Key

J: = Interviewer, Julia
PR: = Interviewee, Phil Ramsden
[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

J:Can I start off by asking you about how you became involved in the Environment Agency and your job there?

PR:So it was one of life’s lucky events, really, for me. So I grew up in a village called Skirwith, which is just a couple of miles away from Acorn Bank, and I’ve always been into fishing, every since I was a tiny boy. By just a lucky quirk of fate, one day I was loading my fishing rods into my car when I was 17 and my neighbour at that point was going out with a chap who worked at the Environment Agency and he happened to see me loading my fishing rods and just said, ‘Oh, there’s some summer work going, are you into fishing?’ And he said, ‘Ring this number,’ so I rang a number and a couple of days later I was at the Environment Agency office in Penrith being interviewed by a lady who ran the fishing programme, the fisheries survey programme, each year in the summer. Next thing I knew I had a summer job helping out with those surveys. So I did that for four consecutive summer seasons which tied in perfectly with school initially and then university holidays. So I had the ideal summer job for me, I got to play with fish all summer long. So off the back of that, when I finished university, I’d learnt a bit about the Environment Agency, I’d learnt a bit about the work that they do, so I knew I wanted to be in so when a job eventually came up, initially in the sampling team, they go out and collect all the ecological samples from fish through to water quality samples, I was in a reasonable place to apply for that. I applied for that and luckily I was successful and the rest is kind of history, as they say. So worked through various jobs and however many years later we are, so nearly 12 years later, found myself leading on fish issues in Cumbria which suits me down to the ground.

J:The surveys you were talking about, what did that involve and what were you surveying?

PR:So the initial fisheries surveys that I started off being involved in and am still involved in now, they’re called electrofishing surveys. So what they do is they use electricity to catch fish in the rivers. They’re designed effectively to do various different things, depending on where we’re doing them, but principally to assess the population state of the fish stocks in that watercourse. So generally we’ll do a short section of the river and we’ll count and speciate the fish that we catch and that informs ongoing datasets to tell us the trend of populations in that river, how the fish are behaving, how they’re doing. It informs all sorts of issues – if we had a water quality issue, for example, you would potentially see that in the fish populations that you assessed. And it’s just a real general good indication of a river’s health. So, yeah, there’s lots of good reasons to do them and they’re a lot of fun to do at the same time.

J:And what sort of fish do you find in the watercourses around this area?

PR:Generally around here our surveys are almost exclusively focused on salmonids, so that means salmon and trout principally in our area. So the Environment Agency has a remit to monitor salmon and trout particularly so our surveys are largely targeted towards them. So we generally will find in the Crowdundle Beck that we have a few hundred yards from us here, we will generally find juvenile salmon and juvenile and adult trout. And then we also get a really broad range of other species as well in most of our rivers around here, so eels, there’s plenty of eels around at the moment, or certainly more than there has been in recent years, which is great news. Lamprey species, which look like eels, and for people who don’t have much to do with fish, they just look exactly the same as eels but actually are a totally different species. There’s other things like minnows, like bullhead, and in some places we do get coarse fish species and things like roach and dace. But generally round here you’re talking salmon and trout.

J:And what affects the numbers of those species?
PR:All sorts of things unfortunately. That’s a question I could talk for hours on. Fish face loads of pressures and are impacted by loads of different variables. So one that’s a hot topic at the moment that is in the media a lot is water quality, of course, and that’s really important. We’re very lucky in Cumbria, especially on this Pennine system where we are here near Acorn Bank, we have generally very good water quality, our rivers are pretty clean, but certainly water quality is a key factor. Salmon and trout need decent water quality to survive, they’re not particularly tolerant of things like low dissolved oxygen levels and high levels of ammonia, things like that. They need decent, pristine environments really.
But all sorts of other things affect them. So the physical habitat of the river. So in the last couple of hundred years we’ve certainly altered our rivers a lot in comparison to how they would have been over the thousands of years preceding that since the last ice age. That alteration of the river is never necessarily good for fish. So things like removing the natural sinuosity of the rivers in favour of straightening them to reclaim agricultural land, for example, that can take away a lot of the in-river habitat and the river characteristics like the different sizes of bed material, the amount of woody debris in there, just the general character of the river that fish have evolved within and therefore it suits them best. So when that’s taken away that can negatively impact populations. Equally, in lots of exciting projects that are emerging more and more now, when we replace that, when we take that back, we can see rebounds in fish populations. So it’s not all doom and gloom, there’s lots of positivity because we know the parameters that these fish need and we can actually… a lot of exciting work at the moment by ourselves and also key partners in this, like National Trust, Rivers Trust, some people like that, Natural England, all sorts of people are working together to reconnect rivers to what they should have been in instances where they’ve been messed around with by humans. That’s really good work.
But, yeah, there’s lots of other things as well that affect fish, lots of wider things – climate change is certainly a big one as well. Salmon and trout are very sensitive to temperature and unfortunately in certain rivers we are seeing situations in the periods of hot, dry weather we’ve had recently, we’re seeing situations where we are approaching the thermal tolerances of these species. Which is quite worrying, really, because if global climate progresses in that manner, then these fish are going to be under more threat from thermal issues than they ever have been before. So that’s a big one is the overbearing spectre of climate change, that is a big one.

