Dear Friends,
I love rivers. I have always found them fascinating. Something about the never-ending movement of water means they are always changing, always new. As a young child, I guess like many, I loved to play in them. I remember my grandmother in Coventry used to take my sister and me to a secret glade in the local woods where, if we were quiet, we might catch a glimpse of the fairies dancing among the bluebells. A small brook ran through it and we would take off our socks and shoes, paddle and explore, lifting pebbles to see what was under them. It was a truly magical place. At university this developed into a love of white-water kayaking, where you become one with the river, reading it, sensing its movement, flowing with it, being submerged in its excitement and energy. And sometimes capsizing in the process. Actually, we capsized so often we developed a club motto, ‘better a wally than a wimp’ – in other words, its better to have a go and make a fool of yourself than never to try at all.
Since those days, I have spent my life studying rivers professionally as a hydrologist. Not in the way a fisherman might, who comes to intimately know the moods and character of a particular river, but from a more scientific perspective. I have travelled around the country looking at rivers of all sizes, measuring their flows. Each one is different. I try to understand why and how they behave during both floods and droughts, how the underlying geology shapes their response to rainfall, how the steepness and breadth of the catchment concentrates or attenuates the flows, what kind of ecology it supports, what effect different types of land use have on the baseflow and the water quality. And, of course, trying to quantify the effects of climate change on their behaviour.
As I’ve said before, one of the things that unites us as a benefice is that all our parishes lie within the River Lyne catchment. But the Lyne and its tributaries have many different characters. The upper part of the river comprises the two main tributaries of the Black and the White Lynes, the latter of which I gauge as it passes Greenholme. The Black Lyne is the larger, but both rise high up in the Bewcastle Fells, just metres from the headwaters of the North Tyne. These are the rugged moorland peat bogs with rough grazing and forestry plantations, of deep cleughs and waterfalls, of gills, sikes, grains and burns, where the river is young. This is where the migratory sea trout used to find their spawning gravels in days of yore. But the forestry practice of ploughing straight up the hillslope has a drastic effect on the response of this part of the catchment to rainfall, increasing both the speed of runoff, and hence flood peaks, and the sedimentation load, while reducing the amount of water held back to sustain lower flows in the summer. Gradually over the years as the saplings start to grow runoff slowly diminishes, both in response to heavy rainfall, and in dry conditions where the soil now dries out. When the trees are clear-felled, again a dramatic change occurs with flashier responses to rainfall in the winter but still drier in the summer.
Then the rivers start maturing and enter more in-by land, eventually uniting at Low Luckens to become one – the Lyne, joined later by the Hether Burn draining Bolton Fell peat moss. Here the gradients aren’t so steep, but there are still plenty of drops and rapids. The rivers widen and develop flood plains. Banks are wooded with alder, ash, rowan, beech and bird cherry. Farming practices here have a different kind of impact. Field drains lead water that was once held on the land quickly to the rivers, again increasing response times to rainfall, giving higher flood flows and lower baseflows. But perhaps less obviously, heavy machinery used in spreading slurry and cutting silage compacts the soils over the years, allowing less infiltration and increasing overland flow and soil erosion. Coupled with the application of fertiliser and slurry to improve sward growth, and glyphosates to control reshes, this in turn means higher nitrate and glyphosate-related chemical concentrations, and persistent pollutants (such as PBDEs) found in slurry, entering the rivers with devastating consequences on aquatic ecology, especially fish. These have all but disappeared from our river, as any old-time fisherman will tell you, and the White Lyne river bed, for one, is now covered in grey filamentous algae. Farmers are not to blame, we are; a theme I hope to expand on in future.
Now the Lyne fully matures and meanders through the low-lying land and gentle gradients west of Cliff Bridge. There are fewer riffles here, just the occasional weir. Flat fields proliferate with less grazing and more cultivation due to richer soils and drier weather. Nitrate concentrations again increase. Eventually it flows into the Border Esk upstream of the M6 crossing, before entering the Solway Firth to become part of the wide Atlantic Ocean.
The River Lyne comprises all these different tributaries, aspects and characters. The river’s life, as a whole, is defined by each part of it; what happens in one stage affect the others, be that water quantity, quality, or ecology. Far from having just a ‘passing interest’, they all interact with, and depend on, each other. Indeed, we couldn’t understand the river, and it couldn’t exist, without each of them – they are all part of the one river. Much like the church, really. We could say ‘we are one river because we all share in the one water.’
Your friend and priest,
Robert.
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