Life of a Chalkstream: Battle of the polluters

Greetings!

Do you feel sorry for farmers, now reduced to paying Inheritance Tax along with the rest of us non tillers of the land? I must admit I am struggling as the loophole so egregiously exploited by agriculture for decades will now see the closure of thousands of small family businesses who will be caught in the crossfire.

In the wake of all that I was not a little amused to read that the farming community reaction is to threaten to bring the water industry to its knees by refusing to shovel the sewage waste aka toxic s**t, for which they are handsomely rewarded, onto their fields. See my September article on this institutionally approved pollution if you missed it.

Goodness, this is really going to be the battle of the polluting giants. In the red corner farmers who are responsible for 40% of river pollution. In the blue corner water companies who are responsible for another 40%.

Frankly, my only hope is that the s**t embargo does become reality. At least that way we will be spared further this particularly heinous form of agricultural pollution whilst the water industry is forced to find a non-polluting solution to the waste they were meant to have dealt with in the first place.

Waterland

Before I headed off on my current trip, I did what I have not done for a very long time – I went out to buy a book. There is something strangely constant about bookshops. Despite the onslaught of technology, they remain much as they were fifty years ago. The smell. The layout. The shelving categories by genre or topic. The just in table. The topical table. Staffed by people who are truly passionate about books. I hardly dare ask a question for fear of being unable to replicate their enthusiasm for a selected or recommended book.

If I want to buy a particular book I use Amazon, so any trip to a bookshop proper is an entirely random affair. I am not a great buyer of biographies or factual books; it is the fiction shelves that draw me, alphabetically democratic, potentially giving every book an equal chance of catching the eye. For me, I am a sucker for a) a cover and b) trigger words so when I chanced upon Waterland by Graham Swift that featured eels on the cover there was no way I was going to leave Waterstone’s without it.

I am not sure whether I have read a Swift novel before – Waterland is nothing new having been first published way back in 1983, his third novel in a career that spans a dozen or more books and four decades. Nor do I ever recall having heard of Graham Swift which is a big fail for me as he won the Booker Prize in 1996, back in the day when there was a good chance that a winning Booker writer will still be being read in a hundred years’ time.

At this particular moment, being only a few chapters in, I cannot reveal the true worth of Waterland to you, but it has already captured me. Set in the Fens, a land of silt that is only borrowed from the sea, Swift evokes the temporary nature of our occupation of wetlands on which dry footed humans do not really belong. It is impossible, at least for me, to not draw parallels with the chalkstreams along with his fascination with eels. I will leave you with a quote from the opening pages,

“… the chief fact about the Fens is that they are reclaimed land, land that was once water, and which, even today, is not quite solid.”

Weed rack rescue

This is a strange time of year for us. One season is over but the next seems a very, very long way away with all that is bad about the British weather between now and the opening day. Believe me, it is hard to keep your mojo going when you start in the dark, finish in the dark, battling rain, mud and cold just to put one foot in front of another.

However, all that said it is a time of year to get your teeth into jobs that were put off during the season simply because there was not enough time or they are disruptive. One such job is the weed rack on the River Itchen at Abbots Worthy. Weed racks are really a throwback to the time of working mills when the waterwheel had to be protected from weed, logs or general debris being carried by the stream into the channel housing the wheel, jamming it up. The least worst outcome is a temporary blockage but at the other end of the scale the detritus could cause flooding, snap off the wheel paddles or at the very worst, heave the wheel off its axle.

So, a weed rack would be installed a few yards upstream of the mill angled to the current with the uprights wide enough apart to let the water through whilst capturing the debris which would be diverted down a side stream to rejoin the main flow downstream of the mill. You will occasionally find these racks built of metal, or a combination of wood and metal, though in the case of Abbots Worthy this is of the more common all wood construction with a walkway that doubles as a footbridge and a platform for clearing any build up against the uprights.

On the Itchen you can see river keepers Si and Charley deploying their carpentry skills stripping out the old oak uprights, called arris rails, essentially square sections of timber cut with a triangular cross section. As ever, the replacement is never as simple as it looks. The arris rails, the bottom half of which are permanently submerged, are supported at water level by oak cross beams between the main upright posts. The beams take huge pressure when combined with heavy flows and a build-up of weed on the rack. They are currently failing in this so we have had to double the thickness of the cross beams and have our metal worker friend make up some crucifix shaped brackets to spread the load and secure the fixings.

It has taken a bit of trial and error to get it right with five new cross beams and a hundred new arris rails but Si & Charley are getting there. The aim is to use all new oak rails working from the left, salvaging the best of the old ones, to reuse on the right, which is out of the main current. Despite the extra cutting and drilling effort, oak is always a joy to work with and its longevity will see this particular round of repairs good for twenty years or more.

Quiz

The normal random collection of questions inspired by the date, events or topics in the Newsletter. It is just for fun with answers at the bottom of the page.

1) What does the J in Donald J Trump stand for?

2) Who disappeared from his London home on this day in 1974?

3) Who lost to who on this day in 2016?

Have a good weekend.

PS In the last Newsletter I clumsily wrote it was the last of the season suggesting it was the last of the year. Sorry, both for any confusion and that you will remain peppered by me on a continuing biweekly basis.

PPS I have held over the Feedback Draw until next time, so there is still time to get your report in.

Best wishes,