YDRT 2011 Auction

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Willow Spiling To Protect Farmland

Bank erosion of streams pollutes watercourses with fine sediments and phosphates that can disturb the local ecology. It also removes sections of the farm to be deposited downstream, either within the river or on someone else’s land when the river overtops it’s banks. There are numerous methods for controlling this process and so reduce the rate at which soils are lost to rivers. The obvious method is fencing the watercourse to remove stock from the bank side. This allows vegetation to flourish creating a strong root stock that binds soils together. But sometimes just fencing the river bank is inadequate as erosion has taken hold and every flood pulse takes another section of bank and then the watercourse begins to eat into fields.

More drastic hard engineering methods can solve this. Gabion baskets for example create a strong buffer between fields and water. Such methods can be successful but they operate against natural processes and so always look at odds with the landscape. Moreover they too can wash out adding an extra ugliness as they hang into the river spilling their gravel back to the water.

There are intermediate methods that are successful and work with the natural features of a river. Matt Neale, the local ranger for upper Wensleydale, has championed willow spiling to protect banks, and fields, from erosion. This method seems to do the trick on most occasions and adds habitat to the river providing refuge and shade for fish, birds and mammals such as otters. Having visited sites where the Eden Rivers Trust had successfully employed the method Matt identified sections of the Ure that would benefit from this method. The first place he trialed willow spiling was on the river Ure just below Hawes. Here the river was eating into the bank and soil was being lost rapidly from the farm with every high flow event.

The method is simple but effective. Stakes are driven into the river bed close to the bank, spaced at two or three metre intervals. Live willow rods are then woven between the stakes to provide a permeable barrier between the river and the bank. This helps to reduce stream power and thus erosion and it also slows the water enough to allow sediments to drop out behind the willow spiling. The bank then builds up as new sediment is deposited whenever the river overtops the willows. The added benefit with using willow rods is that they take root and flourish in these locations. The roots further bind the soil whilst the new tree growth slows the water down even further and more matter is deposited until the bank becomes completely revegetated. The habitat created by this is valuable and helps to protect farmland creating one of those rare win-win situations.

Since the first trial Matt has carried out the method on several other sections of the river Ure and Duerley Beck. He has refined the process and now builds up coarse gravel behind the spiling to encourage fine sediments to deposit out offering further protection to the willow rods whilst they take root. When possible soil is packed into the coarse sediments providing a substrate for the growth of bank side vegetation, again this further binds the bank providing a more stable environment which offers improved chances that the work will be successful. When it is appropriate the bank is reprofiled to create a less vulnerable slope.

All of the sites that Matt has worked on have been succesful with one exception. This is at a location where a large glacial deposit, possibly a recessional moraine, is eroding badly. The land slip is substantial and the processes causing the slip are not simply undercutting of the bank by the river since the slope has become unstable. These glacial desposits are unconsolidated, porous and permeable meaning that water seeps through them providing a good medium for failure points to emerge. Where the processes causing erosion have been caused by river water the method has been extremely succesful and the habitat created appears natural and undisturbed.

Soil Compaction

Many meadows and pastures suffer soil compaction due to the regular passing of heavy machinery and high stocking rates. This can increase run-off during rainfall events and result in the delivery of fine sediments and nutrients to watercourses that can have significant impacts on river ecology. Soil compaction also has impacts on farm yields. If compaction impedes the root stock from penetrating into the soil layers then plant growth, and nutrient uptake, is reduced. This can result in poor crops of silage and hay which are required for feeding stock through the winter months; which is especially important in upland locations where growing seasons are short and winters long.

There are methods to improve conditions where soil compaction has occured. Sub-soil ploughs can penetrate below the compacted layer and break the soil allowing root penetration. This is not always possible in upland regions where soils can be thin with bedrock and boulders close to the surface. Steep slopes can also hinder the use of sub-soil ploughs. Aerators are often a better solution in such locations. These simple rotary blades penetrate into the soil and through the compacted layer allowing greater yields due to oxygen replensihment of the soil and root growth beyond the compacted layer.

If this is carried out in conjunction with newer methods of slurry spreading then yields can be massively improved. Two methods that appear to improve nutrient uptake are dribble bars and slurry injectors. These reduce the liklihood of run-off and allow improved use of a nutrient resource. If carried out alongside aerators and soil testing, for nutrient levels and pH, then savings in time and money can be passed onto the farm enterprise. Often pH levels can be lower then optimal and testing can identify where lime is required. This raises the pH and improves plant nutrient uptake. Soil testing can also idnetify which fields have high levels of phosphates and so allows the farmer to reduce inputs saving them money on fertiliser purchase.

These kind of options, if built into the farm plan, can be beneficial to the farmer and help improve the ecological condition of rivers. Cost of the machinery can be prohibitive but presently there are grants that can help with purchasing the kit. For example Yorkshire Forward's Farm Resource Efficiency Programme grants (FREP: www.yorkshire-forward.com/helping-businesses/rural-businesses/funding/frep) will pay up to 60% of costs. It will even pay up to 50% of costs for the pruchase of one piece of kit for contractors. These grants can make such options feasible for the farmer, either to purchase the kit directly or through their contractors.

