Key

L: = Interviewer, Lesley
RC: = Interviewee, Raymond Clarke
[time e.g. 5:22] = inaudible word at this time
[5:22 IA] = inaudible section at this time
[word] = best guess at word
… = interruption in sentence, trailing off or short pause

RC:I first moved to the area in 1981, I’d been a stranger to the Eden Valley before that. I started working as a water bailiff on the Eden and tributaries in September 1981 and a couple of years later I bought a small house in Temple Sowerby and lived there for about 13 years. So that was very close to Acorn Bank and Crowdundle Beck. I remember a few years after being there, maybe in my early 30s, I had a spell of doing a bit of running and some mornings, not very many, I’d get up a bit earlier maybe and get my running gear on and go for a run from Temple Sowerby and down past the Tannery and along to Acorn Bank through the fields, run around the woodland track near the beck and then all the way back, more or less on a big circular route, back on the road. I think it was about three miles and then by that time I was ready for a bath and then breakfast and away on after that. It was a good way to keep yourself feeling fit but I don’t think I could do that much now, I’d probably struggle to run a mile, never mind three miles, or even less than that.

L:And you’re still running?

RC:No.

L:

RC:The job I do now is sampling water for the EA and that involves an awful lot of driving, all day, all day, drive, drive, drive, all over Cumbria and it’s a huge area that we cover. I’ve been doing that for, I think, 13 years now. I had 30 years in as a water bailiff and then sadly it all ended, they cut back severely on them and I was first in line to be moved and luckily there were some jobs in another department so I moved into that.

L:That’s all with the Environment Agency?

RC:It is, it is, yes, yes.

L:What exactly is a water bailiff?

RC:Well, it was… we were first called water bailiffs and then we were known as fisheries officers. It was a law enforcement role, really, that’s the main thing, law enforcement to do with fisheries, all the legislation to do with fisheries.

L:Catching poachers?

RC:Catching poachers, that was the main task really, monitoring anglers, checking fishing licences and making sure people aren’t taking fish in winter when they shouldn’t when they’re out of season. Making sure people maybe weren’t using illegal bait and adhering to the size limit although we never found anyone taking anything small.

L:Your role since then has been a water sampler?

RC:Aye, that’s right, taking water samples, yeah. We take them from various places in the rivers, some of them in the lakes, and septic tanks, ground water dips, ground water samples from people that have boreholes. Some farms have boreholes, not all farms, and not all farms that have boreholes get sampled.

L:Is that to look for pollution?

RC:Looking for nitrates and any pollutants in water, that’s right. Aye. And we do groundwater dips which is measuring how far down the groundwater is, like the levels of groundwater. And we do rain gauges, which is only once a month. We record them nearest to the end of the month or to the first of the month, that’s quite nice, a nice change. We do seawater sampling for bathing waters, that’s from May until the middle of September. There’s a few beaches, they get done.

L:Like St. Bees?

RC:Yes, St. Bees and Seascale and Haverigg and Walney and Silecroft, yeah and even Windermere Lake is classed as a bathing water so we do that.

L:Well that’s got into the news a bit, hasn’t it?

RC:Yeah, we do that one and we do… Coniston’s a bathing water but that’s just from May until September. Sampling water in the rivers and some of the lakes, it’s just the everyday job. Another thing we do is insect sampling in spring and in autumn, that’s a three-minute kick sample and it involves standing in the rivers at a designated place and scuffing the gravel with your wader, wellington, wader boot, and then holding a fine mesh net downstream of your foot and then the scuffing up and disturbing of the gravel, that causes the insects to drift back into the net and then they’re caught and then they’re put into a white tray and the gravel and the stones and weed and leaves are taken out with tweezers and then all the insects are gathered up into a net and then put into a pot and then taken to the laboratory at Penrith. Then we preserve them there and then eventually a scientist would look at them under a microscope and roughly count what numbers and definitely what species there are and roughly what sort of numbers of each species. It’s a bit of a quick health check, really. If there was no insects there then alarm bells would be ringing and they’d be wondering why. Normally there’s a good number of insects and generally I think it’s quite a good site to see quite a lot of insects. Some of the fell becks have got not a lot in but…

L:How far up do you go?

