This article first appeared in the July 2025 Edition of Birdwatching Magazine
Sir Isaac Walton, friend of the poet John Donne and author of The Complete Angler wrote about my local river… the Kentish Stour, a river then famous for its run of sea trout. In 1640 he married in Canterbury overlooking the Stour close to where I saw my first European Beaver from a crowded urban path. Some miles upstream, a week ago, I saw Grey Wagtails, just as Walton did. Although, in his day, he would not have seen the Little Owl in the bankside willow, nor the Egyptian Geese.
River water runs in my soul, perhaps awoken by fishing trips with my dad a lifetime ago. As Esterban wrote: “Beside the water I discovered… …the quiet. The sort of quiet that allows one to be woven into the tapestry of nature instead of merely standing next to it.”
A couple of years back, even further upstream I sat in a sunny pub garden having lunch next to the Stour… at the water’s edge was a sign: Do NOT enter the water – POLLUTION incident.
My regular birding route often takes me beside the Little Stour. Over the last twenty years I’ve watched it decaying. Where water weed swayed in the flow like a mermaid’s hair, allowing glimpses of the gravel river bed, now there are dead patches of murky silt.
Our rivers are bravely fighting infection – agricultural run-off promotes overgrowth of invasive plants, sewage outfalls create stinking froth, pollutants de-oxygenate causing summer blooms of dead fish.
It’s easy to blame the money-grubbing CEOs and overseas shareholders of ‘our’ water companies… and they deserve our acrimony. But, so does government too. They could turn fines into confiscations and independent testers into heroes. Governments follow their own agendas until the great British public stands up and roars. Clean water is not something to just be encouraged in foreign lands. We can have it at home – but only if we do something ourselves with independent research backing legal action and voluntary effort.
In February 2025, Lewes District Council passed a charter, making the Sussex Ouse the first river in the country to have legally recognised rights. It’s time ALL rivers had rights. The right to be unsullied from pristine springs down to pollution-free estuaries!
Last year upstream from my patch a bunch of birders worked with a local farmer to put bends back in the Little Stour to slow the flow.
In North Yorkshire a group of anglers are trying to restore the ecosystem of a river they fish. The voluntary bailiffs want it to be how it once was; a pleasure to fish surrounded by joyous nature. The Upper Costa Beck, a former trout stream, was devastated by sewage pollution and runoff. The Environmental Agency published plans for a clean-up. The anglers had to take the Environmental Agency to court because the agency’s proposals were vague and ineffectual. They won their case! What did government do? Did it leap into action creating detailed plans to stop the reckless farmers and avaricious water companies? Nope. Instead the environment secretary, claimed that cleaning up the waterway was administratively unworkable and appealed the court decision.
The judges dismissed that argument because it is required by law to develop specific measures to clean up individual rivers, lakes and streams, under the water framework directive – legislation that aims to improve the quality of all our rivers, lakes and coastal waters.
Anglers, birders, ramblers and nature lovers are able and willing to help. If government won’t, we have to. Part of that is making the government do what we voted for!