J:If you were making improvements in a river, how quickly does it take to notice a difference, sort of populations rising? Does it take years or months or…?

PR:So it’s actually surprisingly quick at times. So it does depend on exactly what you do. If you take away a glaring issue like a water quality issue or an in-river structure that’s blocking passage, you can see a response very quickly from fish. So in the case of salmon, for example, we expect breeding salmon to return to the river every year. So adult salmon will return every year, so there’s a yearly cohort of spawning fish. If you remove an issue that had been hindering adults spawning or preventing juvenile fish from developing or growing on, if you remove that issue, say, in the spring of a year and then in that summer you have adult fish returning to the river and then in that winter spawning in the river, if that issue has then been removed such that those fish can spawn successfully and those juvenile fish can come on and survive, then actually the following year you may well have a thriving population of juvenile fish that you didn’t have almost less than 12 months previously.
So these fish, especially salmon and trout, are extremely resilient species, they’re an extremely capable species. They’ve evolved to be very good at what they do. And it’s a bit corny and it’s that old cliché of ‘build it and they will come’ but it’s genuinely true in the case of salmon and trout. If we give them the right habitat and the right environment, they will do the rest. These fish are very good at what they do.

J:We talked a little bit earlier about the weir at Acorn Bank which is undergoing some restructuring or removal, what do you foresee the advantages of that might be to the river here?

PR:So the weir at Acorn Bank is quite a considerable structure in terms of the local environment. The beck is relatively small to have such a big weir on it. Although we know fish can successfully move past it in certain flows, because we know that there’s populations of juvenile salmon upstream of it, so we know that adult salmon do get over it, what we do know from the vast swathes of evidence now that we have on in-river barriers is that at lots of flows they are likely to be prevented from migrating over that weir. Bear in mind that salmon are the most capable swimmers we have, so if salmon are impeded by it, it’s very likely that things like trout, things like eels, things like lamprey, and any other species that want to move up and down the river and utilise different river habitats within the section of Crowdundle Beck, potentially can’t do so because of the weir.
Now, in times gone by when there was lots and lots of fish and there were abundant populations, that probably wasn’t noticed as much as it would be now when we have such pressures on our fish populations and we are seeing declining stocks of fish. So, to return to your original question, the crux of it is hopefully the improvements planned to the weir, fish passage over it, fish will be able to move over it, that improved fish passage will see species be able to utilise the river much more often, much more easily, and effectively will connect the river back into a much more natural state and fish will be able to use it as they should be able to use it, rather than being artificially hindered by something that’s human made and not something that they’ve evolved to deal with, really. They are good at jumping over stuff and moving upstream but in this instance that’s quite a sizeable obstruction. Removing it, well not removing it but improving it considerably, will certainly benefit fish species, I would say.
J:Are there any other species apart from fish which might benefit from it? I know some pearl mosses have a symbiotic relationship with salmon, what other species do you see might be improved or might increase in numbers?
PR:Yeah, so the river connectivity is important to lots of different species. Obviously you’ve got things like mammalian animals like otters that will use the river corridor all the time. And whilst they’re not going to be impeded by the weir, because they can obviously just walk over it or round it, I think the benefit to fish that we’ll see will have a spilling-over effect onto other species. So if we get a better, more resilient, fish population within Crowdundle Beck, which is something I would hope we will get off the back of improvements to this weir, I think that will have spin-off on species which do interact with fish as part of their lifecycle. So things like kingfishers, for example. Whilst it would be very difficult to evidence a direct impact on kingfishers from the weir improvements, I think it’s inevitable that if we improve things for fish, the spin-off on that will be improvements for things like kingfishers, things like otters and a vast range of different species, really, that you would go down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out all their interactions with fish, but they’re almost certainly there.
Effectively, just creating a more natural environment is going to improve things. One of the key things, really, is gravel movement as well. So improving the connectivity of that beck in that area will improve the movement of gravel through the area. So gravel, in our Pennine Becks, well, in any gravel-fed river, is crucial. Not only is it crucial to fish, which use it to spawn in, they use it to forage for food and to shelter and things like that, but all the little invertebrates and stuff that live in the river as well, they rely on a decent gravel supply. So removing that weir, or improving the connectivity of the beck in that area, is going to increase that gravel supply, make it much more natural, and those pulses of natural gravel movement will hopefully improve and that will have spin-off for lots of aquatic environment dependent species like invertebrates and things that depend on invertebrates – your dippers and all sorts like that. There’s a wide species benefit but I’m a fish nerd so fish is the one I’m looking at most.

