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Troubling waters: what future for our ponds, lakes, rivers and canals?

Dave Dunlop 

Thousands of species - including otters, kingfishers, salmon, dippers, water voles, dragonflies and a myriad of smaller creatures on which they depend - rely on safe wetland habitats; as does a host of specialist water-plants.

Thousands of species - including otters, kingfishers, salmon, dippers, water voles, dragonflies and a myriad of smaller creatures on which they depend - rely on safe wetland habitats; as does a host of specialist water-plants.

Healthy wetlands and rivers can also provide communities with protection from flooding by holding water in the landscape and slowing the flow of water through river systems to the sea.

They can save us money by naturally filtering the impurities from our water, providing us with cleaner drinking water and reducing the amount of money that water companies need to spend on doing this work.

River Douglas

Dave Dunlop 

Across our Trust’s area our open freshwater habitats are many and varied. There are two surviving natural lakes – Hawes Water, near Silverdale and Marton Mere, in Blackpool; the “Wigan Pondway” stretching from Wigan north to Preston; and our seven river catchments; Alt-Crossens, Croall-Irwell, Douglas, Lune, Mersey, Ribble, and Wyre.

The health of our rivers and lakes provides an excellent indicator of the health of the whole freshwater environment. In 2003 Parliament passed a law to require that, by 2027, 100 per cent of England’s rivers, lakes, and ponds would have achieved 'good ecological status’, so it’s alarming that only 14 per cent of river water bodies in England currently achieve such status and that this is set to fall to six per cent by 2027. Using powers Parliament gave ministers in the Environment Act 2021, Government has since moved that year downstream to 2063. In our rivers and streams a fall in water quality means that delicate aquatic plants decrease in number and variety, and the diversity of the aquatic insects and fishes that depend on those decline as a result.

Discharge of raw sewage into watercourses – and directly into the sea – has the highest public profile. However, pollution of our freshwater habitats comes from many sources. As a broad generalisation agricultural runoff tends to be the main pollutant in rural areas and storm overflow discharges of sewage and other wastewater in more populous urban areas.

Anglezarke Reservoir

Dave Dunlop

Pollution is only one of the many pressures on our freshwater environment. We face the legacy of past culverting, damming, straightening and channelisation of rivers and streams, contamination with mining waste, and infilling or abandonment of farm-ponds.

Of our natural lakes, Martin Mere has been almost completely drained for farming; and about half of Marton Mere has been destroyed by infilling and hard development.

Non-native invasive species introduced in the late 19th and 20th century risk causing havoc with our freshwater ecosystems, notably North American mink, Chinese mitten crab, signal crayfish, Himalayan balsam, Australian stonecrop, and floating pennywort.

Brockholes Visitor Village

Brockholes Visitor Village by Bentham Imaging

A truly natural river or lake is impossible to find in our Trust’s region but there is some hope: mainly through the eight River Catchment Management Partnerships that now cover our area. Our trust has created a reedbed to treat wastewater from our Brockholes Visitor Centre and worked with both Chorley and Wigan councils on natural approaches to wastewater management. At Bickershaw in Wigan Borough we have de-culverted just short of 3 km of stream and created two water basins to capture flash-floods. The return of flowing freshwater to the floodplain will benefit water quality, wildlife, flood defence and landscape. We also secured funding to record the location of invasive plant species on the catchment of the River Douglas so that these could be better controlled.

On 4th April Government published a new plan to ensure ‘clean and plentiful’ water. Some aspects of the plan are welcome, but it seems to be more a list of pledges than the joined up approach that’s needed. For a national overview from The Wildlife Trusts read Ali Morse’s blog here.

Compounding our concern, however, is the Retained EU Law (Revocation & Reform) Bill which would require all of the thousands of EU-derived laws and regulations to vanish from the UK law book by New Years’ Day 2024 unless Government ministers make a special effort to retain some within that artificial deadline: most of our freshwater protections are based on these and, if they all go or get watered down, we’ll be back to feeble laws from before 1973, when embarrassingly the UK was known as “the dirty man of Europe”. If you’d like to help on that, click here.

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