A thread on why nature conservation needs to go underground...
Yesterday, while I was kneeling in the grass putting tree cages together, I heard the sound of running water coming up through a hole in the soil, probably dug by a mole.
I grabbed a spade and started digging. Two feet or so down, the spade hit a flat stone with a hollow thud, the sound of running water now louder from below. I dug around it, to find the stone was interleaved with two others, making it hard to lift.
Enlarging the hole to expose all sides of the flat stone, I managed to lever it up and out, exposing a neat, square channel, through which a clear running stream was babbling away.
The channel was incredibly well made, and had likely had water flowing through it for centuries. Overlapping flat stones with small gaps between them, topped with a layer of gravel allowed water in, but prevented soil falling through, ensuring the drain would be maintenance free.
If I were to have kept digging, I'd have found that the channel would have run the whole length of the field, and it wouldn't have been the only one. Put a digger bucket in the ground almost anywhere in a field in a wet part of countryside, and you'll find the same thing.
Over the course of centuries, astonishing amounts of labour have gone into land drainage. The toil and the skill involved are easily comparable with the construction of the thousands of miles of dry stone walls which criss-cross our upland landscapes.
Imagine the work involved in digging trenches, hauling and sorting vast amounts stone, building the chambers, all of it by hand in wet mud. No maps exist of these drains, but there are undoubtedly thousands of miles of them flowing away beneath the ground.
Draining the land was one of the many innovations that allowed people living in the unforgiving terrain of the uplands to survive. The wetlands that existed prior to land drainage would have been near impossible to grow crops in, unappealing to livestock and hard to traverse.
The drainage network has lowered the water table, in many places by several feet, drying the soil to allow it to be worked, tilled and grazed. An incredible undertaking. But one that we are now paying a high price for.
In our rapidly changing climate, flooding is becoming more frequent and increasingly devastating. Drainage has optimised the landscape to shed water as quickly as possible, accelerating the speed with which it is shed from high ground to low.
Sending water downstream as fast as possible makes if you're an upland farmer, but downstream is where almost all the population lives.
BBC News - Carlisle flooding causes major travel disruption - BBC News bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
There is growing awareness of the harm done by moorland drainage, and of the need for restoration. In higher, steeper ground, drains were usually left open. Unless land was to be tilled, there was no need to cover them, or to make them as deep.
This makes the drainage of unenclosed land, and the damage it's done, far more obvious. But the buried drains running below enclosed land has done just as much environmental harm.
It's reckoned that we've lost 90% of our wetlands, and most of that will be down to drainage. I find it hard to envisage just how much wetter and richer the land must have been before it was drained. The abundance of wildlife would have been mind-blowing. naturalengland.blog.gov.uk/2024/02/02/wet…
Anyone who has dug a pond knows just how quickly wildlife responds. Dragonflies and other insects find open water with astonishing speed. Birds and amphibians quickly follow. Imagine that scaled up to the landscape level, and how impossibly rich our countryside must have been.
Although there is no real prospect of restoring our lost wetlands in their entirety, there is still lots that can be done. While digging these ponds on the farm a few weeks ago, we found stone drains 7ft down. Blocking them has brought the water back into the light.
Here's another example, down the valley on the Lowther Estate. This tarn (as yet unnamed) sprung into being by removing a single large underground drain. Lapwing bred on its muddy edges the first spring after it was made, and it's busy with birds all year round.
(📷 Tony Rumsey)
When we did the river restoration work in Swindale, we cut through drains every few yards. There were deep stone drains, as well as, concrete, clay tile & plastic ones. Every digging project I've been involved with in Cumbria has found them. Basically, they're everywhere.
We refer to the thousands of miles of tunnels under the soil as drains, but we should really call them what they are - buried rivers, sunken lakes and vanished wetlands. And then we should accelerate the work of bringing them back to the surface.
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Having grown a bit sick of the silly conservation vs farming narrative, last year I started on a series of articles about farmers doing great things for #nature in #Cumbria. I didn't do one on @herdyshepherd1, but thankfully, I had lots of other farms to choose from. (THREAD)
First up (unsurprisingly) was @wildhaweswater, where I'm lucky enough to work as site manager. We are hoping to show how sustainable upland farming can work alongside ecological restoration. We're learning lots in the process. @Natures_Voiceleeschofield.co.uk/farming-with-n…
Next, I visited Sam & Claire at @gowbarrow, on the beautiful shores of Ullswater. They're doing brillinat regenerative farming, with cattle, pigs and ponies. leeschofield.co.uk/farming-with-n…
Today I decided to return to Young Wood, one of the @lakedistrictnpa's most fascinating ecological fragments. It doesn't look like much from the road outside our house, 3 miles away across the valley, just a fuzz of green on the side of Bowscale Fell.
There was lots of good stuff on the way. First, I walked through @cumbriawildlife's Eycott Hill nature reserve. The planted juniper scrub and broadleaf trees are thriving, escaping their guards in places. A young wood, in sight of Young Wood.
A tiny bit of trespassing allowed me to hop from the Eycott Hill Access Land 'island' to another one containing White Moss, a lovely raised mire. It was good seeing birch growing where a conifer plantation was removed at the bog edge.
This is the sort of article that sparks righteous indignation at both a lack of compliance and at the failure of government to enforce its own rules. However, this is a more complicated picture than first meets the eye... (THREAD) theguardian.com/environment/20…
Since WW2, farmers have been encouraged and incentivised to intensify food production. At the same time, consumers have paid less and less and for their food.
Dairy farmers have been at the sharp end of this. They have been hugely successful at increasing their milk yields, with most switching to more intensive forms of grassland management with the aid of fertiliser, increasing herd sizes and keeping cattle inside for longer periods.
Took a wet walk through some first class WOOD PASTURE on the shore of #ullswater this morning. Here's a thread to explain why it's such a fantastic habitat, and why we need more of it.
On the face of it, wood pasture is just a field with trees in it, but it's so much more than this. When well managed, with the right level of grazing, wood pasture is one of the richest habitats we have. In fact, it's more than just one, it's a habitat mosaic.
One of the most prominent features of a wood pasture, is big, old #trees. This one has lots of oak, ash, birch, holly, sycamore, hawthorn and alder, many with abundant rot holes, perfect for pied flycatchers, restarts and other hole nesting #bird species.