J:Is there anything that the general public can do to help rivers in general?

PR:Yes, so it depends in what capacity that general public is involved in the river. So if you’re just talking about people who are out and about, potentially just walking on footpaths or just spending time next to rivers, the key thing that I always advise people to do, and people don’t do enough, unfortunately, is report things they see to us that worry them. So when I say us I mean the Environment Agency, and when I say report I mean pick up the phone and dial 0800 807060 and talk to our really helpful guys on the hotline. Not necessarily about anything criminal or anything really dodgy but if you see something in a river that doesn’t look right, if you think the colour of the river doesn’t look right, if you think there’s a plume of something coming in that doesn’t look right, if you think there’s an activity going on undertaken by somebody or an operation that you don’t think looks right, tell us, report to us, Because eyes and ears on the ground telling us about stuff like that are absolutely invaluable because we can react to it, we can look into it and there’s a good chance it’s nothing to worry about, but equally if it is something to worry about and we don’t know about it, we can’t do anything about it.
We’ve got lots of really, really passionate staff who want to improve things and the best way the public can help us is to act on concerns they have. Don’t just tell your friend down the pub of mention it to someone a few days later, pick up your phone and dial that number, the 0800 807060 number, and tell us about the issue you’ve seen on the hotline. You can do it anonymously, there’s no come-back on you, there’s no need to give any details that you’re not comfortable with, but if you can tell us then we can act on that information.
So that, for me, having worked at the Environment Agency for a long time now, that, for me, is the key thing. We have some really great staff and the staff who are there have no agenda other than wanting to improve the environment, that’s why all of us work there. If we know about stuff we can do something about it, but if we don’t know about it it’s very hard to act.

J:I did not know that number. A lot of people don’t, do they?

PR:A lot of people won’t know that number, yeah, but anglers and people who are more connected to the Environment Agency through things like buying rod licences off us and interacting with us on various fronts like that, are generally more au fait with that because it’s more publicised to them. But the general public who are out hiking, enjoying the outdoors, as people are doing a lot more now, and certainly a lot more in England since COVID, really, a lot more people are staying locally and recognising that actually we’ve got some really great places locally. A lot more people are out and about and when they see things, potentially people see things and think, ‘Oh, that doesn’t look quite right,’ or ‘The river’s a funny colour today,’ or… and they maybe don’t know who to tell. But that is who to tell – the Environment Agency hotline – and we will act on that information one way or another and use it to try and inform the work we’re doing.

J:Gosh, that’s so important, isn’t it?

PR:Very important.

J:The gravel, you said, is very important in terms of habitat and things like that and the whole health of the river, is gravel being washed away a problem and has that increased in recent years?

