Team LIFE R4ever Kent take part in Practical River Restoration Course, hosted by the Freshwater Biological Association
Words & photos: Morgan Barrie, Interim Project Manager
A few of us from the LIFE R4ever Kent project attended the Freshwater Biological Association’s absolutely fantastic Practical River Restoration course, held over two days in September. It was presented by one of our very own Governance Board, Simon Johnson, Executive Director of the Freshwater Biological Association, along with exceptional and fascinating insight and expertise from George Heritage, Director of Dynamic Rivers, and Kieran Sheehan, Chief Ecologist from JBA consulting.
The course took place in the Lake District, Cumbria. Over the two days, we visited Goldrill beck and Hartsop up, and downstream of Brothers Water, along with Swindale Beck to see different examples of some really inspiring dynamic river restoration.
Get your wiggle on!
We discussed tributary and upland interventions (don’t always look at the main watercourse, especially if you’re tight for space), judging when to stand back and not over-tinker with works (cue a wonderful rendition of Frozen’s ‘Let it go’ from Kieran!) and how to look at a landscape approach on site (can you spot a flush in a valley just by looking at the colour of the grass?)
We saw wiggles (crucially along with associated features – don’t just wiggle for the sake of it!), fans, alluvial anastomosing channels, multi-threaded reaches, bifurcation, seepage pools, wet woodland, erosion and gravel bars, backwaters, riffles and rapids.
George raised fantastic questions such as should a tributary actually connect to a river, how do you measure a stone and what knock on effect does flood storage capacity have? He demonstrated the joys of playing around with modelling before you put a single spade in the ground and Kieran kept us fascinated with botanising on what he described as the best SSSI he had been on all year at Swindale and how the hydrology and ecology are so intrinsically linked. Now I know the difference between a mire, a fen and a bog!
Small changes have a big impact
What I mainly took from the course was the examples of where a small amount of work has led to a large change. By being able to read properly the landscape and having effective modelling, a half day with a digger filling up one drainage pipe or taking a small notch out of an embankment can have such huge effects, it can seem to be on the same scale as large complex multi-year projects. The overarching message – don’t be timid: if you go for half measures you’ll only have to come back and redo it again later!
The weather was largely against us in proper Cumbrian fashion, but it was great to see these floodplain reconnection sites functioning in spate (often we get to see works in summer and have to imagine how they connect to the wider valley, so getting to experience it was certainly worth the occasional soggy foot from an overtopped welly). However, we did get a brief moment of sunshine on our first day and I have always said, if we didn’t have the rain up here, we would just be ‘The District’….which sounds a lot more ominous!
Read more about the River Kent and its tributaries here.
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