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Restoring rivers one bank at a time

Restoring rivers is proving to be a good thing for wildlife and the people who manage the land surrounding them. Deputy Land and Water Team Manager, Luke Neal, writes about one of this year's success stories.

Corfield farm is a family-run mixed livestock farm, the family have a deep connection to the river and remember playing there and catching fish. The new generation would like to see a return of improved fish stocks and be able to take their children to enjoy the River Corve, which winds its way across their land.

This site was a designated Wildlife Site, but in the early 1990’s the river was dredged to deepen the channel and drain the wet meadows and improve the land for agriculture. At this point the wildlife site designation was lost. Dredging and over-deepening the channel disconnected the river from its floodplain and resulted in a free flowing, over-deep channel with no pools and natural river features, which led to there being poor marginal vegetation.

WM Plant Hire creating new habitat

Building from our earlier work in the Corve Catchment delivering Natural Flood Management features, we saw  the opportunity to work with the farm and restore this stretch of the River Corve. Good relations had been built up and the farm was willing to allow us to bid for funding to prepare for river bank improvements. Through our strong links with Severn Trent Water we were able to secure funding for the farm, thanks to STW's commitment to biodiversity improvements throughout their operational area. We are lucky to have a variety of specialist contractors to call on to deliver this type of work and we were pleased to work with WM Longreach, a local firm, who have a wealth of experience in delivering river restoration projects nationally.

Overhead view of Corve works

500m of river bank was improved during the work in 2022, along with the installation of large fallen tree trunks into the water to help slow down the flow of water and create new river ecosystems as insects and plants begin to use them as a refuge. However the impact of this work goes beyond that. Coupled with the removal of a weir downstream, we have unlocked about 12km of river and provided important nursery grounds for a variety of fish species – especially brown trout, which is a species that has declined massively on many rivers in the UK.

The work itself was completed in just 2 weeks, but the planning, negotiation and permits took about a year to have in place!

We are extremely pleased with the results, everything went to plan and river looks fantastic. We have scattered wildflower seed on the bare banks to enhance the sward and will be planting aquatic vegetation to improve the water habitats too.

The farming family have reconnected with their bit of the river and enjoyed working alongside us – especially when the children got to handle fish during our surveys to study the biodiversity of the improved river.

Improved fencing will prevent livestock accessing the water not only helping the health of the river but also ensuring that the farm complies to environmental standards making their business more resilient. Instead, the banks will be left ungrazed and the plants and grasses that so many insects depend on will recolonise the area and stabilise them.

The weir we removed was just one of dozens of dams and weirs that were taken down in 2022 in the UK. In fact, 2022 was a record breaking year for dams being removed in Europe, meaning that the future for much-loved fish species like salmon is looking bright.

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