PR:So the first thing to say is that Crowdundle is supposed to be a feisty little beck. Our Pennine becks, our steep gradient, Pennine watercourses draining into the Eden are dynamic, powerful little becks. In high-flow events they are supposed to move, they’re supposed to erode, they’re supposed to move big chunks of gravel and big lumps of wood around, that’s what these rivers do. It’s not an unnatural thing. It’s sometimes wrongly seen as the rivers being destructive and, unfortunately, over the past couple of hundred years we have managed our rivers in such a way as to try and contain that behaviour that’s totally natural. So we’ve hemmed them in and we’ve tried to keep them in and there’s, unfortunately, a bit of a misconception that we should dig out the main river channel as deep as possible and keep it in there. Whilst that might work for certain human interests, it doesn’t work for the river, it’s not what the river should be doing. Crucially, for me, it’s definitely not as beneficial for fish and wider species.
So, you’re right, the Crowdundle is a powerful little beck and you’ll see after big events it moves huge chunks of wood and big chunks of gravel, but it’s supposed to do that. That gravel movement is entirely natural and it’s actually crucial for things like fish. So to just expand a little bit on the fish need for the gravel, one of the key requirements they have for the gravel is they lay their eggs in it in the winter. So they dig what’s called a redd, which is spelt with two ds, they dig that redd with their tails, they dig effectively a hollow in the gravel which creates a little mount of gravel behind that hollow and they lay their eggs in that mound and they bury it with more gravel. So they need that gravel and that gravel crucially has to be clean and well oxygenated so things like diffuse inputs of silt, for example, can really mess with that gravel because it can smother it all up and make it unsuitable for spawning.
But that gravel supply, just to hinge back to your original question, that gravel supply is crucial. So ultimately it’s come off the high ground, these becks are draining off the high fells and it’s a dynamic, steep environment. So gravel is naturally eroded from rocks and it ends up in the river and it needs to be. We need to have that constant supply of it through. So where there’s a situation where that gravel supply is starved, that is a negative issue for rivers and that can be in the form of things like culverting little watercourses or intersecting them and damming them so it starves that feeder network of gravels. Weirs, unfortunately, are not particularly good for gravel movement either because effectively they block that natural bed movement of gravel downstream and that’s why quite often with weirs you’ll have a build-up of gravel upstream of it which historically has needed to be managed by people going in and digging that out, and then typically below that weir you’ll have a dearth of gravel, very little gravel supply below that weir. So the gravels really are fundamental to everything, these are gravel-bedded rivers, their species and their biodiversity and their set-up is built on them having gravel in them. If they don’t have gravel in them they’re not going to be the becks that they should be.
So, yeah, that would be a take-home message from me is when people see these becks and they see big berms of gravel thrown up the bank or they see big chunks of tree or whatever wedged up against banks, yes, that can be a problem for us as humans, and I absolutely recognise that, but at the same time that is what the river should be doing. Now, to caveat that ever so slightly, we’ve potentially as humans, without getting into the climate change debate, our climate is undoubtedly changing and weather patterns are changing and we’re seeing wetter conditions and big floods and big events when maybe previously we’d have seen less big events and more smaller-scale floods. At the moment we are in a pattern where we’re seeing big, big flood events, huge amounts of wet weather. You could potentially say that was slightly unnatural in that we’re having these huge events which are… the river has a huge amount of power in these big events and can cause a lot of damage to human infrastructure. So whilst it’s absolutely natural that these becks flood and connect with their floodplains and move a lot of material, it is possible that with the changing climate we’ve exacerbated that and had that wider-scale impact on how these becks behave. So, yeah, that’s one to bear in mind, it’s not simple. It’s not simple but, yeah.
In part of my working for the Environment Agency I’ve been involved in flood roles and flood response roles and I’ve seen first hand some of the really horrible impacts of flooding. And I’m not taking anything away from the terrible impacts that it can have on people’s lives. I’ve carried people out of flooded houses in Carlisle and it’s been pretty harrowing. It’s a horrendous thing to happen to somebody. So I’m not saying we should just stand idly by and let that happen but it’s important to recognise that rivers are going to flood and they are going to connect with their floodplains so it’s definitely when we have the opportunity to allow it to do that and to make that space appropriately where it’s not going to have these terrible impacts, then it’s important to recognise that that’s a good thing for nature.
We have a really strong partnership network. So while we do use volunteers for things like… one of my colleagues is really active in doing habitat creation projects, so things like tree planting, and he uses volunteers all the time and they’re an invaluable workforce, but for things like our core surveys and project delivery and stuff like that, we have a really wide network of partners. Like Rivers Trusts, we work really closely with Rivers Trusts, and the National Trust, we work very, very often and frequently with the National Trust. I’m currently engaged with quite a few projects with those guys. Natural England as well, obviously they have key jurisdiction over conservation designations and things like that, of which Crowdundle certainly has one. So we’re not doing this on our own by any stretch, we couldn’t do anything on our own, really, compared to the stuff we do do. So, yeah, partnerships, working with anybody who’s interested, is always crucial in conservation and protecting species, definitely.