Hay time



Soil profiles can help identify if compaction has occurred



Slurry injector





Dribble bar on umbilical

Winter in the Yorkshire Dales

Winter has hit the dales in a way it hasnt for decades. The riverscapes are surrounded in white that glistens in the low winter sun. Sheep huddle together behind walls waiting for deliveries of food that arrives by tractor which, despite their traction, also slip across the surface. The rivers are running low as all the precipitation is stored in snow and ice, the freezing nights keeping water locked up.

Cars have deep coverings of snow and roads look like gorges as the ploughs scrape them free of snow leaving steep edges on either side. The forecast suggests we have at least two more weeks of this and with drifts already reaching above head height the next days promise impresive sights.



The thaw is held up by the sub zero temperatures dipping to -8 in the dales and colder still the further north one travels. When this huge store of water eventually flows the rivers are set to rise substantially. The worst case scenario for those living in towns downstream of here is a rapid temperature rise coupled with rain. Such conditions will undoubtedly lead to flooding, and misery, for many.

Research into land management suggests that compacted soils and extensive drainage exacerbates flooding by shifting water rapidly from land to river resulting in sharp spikes in the hydrograph. The key to the next few years, as we move towards the prescriptions of the EU Water Framework Directive, is to understand how land management effects water and more importantly identify methods for improving conditions whilst making sure upland farmers do not lose income. This is an exciting time for freshwater ecology as local scale perspectives are stretched to the catchment scale which provides many of the controlling factors on river ecology and quality.

The incredible thing is that the whole country is white, smothered in deep drifts and layers of weeks of snow. Satelite photos from NASA display this strange image of the UK. It looks like not only Yorkshire rivers are at risk. In the meantime the landscape looks fantastic and we all hope the thaw occurs in a slow, steady manner.

Change and restoration

Upland rivers are fascinating places that possess a raw quality. Full of rapid change, violent spates to low flows in quick time, they pose challenges to people and nature. It is this rapidity of change that keeps them alive, keeps people drawn to them and puts their ecosystems on a knife edge of existence. One severe flood, drought, landslip or pollution event can alter their ecology for years. And when a natural system flips between threshold states dragging it back to its original condition is complex and challenging, beset with frustrating feedbacks and full of unexpected consequences. The new science of restoration ecology has discovered this time and again. What has appeared to be an obvious intervention can force a natural system to skew off towards some other state not accounted for during intervention planning. This has resulted in more measured approaches to reverse interference and has revealed that ecology does not exist in easily flipped parallel states but occurs in complex dimensions of interacting multivariate factors that we can never fully understand.

But not fully understanding something does not mean that we cannot understand it enough. Beneath the aesthetics of these places lie scale upon scale of interacting processes within and between both the living and non-living components of a system that create forever fluctuating conditions. However, even though they fluctuate, under prevailing conditions they are always pulled back towards some unknown average. In order to understand enough we need to simplify these interactions down to basic assumptions that explain them in as much detail that is required in order to predict the outcome of an intervention. This is not a magical process and can only come from experimentation both in laboratories and natural systems. And we are beginning to understand enough though it would be arrogant to suggest that we will never make mistakes during restoration efforts, but with restoration ecology it is the mistakes that guide learning.

The biggest experiment (and probably mistake) we are undertaking is one we have not planned but has come as a consequence of modern economies and lifestyles. An article published in 2007 in Global Change Biology by Durance and Ormerord showed that upland stream macro-invertebrate assemblages may decline by 21% for every degree centigrade rise in water temperature. This is of concern to freshwater ecologists as after primary production these are the most important components of upland river systems. What we have learned in recent years is that such a change would be difficult to reverse and as future temperatures are forecast to increase for sometime it may be that these upland river systems are destined to become shadows of their present selves.

The intricacies of the dales

The little intricate waterfalls of the dales are the hidden gems of this land. Everyone knows the big famous ones like Aysgarth and Hardraw (both of which have had visits by Kevin Costner) but tucked away on some of the small high altitude streams are jewels of waterfalls that are rarely visited. Some of these are virtually dry but surge into life once the clouds burst. These ephemeral places contain ecology trained by evolution to cope with constant change.

Walks over the hills brings a natural closeness with the land. You can become lost in the scales here. One moment watching pipits swarm across coarse grass swards to pick at tiny beetles the next taking in wide vistas or your vision being tunnelled down a far winding dale. Hills like Ingleborough and Pen-y-ghent always seem to break into the skyline. Their obvious stepped tops revealing millions of years of strata, borne from scales we can barely grasp.