RC:They are a bit sterile, some of the fell becks on the Lake District area. Crowdundle doesn’t have a kick sample, there’s one on the Eden at Temple Sowerby bridge, that’s an annual one, twice.

L:That’s where you were today?

RC:I was there today, earlier on. I wasn’t doing a kick sample but a water sample there. I took about a dozen bottles, different bottles. When I was at Temple Sowerby bridge today I saw some otter footprints.

L:When was this, today?

RC:Today, yeah. No surprise, it’s quite a… you’ve more chance now of seeing otter footprints than mink footprints. The mink have really declined and the otters have come back and are very widespread now.

L:Are the two things related, that mink are declining?

RC:They’re not related.

L:I mean, if they’re getting rid of the mink does that help the otters?

RC:I think the otters are a bit more dominant, I don’t think mink like it where there’s otters about. But the otters have… and people are more aware of it and to try and get water voles back in certain areas where there would have been water voles. RSPB and Eden Rivers Trust, Cumbria Wildlife Trust, they’ve all been involved in… and Environment Agency, in this few projects to release water voles and then they’ll release some water voles, some captive water voles.

L:Do otters eat water voles too?

RC:They probably would if they got the chance. They probably would but the problem with the mink is that they’re so small, especially the female mink, they can get down the burrows of these water voles and catch the adults and the babies inside the hole. So they’re quite vulnerable to mink.

L:The otters will be eating… what sort of things are the otters eating?

RC:Frogs, frogs, they love frogs, especially at this time of the year in spring when the frogs are very evident in all the marshy land and the ponds, they’re spawning. They’re so vulnerable to otter predation, they’ll be scoffing their heads off frogs. They’ll be eating them, they’ll be really, really eating them a lot. Some of the otters will have had a bit of a lean winter, I would think. You know, when rivers are in flood and it’s a long winter for everything and come spring and they come across a big pond full of frogs, they’ll know they’re there and they’ll keep going back for a good feed. Then you can see in the otters’ droppings, they’re called spraints, a posh name for poo – spraint, and black, about the size of your little finger, full of little tiny bones and a lot of them bones will be frog bones. It depends on the time of the year and what they’ve been eating. And then sometimes you’ll see it’s full of fish scales, full of little tiny maybe vertebrae bones of fish as well. But they like frogs, they like eels, they like salmon as well. They like any fish, any fish they’ll tackle and eat. They even take salmon, I didn’t think they would but they do. I’ve seen a few times where there’s been a salmon and the otters had its otter’s bite. It’s known as the otter’s bite and quite often they take a good old feed out of the shoulder of the fish. It’s so big they can’t possibly have it all. They tackle them, there’s no doubt. My granddad said, ‘Oh, they always just eat eels, they don’t bother salmon,’ and I always believed him but it’s been proved differently since I got to know it.

L:I suppose it depends how many eels there are.

RC:Well, eels have declined terribly. They used to be incredibly common, the eels. 30-odd years ago there was… 40-odd years ago there was vast numbers of eels. And then they had this eel virus.

L:When was that?

RC:I think it started about 30 years ago, a big decline in them. Huge decline.

L:And nobody knows what caused the virus?

RC:I’m not sure. I don’t really know but they have declined. But I think they are coming back a bit, the eels. When we do some electric fishing surveys in certain places there are quite a lot of eels.

L:That sounds interesting, what’s an electric fishing…?

RC:Oh, that’s another task that we do is they have designated sites and some of them are annual sites and some of them are maybe on a six-year site. It involves electrocuting the water and wading upstream and catching the fish as they get temporarily stunned and then they drift back into a net. Then as soon as they’re removed from the electric field, or taken out of the water, the fish react as though they’ve never been stunned and they’re completely unharmed. And then they’re put into a keep box. Then when the section has been fished through, it’s usually between 40-50m, and sometimes it’s fished through twice and occasionally three times. Then all the fish are very carefully measured and see what species they are and the catchers say, there’s a woman scribing, and the catchers would say “Salmon, 130,” it’s all measured in millimetres, or “Trout, 60” and it goes on and on and on like that until they’ve either got a number that they don’t need to measure every one, every fry doesn’t always have to be measured. Once they’ve got about a hundred fry measured I don’t think they need to bother every one so they just count the number of fry. But they do need to say whether it’s a salmon or a trout fry. From about July onwards you can tell if it’s a salmon fry or a trout fry because of the shape of the tail of the salmon and also the little tiny, silvery scales on a baby salmon and also on a brown trout it’s got a little red adipose fin on, that’s the fin above the tail. That’s quite interesting but I’ve not been involved with that much these last few years.