J:It’s working together, isn’t it?

PR:Working together, yeah.

J:So how long have you been fishing?

PR:I’ve been fishing as long as I can remember. It’s always been just right through me. It’s who I am. So I remember the earliest memories I have would be going out on the little boat that I still have that was Dad’s at that point, it’s become mine now. But when I was very little my dad was in the police and he was moved to Barrow-in-Furness. So just after I was born in Penrith we moved to Askam-in-Furness for a couple of years and my earliest memories would be out on the boat in Walney Channel with Dad fishing for plaice and things like that. And I’m told I was about three, three or four, then when I was out and I remember Mum had a rule that we were only allowed to go to the lifeboat station at the end of Walney Channel. If Dad wanted to go any further than that I had to be dropped off. And I can distinctly remember a very red-faced tantrum at being dropped off one day because I did not want to leave. But, yeah, it’s always been me, I’ve always fished. I’ve been utterly obsessive about it at certain points in my life and I feel very fortunate that I’ve ended up in a career with fish. So, yeah, it’s an absolute passion of mine.

J:What do you love so much about it?

PR:Whether it harks back to eons ago when we were relying on that kind of hunter gatherer approach, whether I’m not as evolved as everyone else, I don’t know. But all I do know is that I’m not alone, fishing’s one of the hobbies and sports, call it what you will, that so many people feel just as passionately as me about. So it would be for somebody much more worldly and wise than me to try and put a finger on exactly why it appeals. But I can tell you that it really does and obviously there’s all the spin-off of you generally spending time outside, in an environment, in settings that most other people don’t. You’re seeing things that people don’t, you’re connected to the water, into the river, into the species in a way that other people won’t necessarily be. So you do see a lot and learn a lot.
As I get older that becomes more important. As a kid, as most kids into fishing are, it was just all about let’s catch, we need to catch some fish, and that excitement of catching the fish and getting it in the net and holding it and looking at it. That’s still very much there and I’m glad I get to do that at work as well, but as I get older and slightly more mature, young Phil would be mortified to hear me talk like this, but as I get older and realise that I’m an adult, it is all about that wider experience as well.
Let’s not underplay the importance of hobbies, but fishing especially, in terms of mental health as well. It is very mentally restorative, I think, and it’s a really, really great way of just taking some chill and just doing something that is a bit slower paced, potentially, depending on how you do it. But, yeah, I can’t really explain why I like it, I just know that I do and it’s one of the very… I think in life you never know many things for certain but I think I know for certain that I like fishing.

J:What do you think it is about being on the water or near the water that’s so special?

PR:I just think the aquatic environment and the rivers and the lakes and even the sea, they’re like a different world, aren’t they? So when you’re in them or next to them or around them it is kind of like immersing yourself in just a different environment. Things take a different pace, things sound different, things behave… And after you’ve been there for a little bit of time you kind of click in to that different rhythm. So you start to notice things, you start to hear things and how things are moving and interacting around you and it’s just… it’s that different world, isn’t it? Like I say, it’s not an environment a lot of people spend a lot of time in. So, as an angler, for example, your bread and butter sometimes will be standing in the middle of the river up to your hips in water and that’s not something that your everyday person is going to be doing. And when you’re in that current and you’re in the fish’s environment and you’re in the otter’s environment, it’s different to what you would normally do. As I say, I can’t really put a finger on it but it just… it’s the thing that floats my boat, literally and figuratively, the old water. Yeah, there’s something special about that environment.
And of course, the appeal of the fact that it holds those fish which are like a prized… The fish appeal to us as anglers, we respect them, we love them, we want to catch them and interact with them and see them and that the water contains them, that’s their domain. Entering their domain and trying to catch them and learn about them, that appeals to us as anglers because fish appeal to us. The good times are really good because they’re about fish. I’m one of these people that I don’t have a particularly good attention span when I’m not interested in something unfortunately, so I’m very lucky that I’ve got a job that fundamentally at its core I’m very interested in.

J:If you had a vision for how the condition and the status of rivers and watercourses in this area, say in five or ten years’ time, what would your ideal vision be? What would you like to see?

