Thank you for your interest in this story
To continue reading this article, subscribe to the Stray Ferret for as little as £1 a week
Already a subscriber? Log in here.
02
Mar
What next for the River Nidd? Experts gather in Knaresborough
One of the biggest stories of the last 12 months has been the state of our rivers, and there’s been no shortage of people calling for something to be done.
Back in 2022, some of them formed the Nidd Action Group, which has been active in marshalling resources and volunteers to get to the bottom of the problems besetting the Nidd and its tributaries.
Meanwhile, the Environment Agency took samples throughout last summer, and Yorkshire Water has been doing its bit too. Universities have been involved, and landowners, fishermen and pensioners have all been roped in to help.
Nidd Action Group volunteers have sampled water quality in many rivers and becks.
All the people involved with these efforts are interested in each other’s work, but there has not been a forum where they can come and share their findings – until now.
Last week, NAG convened a public consultation on plans to protect the River Nidd, and – even though it started at 4pm on a weekday – it was well attended.
During a break in proceedings at the Centre on Gracious Street in Knaresborough, NAG chair David Clayden told the Stray Ferret:
I’m old – I'm 80 – but this is about what we want to leave to our grandchildren.
The aim is to maintain the river’s beauty, but also to maintain people’s interest in it, because it’s a community resource.
Is it more important than people starving? No. But it’s getting to be almost as important.
If people are engaged with it, they will take care of the river. We’re not going to go back to the Garden of Eden – we've got billions of people on the Earth – but we can make things cleaner and greener.
Nature will make its own way, regardless of what we do. But I’d like us to be a part of it.
Fish stocks
The event featured an impressive roster of speakers, starting with John Wilkinson, lecturer in environmental science at the University of York, and a specialist in analytical chemistry and environmental toxicology.
He spoke about the AQuA project – the Alliance for Quality Aquatic Environments – which is a citizen science initiative that has enlisted more than 1,700 members of the public. The project, which starts this spring and is funded to the tune of £1 million, will see volunteers collect river samples using specially designed kits that can detect chemical concentrations, microbial contaminants and chemical sensors.
Professor Jonny Grey, research and conservation officer for the Wild Trout Trust, spoke about habitat improvement and how volunteers can help. He started by taking a look at what is wrong with the River Nidd from the point of view of fish stocks. This concentrated less on pollution and more on the physical barriers that deter fish from moving freely along the river and its becks, such as dams, weirs, embankments and culverts.
In other parts of Yorkshire, Prof Grey and the trust have worked with landowners and North Yorkshire Council to get rid of some of these obstacles, ‘unstraightening’ rivers (putting the wiggle back in them) and removing weirs and culverts to 'renaturalise’ the watercourse.
As a result, in streams including Haw Beck (a tributary of the Aire) and Thornton Beck (a tributary of the Derwent) fish numbers have boomed by between 2.5 and 10 times.
Cloudy water in Hookstone Beck caused by pollution from an unauthorised sewage discharge by Yorkshire Water.
Claire Campbell, Yorkshire bathing waters technical lead for the Environment Agency, gave an update on her team’s work to unravel the complex issue of where the pollution in the Nidd is coming from.
Yorkshire Water has often been the easy target for public anger – and perhaps not without reason, given its history of illegal discharges – but Ms Campbell highlighted some other sources that also deserve attention.
Water quality in the River Wharfe, she said, was poor immediately after heavy rain but back to normal 72 hours later, which strongly suggested that sewage outflows were to blame.
In the River Nidd, by contrast, water quality is consistently poor, which suggests other reasons, such as fish farms, caravan parks and private septic tanks.
The agency previously tested water quality over the bathing season by visiting Knaresborough Lido and physically taking samples, but has now started using ‘sondes’ – solar-powered pieces of kit that remain in the water and transmit readings remotely, allowing the team to update its records more frequently.
The agency has also launched Hello Lamp Post, and initiative that relies on members of the public to use their smartphones to collect data at monitoring sites.
Ms Campbell also appealed to the public to get involved more generally. She said:
We don’t have the resources to drive around constantly checking things. We rely on people to tell us if something’s wrong.
Please don’t assume we know about a pollution incident, because the chances are, we don’t – so please ring it in on 0800 807060.
Oak Beck
Sarah Lonsdale of the Yorkshire Dales Rivers Trust spoke of other sources for pollution, such as metal mines and so-called ‘missed connections’. These are where Victorian plumbers and engineers mistakenly connected foul-water pipes to surface water drainage pipes, wrongly combined the two sewage systems.
This means that there could be a steady drip-feed of untreated sewage leaking into Oak Beck at unknown points, since even Yorkshire Water doesn’t know where all these missed connections under Harrogate are.
She also appealed for volunteers for two citizen science research intiatives, one that counts positive indicator species of riverfly, and one that maps and works to eradicate harmful invasive species, such as Himalayan balsam, Japanese knotweed and giant hogweed.
Himalayan balsam crowds out native species and then dies back in winter, leaving river banks vulnerable to rapid erosion.
'We’re moving forward'
Other contributions to a packed programme came from Josh Cohen of the University of Leeds' Riverkin Project, which seeks to draw on traditions of indigenous communities who regard rivers as family members; from Hugh Clear Hill, principal environmental and project officer for North Yorkshire Council; and from Nathan Lawson and George Taplin of Yorkshire Water, who spoke about the utility company’s programme for 2025-30.
By the end of the three-and-a-half-hour session, it was clear that a lot of work was being done, both by people at the technological and academic cutting edge and by thousands of volunteers across our district and beyond.
It is, though, very much a work in progress and there was no suggestion that an end to the Nidd's problems is at hand.
NAG’s David Clayden said:
It’s a slow job, but then the Nidd Action Group has only been going for a couple of years.
We need to have this kind of discussion and debate to agree action and improve things.
We’re moving forward, one step at a time.
0