L:Are any of these species evident in Crowdundle or is it…?

RC:It’s a good river, is Crowdundle, for fish. It is, it always was a very, very good river for fish. There’s good variety in there. There’s all the usual types, the salmon go up there, there’s brown trout in there, eels are in there, lampreys in there, there’ll be bullhead lamprey.

L:Is that a type of eel?

RC:It’s a bit like an eel. It’s a bit like a giant sort of worm that lives under the mud. River lamprey or brook lamprey. And they’re about… well, between four and six inches long. A bit like a tiny smooth snake.

L:Like a grass snake, yes?

RC:Tiny thing though. Yeah, like a slowworm, almost, a tiny thing. Yeah, very silvery.

L:If I knew what I was looking for in Crowdundle Beck I could find some of these?

RC:Usually only if they’re spawning that you see like a little ball of them spawning. I’ve seen it a few times when they’ve been spawning and they choose very fine gravel and there can be a cluster of these lampreys spawning. And they’re almost like wrapped round and knotted around each other. I’ve seen as many as about 50 in one place and I’ve seen this maybe half a dozen times. But apart from that then you wouldn’t see a lamprey, only by electrofishing which draws them out of the mud.

L:Right, because they don’t like the electricity.

RC:No, no, it brings them out, it brings them out. Sea lampreys, they come up the River Eden. It’s quite amazing, it’s an ancient species, the sea lamprey, and they spawn and they’re visible spawning. They’re very large things, they can be up to three foot long, great huge things, quite scary. Great big rasping mouths on them as well and they can cling on to salmon and suck the goodness out of them.

L:Are they parasitic then?

RC:They are, they catch things doing that, yeah. I don’t think they’ll be up Crowdundle, I don’t think.

L:No. Crayfish, I’ve heard there’s crayfish down there.

RC:Yes, there ought to be crayfish, I’ve not seen crayfish in Crowdundle but there ought to be. Yeah, there certainly ought to be. Yes, it’s a great beck is Crowdundle and it’s a very long beck. It starts a way up on Cross Fell, it goes right down, it’s joined by its major tributary, Milburn Beck, that’s just above Newbiggin Hall. So once it gets joined by Milburn Beck it’s a good sized beck, especially in winter or especially if it’s in a flood. Milburn’s quite a good beck, that’s a nice beck for fish, a lot of trout go up there.

L:Is that private fishing up there?

RC:It will be. It’ll all be owned by whoever owns the land. There’s no fishing club has fishing rights, it’s just owned by whoever owns the land. I used to occasionally fish on the roadside when I lived at Temple Sowerby, occasionally if it was just after a flood I’d go and try and catch myself a trout. But I’ve been back to that a few times and where you could get in it was all grass and now it’s actually a massive thick bramble patch. The whole thing is, it’s totally impenetrable and you wouldn’t be able to get near to the river edge. It’s quite incredible really.

L:So is that near Acorn Bank?

RC:It is, just below the gates of Acorn Bank. Yes, all that was grass and now brambles have come. It’s not a bad thing, brambles are a good thing, there’ll be all sorts in there. Keeps people out I suppose. Yeah, you used to catch… usually you used to catch one or two fishing in there after a flood or on a flood. Bit of free water right on the roadside. Although I was a member of Penrith Angling Club as well but it was a bit of a change being able to use a worm in there because Penrith is fly only, you see. Yeah, I like a bit of variety, I’m not a purist.

L:That’s not cheating then?

RC:No, no, I’m not a purist. It’s a bit of a change of technique.

L:Yes. Has there been a big change in the number of species, then?

