Down the Corran in a rubber boat, by Ollie Danvers

An original contemporary online review.

I should say at once that I am not a natural adventurer. My idea of a thrill is a second helping of pudding. So when my daughter booked a half-day white-water trip with Torrent Adventures for my fiftieth birthday, I smiled, thanked her and privately began composing my will.

The trip starts at a converted farm steading a few miles above Glencorran, where you are issued with a wetsuit, a helmet, a buoyancy aid and a pair of rubber boots that have clearly been worn by several hundred strangers. The wetsuit took me ten minutes and a certain amount of help to get into. Do not eat a big breakfast.

The safety briefing, however, is excellent. Our guide, Rory, a former outdoor-education teacher with a beard like a hedge and a voice that could be heard over a waterfall, spent half an hour on the riverbank teaching us the paddle commands, how to hold on and what to do if we went in. ‘Feet up, face to the sky, and look for me,’ he said. ‘I will find you. I always find people.’ It was oddly reassuring.

Then we were on the water. The first mile of the Corran is gentle, and it lulls you, deliberately I suspect, into a false sense of security. Herons lifted off the shingle. The sun came through the birches. Rory pointed out an otter slide. I began to think I might enjoy myself.

Then came the gorge. The banks closed in, the walls rose to thirty feet of black rock dripping with ferns, and the river, which had been chatting quietly to itself, began to roar. The first rapid, known as the Washing Machine, picked up our raft like a toy and flung it sideways. Water exploded over the front. I heard myself yelling. Rory was shouting ‘Forward! Dig! Dig!’, and somehow all six of us dug, and the raft burst out of the white water into a calm pool as if nothing had happened.

That was the pattern for the next hour: terror, effort, triumph, and then a stretch of calm in which everyone talked at once. By the third rapid I was enjoying it. By the fifth, the Cauldron, a frothing drop of nearly two metres, I was the one demanding we go back and do it again. At one point Rory let us jump off a rock into a deep, peat-brown pool. The cold took my breath away so completely that I forgot to be frightened.

There are faults. At £75 a head it is not cheap, and photographs taken by the company’s photographer on the bank cost an extra £25, which feels like profiteering. The minibus back to the steading smells strongly of wet neoprene. And, as I discovered, there is nowhere to hide your dignity when climbing back into a raft in a wetsuit.

But these are small complaints. For three hours I was soaked, battered, frozen and happier than I have been in years. My daughter says she has never heard me laugh like that. I have booked the full-day trip for next summer. My will can wait.

Four and a half stars.

The white-water rafting trip is described as an unforgettable adventure. How does the writer try to show this?

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