moat that lies close to the house. In Wildwood (2007), his epic account of trees, woods and forest cultures around the world, Walnut Tree Farm is the fixed point to which Roger returns and from which he learns,even as he journeys out to the walnut groves of Kazakhstan and the eucalyptus stands of Australia. And in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (2008), extracts from Roger's copious journals record both the labour and wonder involved in living in twelve acres of meadow, hedgerow and woodland; the night-time bark of foxes, the viper-bite of blackthorns as he cleared scrub or laid hedges, and the fallen stars of glow-worms in the long grass.
  • Robert Macfarlane, "Foreword (Roger Deakin and Walnut Tree Farm) by Robert Macfarlane". Life at Walnut Tree Farm. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2019. ISBN 9781788547802. (256 pages; coauthored by Rufus Deakin and Titus Rowlandson)

• In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse outside the ancient village of Mellis, in Suffolk, and began a restoration, repairing stone walls and replacing roof tiles. Among the attributes of Walnut Tree Farm, as the house was called, was a deep, spring-fed moat. It didn’t surround the house, as with a fortified castle, but was excavated into the land, in roughly parallel lines, at the front and the back of the property. The moat had served its original, Elizabethan owner as a water supply, a cooler, and a status symbol. Over the centuries, it fell into disrepair, becoming silted up from falling leaves and rotting tree roots. Deakin had the moat dredged to a depth of ten feet; staked a wooden ladder by the bank, near the spreading roots of a willow tree; and began regularly swimming in the cold, greenish water. He gained what he called a frog’s-eye view of the changing seasons, and an intimate familiarity with the creatures sharing the moat, from dragonflies to newts.
  • Rebecca Mead, (January 27, 2020) "Going for the Cold". The New Yorker.

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  Encyclopedic article on Roger Deakin on Wikipedia