I have been neglecting my blog of late: things have been so busy working on behalf of the Rivers Trust with Defra on their long awaited (and not long now, I hope) chalk stream recovery pack. Back in the world of fixing the wild and the wet – the bit I really enjoy – chalkstreamfly has now finished and launched its film of our recent Water Environment Grant (WEG) restoration project on the River Nar. You can see the film HERE on their YouTube channel. Already there are loads of kind comments on there, which is incredibly heartening.

The film was sponsored by the Wild Trout Trust and the Norfolk Rivers Drainage Board, in the hope that it might inspire other projects along similar lines on other chalk streams. Personally, I feel we are just getting started with this type of restoration, one that looks at the whole width of the floodplain and tries to create a mosaic of habitats, not just the flowing channel of the stream, but the side channels and wet woodland and fen. The basis of the WEG grant.

One of things I really enjoyed about this project was seeing how we could repurpose the old, diverted channel, the mill leats effectively, which had been dredged and were quite homogenous. Of 2km of old channel, bypassed by the rediscovered and reinvented meanders, we only filled in the top 50m. The rest is flowing with groundwater and really seems to be enjoying life in it’s new identity as a spring-fed fen. The transformative power of process-based restoration at scale is astonishing in my view and I hope we can all start pushing the boundaries and learning from each other.

I would like to emphasise that this project was all about collaboration. The landowners were amazing. Holkham, West Acre and Narford, all thoroughly embraced what amounted to radical change. The Norfolk Rivers Drainage Board – brainlessly traduced by some campaigners in Norfolk – were fantastic project managers.

The public were great too. A path runs alongside the river here and every single person who passed was supportive, in spite of the fact that the site did look a bit raw during the delivery.

The new channel, by the way, is rammed with wild trout and the flooded woodland is bullhead soup with a side helping of very, very fat trout parr. All very nice to see.