words by Amy Woodward
I approach the side of the water's edge and look down to see what is ready to greet me in the murky depths below. What am I nervous about? I ask myself. The cold, the wildlife, judgment? I’m drawn to the sunlight dancing on the surface. I find it hypnotic and welcoming. I strip down quickly before I change my mind, leaving a bundle of my dropped towel and clothes where I previously stood, and lower myself into the water. My breath halts, and the world falls silent. The cold eclipses my thoughts — all of my senses are ignited as endorphins and adrenaline create a natural altered state. I can smell the damp earth and the fresh bunches of wild garlic I foraged on the way here. The river is lined with trees that I am still learning the names of. I notice a heron flying elegantly overhead to her nest; a solitary creature like me, at this moment. Inspired and fuelled with curiosity, I glide out vulnerably into the water and allow the ripples to cause an energy shift around me. I’m cold, naked, and I feel utterly free.
The term “skinny-dipping" has been recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary since 1947, but the history of wild and nude swimming goes back much further. Communal bathing and swimming naked were once considered normal around the world. From Roman baths to Japanese onsens, Nordic sauna culture, to sea bathing in pre-Victorian Britain, embracing our natural form in water has always been deeply rooted in culture and tradition as we cross the bridge back to nature. Recreational wild swimming became popular in the 17th century when there was an increased interest in and acknowledgement of mineral water's health-giving properties, resulting in spas becoming more appealing. Despite this, however, it was much more feasible (and cheaper!) to visit large bodies of water. It was around 1730 that a divide began to emerge where women were increasingly expected to cover up, with Victorian morality in the mid-late 1800s reshaping nudity into something shameful and taboo. Their segregated swimming impulsed women to wear full bathing ‘outfits’, covering every feminine curve, that was carried through the Edwardian era and beyond. With the ongoing privatisation of land and water and pay-to-enter leisure, swimming has become a regulated and surveilled act, the way it appears to have been for hundreds of years, but with a different frame. Even in today's society, wild swimming and especially nude swimming are more appealing to the rebellious-minded, those who challenge and question the norm.
Virginia Woolf, an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors, was a rebel in her own right and wrote about wild swimming, which she often engaged in at Byron’s Pool in Cambridge. Both her swimming and writing, including The Waves, written in 1931, represented a form of liberation from the societal constraints of the norm in the Victorian era, embracing a more uninhibited and natural way of life. As she explored the relationship between nature and self, wild swimming was used as a metaphor for her creative process as she dived into her personal expedition of the human psyche and consistently challenged the status quo voicing her desire for social change.
Carl Jung, a famous psychiatrist and psychotherapist, who also challenged established norms of his time, explored the powerful symbology of water. In his 1959 book of essays, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung suggested that swimming in natural bodies of water is a way to connect with this unconscious realm of the human psyche and potentially facilitate personal transformation, releasing hidden thoughts and feelings that lie in the depths of us we don’t often explore.
The psychological researcher in me needed to know if there were other benefits of wild water swimming, clothed or nude, and I was encouraged to pursue the hobby after reading a 2024 study by the Wild Swim Project which shared about swimmers who attended a wild swimming group for more than six months, and reported that their life satisfaction improved by 25 per cent, their happiness increased by 20 per cent, whilst their feeling of worthiness went up by 23 per cent. Significantly, their anxiety levels also decreased by 18 per cent. They also experienced improved confidence, body positivity and told themselves that if they could wild swim, they could do other challenging things too. A cold water swim offered an immediate calming effect and a sense of community in a wild space where they could create emotional connections and socialise, decreasing symptoms of depression and anxiety as participants explored the world from a new perspective without the barriers they live with. This reaffirmed what I already knew, that nature is a site of healing and by returning to it, we often return to our true selves.
While I was swimming, I noticed two women approaching the bank and starting to unload. I wanted to be alone like the heron, but their presence was welcome when it was clear that we had come on a collective mission and with it shared a sense of vulnerability. They passed a thermos between them, and I wish I had thought of doing the same. A smile of solidarity was shared as I passed, a mutual understanding that didn’t need to be voiced which I wish more people, especially women, experienced. Stretch marks, scars, wrinkles, and my very red and blotchy legs from the cold were visible amongst us all. There at the river, where we chose to swim nude, we shared a quiet act of rebellion where we reclaimed a communal body in our natural form outside of the pressure of idealised imagery. Those women weren’t there to judge me, but were there to just ‘be’. To experience freedom and adventure. Freedom from our thoughts and adventure from the daily routine. As we shed clothes and class, we also shed layers of social expectations and self-consciousness. We were bodies, not objects.
The rebel in me was excited to tell a friend that I had been wild swimming and chose to do so naked, and I found myself defending how being naked in water doesn’t have to be erotic and that the vulnerability of being naked was normalised, the ego dissolved, and the naked form was desexualised. I released shame and reconnected with embodiment, and it acted as a reminder that wild swimming offered much more than physical freedom. The exposure was an equal act of trust and belonging as we returned to a primal state and gave ourselves permission to become one with nature and just ‘exist’, with no choice but to be in the present and focus on our breath if anything at all.
In the post-swim buzz, I questioned why I hadn’t done this before. After all, the human experience is so deeply intertwined with nature, offering us a reminder that we are part of something bigger than our expectations, as we feel our belonging in the natural world that welcomes us as we are. In a society that insists on covering, controlling and commodifying even our most basic needs for connection, swimming naked in open water is a personal and soft resistance for those who dare to be free and to be themselves, no invitation required.