RC:There’s been a huge decline in fish, especially salmon, sadly. There’s a massive decline. Probably declined, I would think, 80% decline. Yeah, a huge decline in salmon. No-one really knows why for sure, they think it’s a combination of reasons. But I think it’s something in the sea that’s altered. It must be, to cause that sort of alteration. Because there’s such a lot of good work been done in the rivers and it’s had the medicine but it hasn’t really responded to the treatment.

L:So it’s a bigger…

RC:The EA and Eden Rivers Trust, the EA’s funded quite a bit and Eden Rivers Trust have funded a lot and between them they’ll have fenced off, especially Eden Rivers Trust, they’ll have fenced off probably a hundred miles of river now which is incredible, that. It keeps stock out of the river and it allows the river banks… You get this buffer zone and the wider it is, the better. And that allows everything to come back and grow up and it doesn’t get grazed and willows and alders come back and bluebells come back. You get all sorts in the river edge, just how it would be if man had left the Earth, really. And now one or two barriers have been removed, not just one or two but several, manmade barriers.

L:Weirs?

RC:Yes, weirs, yes. They’ve been taken out and that gives fish a better access, better chance of getting up without using too much energy. In some cases it was a total stopper where fish couldn’t get up. They were quite a hindrance, some of the manmade barriers, the natural barriers aren’t tackled and aren’t altered, that’s like a natural thing. But any manmade barrier has been a target and they’ve successfully removed quite a lot.

L:Is there anything about the environment of Crowdundle Beck that you particularly like as a place to go and relax? At the beginning you talked about running round there.

RC:Yeah, I very much admire the snowdrops, it’s absolutely incredible is that. There must be, I don’t know, a million snowdrops, I’d say at a guess.

L:We had snowdrop weekend and I was giving clickers to the kids and they were saying, ‘Don’t try and count the snowdrops,’ but maybe I should have.

RC:And then after the snowdrops it’s the wild daffodils and they’re incredible as well, amazing. What a beautiful sight, it really is.

L:Yeah, and the ransoms, the wild garlic.

RC:A lot of the wild garlic, yes. You can certainly smell that now. I’ve been around today, nearer Carlisle, and it’s growing quite rapidly and it’s certainly got quite a hum with it, hasn’t it?

L:Yes, it has.

RC:It has, yes. And then there’s such a lot of lovely old oak trees along Crowdundle Beck, some of them are ancient things. And probably I think 200 year old, they must be. Great harbours for all sorts of creatures. I know there’s one or two badger holes near the beck and massive, massive fortresses and huge halls, like little bears must be in there and it’s as safe as houses. They’ll never be ever dug out by any badger diggers in there, they’d never get them, they’re so safe. Badgers have come back in big numbers compared to what they were 40 years ago. But a long time ago, before I was married, I was aware that there was a badger sett below Acorn Bank cottages and I’d been myself to watch them a couple of times. Sort of fascinated by them, really, quite a bit of entertainment. And anyway I told my wife to be about it and she told her mum and dad and they came all the way from Ambleside to my cottage at Temple Sowerby. And we walked from there all the way over to Acorn Bank cottages, across into the wood, only maybe a hundred yards or so from the road and we laid down, all four of us, and then waited. We were rewarded by a great load of badgers coming out and I think there’d be, I don’t know, four or five or six. They were playing around and chasing each other for quite a while and we were there watching them until we’d seen enough and then we just crept away. I think it got towards dusk and away we went and my mother-in-law, Fiona, she later made a little sewing thing and she called it… she said the date was on, it was in July, I think it was 1996 and she said, ‘The day we saw badger.’ And she embroidered a badger on this little… like a little placemat, I would call it. And we’ve still got it somewhere. She was a very skilled needlewoman, she was. So quite a nice little reminder of that date. Nice little black and white face.

L:Well that’s a lovely story, thank you. That’s a really nice thing we can use.

