The most erodible catchment in the UK
The Rother has the dubious accolade of being the most erodible catchment in the UK. Here the sandy soils are easily washed into the river during rainfall. Soil in the river is known as sediment. It affects water quality and smothers gravels and plants. Fish can’t lay their eggs in gravels which are smothered by sediment.
To quote an American Geomorphologist:
The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land.
- Luna Leopold
Never was this truer than in relation to sediment in the Rother.
Sealing our soils
Soils are incredible, and their story is inextricably linked with our rivers. In a natural system soils hold water during rainfall, making it available for plants and releasing it slowly to the riverscape over time. But in so many areas we are sealing our soils, installing hard surfaces instead. Water rushes off hard surfaces, increasing the risk of flooding. Around 30,000 properties in our area are at risk of flooding from this type of ‘surface water’.
Run-off also washes pollution from our roads into rivers. Using our cars leaves behind a toxic mix of chemicals on the surface of the road (think of the black slush when it snows). These chemicals then run into our rivers - a poisonous peril for the wildlife living there.
Let rivers be rivers!
We have installed many structures in our rivers, such as locks, weirs, and culverts (where the river flows through a giant pipe). They interrupt the natural flow, stop fish moving up and downstream and, in the Rother, trap huge amounts of sediment behind them.
240 structures in our rivers prevent fish swimming up and downstream
We’ve spent the last few hundred years manipulating river flows, trying to drain land, direct rivers, hold water back here and there to suit our human needs. We’ve now realised the error of our ways and will likely spend the next few decades trying to reverse this!
Straightening rivers and forcing them into man-made channels prevents them from behaving naturally. Luna Leopold also said ‘The stream has to have change’. Our rivers need to be free to grow and shrink, shift and sway. They should be sinuous, meandering here and there in braided multi-channels. Rivers and floodplains should be one in the same entity. Our desire to control rivers is often at our peril - we see more frequent and severe flooding events downstream where rivers are constrained.
Where there’s space to do so we need to re-wet the landscape, allowing nature to do its thing. There are so many benefits for us too.