Heading over the top from Ballowfields the sound of water rushing beneath scree piles highlights that you are walking over limestone. The rock is taken into solution by acidic rain and streams drop underground forming caves and caverns from the tiniest of sink holes that swallow water with a giants thirst.

The water here doesnt behave as expected. Below the summit of Addleborough, a brooding hill that decieves its low altitude, is a waterfall dry for most of the year. Water is swallowed from the stream above and as you walk over the land you can hear it bubbling and gurgling beneath the surface like a hungry stomach. And at the lower reaches of the redundant waterfall it re-emerges from two places before combining back into one of the best trout spawning streams of Wensleydale.

And if you walk the other way, towards Addleborough top, calcareous flushes clear and potable emerge from the ground. Just metres from their source they mix with dark peaty streams and then for a short distance two different waters flow side by side till they become mixed, their pH and chemistry settling somewhere between the two.

In many ways water has shaped this land. Over 300 million years ago coral reefs grew in tropical waters and their remnants now form the majority of rock in the dales. Then huge columns of frozen water scraped the land forming u-shaped valleys that are the prominent feature of the landscape. After this liquid water ran over the surface of these scraped clean valleys cutting narrow V's in the land and dissolving the rock to form the caves and caverns that form underground mosaics like fungal hyphae. This isn't a perfect timeline of the processes but the idea of how these places were formed is there.


In the last few thousand years people cultivated the land and our signals can be seen all over the floodplains and down to the Humber estuary. A soil core of these plains shows that the rate of sediment movement increased massively after we cleared the original vegetation. It shows that we can have bigger impacts on the land then we suppose. But it is this patchwork of fields delineated by dry stone walls created by farming that is one of the biggest draws to the dales, and rightly so.

Modelling at the catchment scale

Understanding how water moves across the land and what chemicals and sediments it delivers to rivers is vital to the understanding of river ecology. The rivers trust movement has played a key role in recent years by helping to decipher how catchment processes control river morphology and how morphology and water quality affect ecology.

Excessive fine sediment in upland rivers degrades river habitats by clogging up the spaces between the gravel. This reduces egg survival of Salmon and Trout and changes the macroinvertebrate communities by favouring organisms such as Chironimidae worms over Stonefly and Mayfly.

A number of rivers trusts including the Yorkshire Dales Rivers Trust have been using a modelling tool developed by Durham and Lancaster universities called SCIMAP (Sensitive Catchment Integrated Modelling and Analysis Platform). This provides detail on where fine sediment is likely to be delivered to a watercourse based on slope, landcover and its associated erosion risk and rainfall.

SCIMAP outputs show the average risk for in-stream fine sediment in any catchment being modelled with a number of risk classes either side of the average ranging from high risk (red) to low risk (green). Underneath this output is a second output in grey that highlights the land parcels of a catchment most likely to be the source of the sediment. From this it is easy to locate the red 'streams' and then look up stream for the most likely locations that are delivering the sediment. Some ground truthing is then necessary but once the risk has been established it is possible to enter negotiations for changing land management to methods that can reduce these inputs. Simple measures such as buffer strips or contour planting of trees slows surface run off allowing sediment to settle out before the water reaches a watercourse.

This has the benefit of reducing the degradation of rivers and streams and allows species composition to restore itself back to the natural community of the river type. It is these simple habitat measures, developed through catchment scale thinking, that will restore habitats to something like their potential. This kind of large scale thinking is constantly developing which makes working as part of a rivers trust an exciting and rewarding vocation.

Raydale and Semer Water catchment project

Work in Raydale has been going well with Deborah Millward leading a fantastic catchment project. This small valley has it all, forestry, dairy, beef, sheep, moors, nature reserves, one of only two glacial lakes in Yorkshire, a good number of gills and streams and one of Englands shortest rivers, the Bain. The dale has an active farming community that contain knowledge stemming from generations of land management.

As with all land in the UK there are pressures and conflicts for space which has resulted in a number of issues that the Raydale project has been trying to address. First there is the threat of a changing climate that seems to be resulting in heavier downpours and rapid flows of water. This is compounded by artificially drained moors which allow water to flush through the catchment with greater speed then would naturally occur. Fleet moss, one of the moors at the head of the dale, is severely eroded and hagged and has delivered tonnes of sediment to the river network resulting in habitat degradation for fish and riverflies. Moving downstream it appears that gills and stream banks are eroding with stock access to rivers exacerbating this in a few places.

With leadership from Deborah and the local community a good number of actions have taken place that will help reduce land management risk to rivers. This has included fencing off river banks, planting gills with native trees and restoring a gravel bed stream that has been running over a historic right of way back to its natural course. Further action will include the devlopment of a small hydro-electric scheme which may provide a future income for Raydale and help them establish their own charity to support the community and land managers in future years.

Over the next few years it is expected that the open drains on the moors will be blocked and heather restoration will be carried out. Lower down the dale catchment sensitive farming methods are being championed to ensure that farmers can achieve an income whilst also preserving the beauty and ecology of the dale and its streams.