RC:Well it once suffered from a bad flood, did Crowdundle Beck, I think it would be in the early ‘90s, maybe… no, late ‘90s because I remember borrowing my wife’s horse wagon because my car was in the garage and, believe it or not, I drove the horse wagon, she had a big wagon then, well it was a Dodge, a decent sized wagon for her horses. And I drove it up to the golf ball up on Dun Fell, you know, where the aviation station is. And I left it below the gate because there’s a locking gate there, I didn’t want to get locked in. But there was three or four of us and we had to see what damage this flood had done to the becks because there’d been an absolute cloudburst up there, devastated it. I call it modern weather. We didn’t get weather like that. I think it’ll have happened… we’ll have had massive floods in the past but I think nowadays it’s more frequent than it used to be. And we went away up there and I left the wagon up there and they went to look at another beck and I walked all the way back down to Lownthwaite Bridge which was a long way. I was meant to meet them at Lownthwaite Bridge so I walked all that distance back and the footbridge away up near Wythwaite in the woods, that had been knocked out completely, flattened.

L:Just by the rain?

RC:Aye, the huge flood and gravel and trees pushed over, made a real mess of everything. Sods in the beck and sods in the fields and turned everything upside down. Bad news for fish is all that, very bad news. Anyway, I went down to Lownthwaite Bridge and meant to meet them but they weren’t there so I carried on walking up the road and I got to about Milburn before I caught up with them. And they saw me and they gave me a lift back and we went all the way back up to pick the horse wagon up, up on Dun Fell, quite a walk that was that day. I remember going away up there and seeing loads and loads of mushrooms on the way up towards Dun Fell, absolutely loads of them.

L:They’re not usually there?

RC:Well, it was quite surprising to see as many as that, it really was large numbers. It was, yeah.

L:Just the upheaval of the mud and everything?

RC:I don’t know but there was a lot. And one thing I used to do when I was in fisheries was to count the salmon redds and look for salmon and look for signs of anyone poaching. And every autumn in late November, early… well, certainly end of November, I’d walk away up from Lownthwaite Bridge, right away up onto the fell to try and record the number of spawning redds were the salmon had been digging in the gravel and record numbers of fish seen as well. One thing that I used to look out for was black grouse and every time I went I saw some. There was not a lot, you’d see some though. You’d see three or four, five maybe, but you would see them and quite a thrill because it was the only area that I knew where there was any… you didn’t see them anywhere else. But they’re a great thing, is a black grouse and black grouse are a very rare bird, they are. They have partly come back in some areas, they are slightly better than they were. There’s a lot of research been done on them, a lot of habitat work been done on them by the estates over in Teesdale, a lot of [26:53] planting has been done. They’ve sort of realised what are the foods they like – rowan berries and birch buds and larch buds. A lot of that’s been… a lot of planting been done with them in mind.

L:Is that by the Environment Agency?

RC:No, no that will be part of the… probably a stewardship scheme for farms or for an estate.

L:Curlews?

RC:Yes, there’s curlews away up above Wythwaite. When I went up there they’d gone, they normally go back… They always say that the curlews leave the moor before 12th August, before the grouse shooting starts the curlews have already gone. But there’s a friend that lives at Wythwaite and he sees them every summer and he knows that they’re around, the curlew, up at Wythwaite area and up on those allotmenty land away up above Milburn. It’s an ideal area for curlew.

L:I’ll tell you what I used to see when I was a girl – peewits, lapwings.

RC:Yes, yes.

L:Hardly see any of those now.

RC:No, huge decline. Yeah, massive decline in peewits. There’s an awful lot of threats to lapwing eggs and lapwing chicks. Years and years and years ago there wouldn’t have been hardly any buzzards. 40 years ago they were not really as common as they are now. They are really quite common now. I mean, they’re marvellous birds, lovely things to look at. You see two or three buzzards wheeling round in the thermals on a spring day and calling, that mewing sound, it’s a sight to remember, it’s a sight to watch. You get binoculars on their wings and you can look at them and they’re just like a little eagle, really.

L:Yes, they’re beautiful.

RC:They’re a lot of interest, they’ve got a massive nest and they’ve got a very varied diet. The buzzard will take from worms, lizards, carrion, young rabbits, dead rabbits.

L:Occasionally wood pigeons.

RC:Possibly. I even once saw a buzzard pick a jackdaw off a fencepost. He just went a long and plucked it off the fencepost and sat down and started mantling it.