River restoration at Snaizeholme 

A giant boost for nature in the Yorkshire Dales and the White Rose Forest. River restoration in conjunction with Wild Trout Trust.   

Alec Pue, Snaizeholme site manager: “the river restoration work that we're underway with today is just another project here at Snaizeholme which is vital to creating that mosaic of habitats that we're working on. The idea here is to try and restore natural processes back to the watercourses.” 

Jonny Grey, Wild Trout Trust: “so what we're trying to do is reintroduce the sort of physical habitat diversity that would have occurred hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. When there were more trees naturally occurring in the valley, we would have had trees falling into the river, and that aspect of the physical structure makes the water work harder. It creates erosion and deposition, and makes a more diverse habitat mosaic, which is important not only for the trout that I'm particularly interested in, but also for the invertebrates that feed those trout and for anything that might feed upon the trout themselves.  

"It's important in terms of us being able to slow the flow up here, which obviously has a knock-on effect further down the valley. If we can dissipate the energy up here and spread the water out onto the valley floor a little bit earlier in the system, then obviously that means there’s less power and force of water going down the valley which may cause issues for settlements, bridges or agriculture further down.  

"Even up here towards the head of the valley, this channel has been straightened. At the same time as it's been dug out and straightened, a lot of the walling stone has been removed from the bed of the river. What we're actually doing is unstraightening it and putting that stone back into the channel from where it's been stolen in the past, if you like.  

"Because it's been dug artificially and straightened, it's incised down into the bed and therefore disconnected from the rest of the floodplain. By putting this walling stone back in, during higher flows, water can get out across the floodplain much more easily. And even here, which was actually walled all the way down the side to stop the erosion going in that direction, we’re not worried about erosion up here, it’s a natural process that we kind of reinstate by taking the wall away.” 

Alec Pue: “prior to this work, Jonny Grey from the Wild Trout Trust was out here undertaking electrofishing surveys to see what we have in these watercourses already. That shapes how we go about the work and gives us a baseline to see the response to our interventions."

Jonny Grey: “here we found about four to five species of fish, including wild brown trout and bullheads, to name just a few, and we’ve also got white-clawed crayfish in the water which we knew about as well already. We use electrofishing equipment to send an electric current through the water to temporarily stun the fish. They aren't stunned per se; they're just trapped in the electric field, which allows us to net them, take them out, put them in a bucket. As soon as the electricity is off, they recover immediately. We can then identify, age, and measure them to tell us something about the population structure and the community structure up in this area.  

"I'm most interested in the brown trout. They’re very lively. The fact that I'm not seeing many zero plus fish (the youngest age cohort) suggests that the spawning habitat isn't as good as it could be. A lot of the work we’re carrying on further upstream is to improve the spawning habitat and making it better for the egg laying potential and the fry potential to boost the production of trout throughout the whole system.  

"I work for the Wild Trout Trust and use the trout as a sentinel species. We are being part-funded for this by the Fishery Improvement Program from the Environment Agency. That’s rod license money from anglers recirculated back into improving the habitat. If we get it right for the trout up here, there's more trout production that will drip feed down into the system for the benefit of anglers and for the benefit of all the ecology up here.” 

Alec Pue: “so here at Snaizeholme we see the way the water travels off the site is really important, not only how it gets off and how fast it comes off in terms of natural flood management, but more importantly the actual water habitats themselves. Even though it seems like a wild landscape, there's been a lot of man-made interventions into this and it’s been influenced by man over the decades. For us to start returning natural processes to these watercourses and give them a helping hand is really important to us. We see the work we’re doing today and over the next couple of weeks as stage one in that return to rewilding this area. Hopefully, in the next few years, we'll have more stages of work looking specifically at water habitat improvement.” 

Thank you. The Snaizeholme Estate was acquired by the Woodland Trust thanks to the generosity of our incredible individual supporters, charitable trusts and corporate partners. The river restoration work with the Wild Trout Trust received Fishery Improvement Programme funding from the Environment Agency.