River work

Young welcoming party at Meadow farm

The WT team being introduced to the days task

Start of the river section 'narrowing'

Spent today with the WT on the river Dikler, downstream from Hyde mill and close to Meadow farm. Richard & John were leading and as well as the usual volunteers we were joined by Defra & NE representatives, all amounting to over 20 people. Before starting on a variety of 'river tasks' we were fortunate to see a kingfisher fly by obviously a little put off from its quiet fishing by such a large body of human invaders.

I with one group of 'workers' were directed to carry out the usual 'shade' clearance to help improve our favourite water vole's habitat. In this instance there were a number of mature trees which were to be left to provide some shading to ensure the brown trout were not too disadvantaged. The other work was to deal with sections of the Dikler which had become too wide and to start work to reduce the width by forming an artificial river bank where the original bank would have been. This was done using stakes weaving in suitable vegetation/fascines to form a barrier behind which the new river bank would establish itself. Sadly I didn't get the opportunity to use one of the 4 seriously large sledge hammers for setting the stakes securely in place. I had fond memories of similar work which addressed bank erosion at Hyde mill, amazingly 2 years ago!.