PR:I would like to see… certainly in the context of Atlantic salmon, which are one of the key species in our rivers round here, I would really like to see them come back in better numbers than they are currently doing. We absolutely have a bit of a sad state of affairs at the moment with our salmon stocks that they are in decline. That bothers me, that is sad and that’s something I’m working very hard to try to do everything I can and facilitate everything I can in my wider remit to address. So I would love to see salmon stocks rebound and improve. But likewise the wider environment, I would like to see that as natural as we can get it within the confines of the human interactions we have in the landscape. So certainly by no means am I an advocate of let’s just rewild everything and forget humans, we’re here, we live here, we’re going to live here and we have to have things like agriculture and stuff like that, but I think there’s a lot of scope to really improve how we see the landscape. I think there’s a lot of scope for things like farming to work with nature in a way that improves the rivers, gets our rivers better for things like fish and other species, but also benefits agricultural land. There’s potentially a perception still at times that you can’t have one without the other, it’s either do the human stuff on the land – the farming, be whatever that is – and the trade-off is you can’t have the beck being natural. But actually I don’t think that’s the case, I think we’ve got a few examples building up now where we can all work together and certainly that would be probably improved, the chance is that would probably be improved if it’s made to pay. So if improvements in the natural environment and in watercourses and places like that are incentivised for the owners of the land and stuff, I think that would make a big difference. That’s something I would love to see happen more.
But, yeah, just generally I would just like to see continued momentum on improving our watercourses and I would love to see certainly populations of fish improve and continue to be healthy. The big one is always salmon, it dominates a lot of conversations, but rightly so because years ago the River Eden here was probably one of the best, if not the best, salmon fishing river in the country and unfortunately runs have tailed right off. Crowdundle Beck at one time, I imagine if you were here 200 years ago, or not even that long ago, 60-70 years ago, seeing Crowdundle Beck at this time of year it would have been alive with adult salmon having spawned and spawning at this time of year. And whilst we still do have reasonable spawning activity on Crowdundle Beck in places, we certainly don’t have those numbers that we once had. It’s certainly far fetched, I would say, to think that’s going to happen again in the next five years but it would be absolutely fantastic to see a change in the fate of salmon particularly. I think if we get the river right and we work as hard as we can to improve the freshwater environment and get the river as good as we can, then really that’s the best way we can act.

J:Have you noticed any invasive species, an increase, either around the river or in the river?

PR:So, yeah, there’s a few invasive species – Himalayan balsam is a big one. We’re always seeing Himalayan balsam. In terms of more animal species, we don’t have an invasive fish species as such, really, in big numbers. It’s possible now and then and occasionally we see unusual trout species appear in the river. For example, a couple of years ago just a mile away or so from here there was a few tiger trout caught and tiger trout are not a natural English species. They’re a species that have been effectively generated through breeding for stocked fisheries, so rainbow trout fisheries and places like that they’ll get stocked. No-one knows where they came from, luckily they were in low numbers and they probably haven’t survived in the river and they’re almost certainly not fertile so they’re probably not able to spawn.
But we do occasionally see invasive fish species. One of the things we’ve seen in the past couple of years, although none of them got this far up the catchment, was losses of farmed salmon from marine farms in Scotland. So we had a big loss of salmon from one of the farms in Scotland in 2020, I believe it was, and we did end up seeing quite a few farmed salmon that travelled from the escape site on the west coast of Scotland into our rivers. When they get into our rivers they can cause problems like passing on disease if they’ve got any or interbreeding with our wild populations and causing longer-term genetic impacts on the wild stock. But luckily that’s not something that happens very often. I would not class it as a particularly prominent threat around here.
We have American mink as well, they’re an invasive species. They do predate on fish to some extent as well as other mammals like water voles and ducklings, they absolutely hammer the ducklings and things like that. So they’re not great for native wildlife. Yeah, the answer is there are invasive species, it’s always a risk and especially from the species we’ve got that are sensitive to things that invasive species might bring in like disease. We’ve got crayfish in the River Eden, for example, and obviously they’re our native crayfish, the English white-clawed crayfish, they’re very much at risk from crayfish plague which is carried by American signal crayfish which are invasive and they’re spreading to watercourses around the country, unfortunately. So whilst I wouldn’t class it as a prominent threat now because we don’t have lots of those invasive species in situ, it is potentially an emerging threat sat waiting to potentially pounce if something went wrong. That thing might be poor biosecurity practice by somebody who accidentally brings in crayfish plague or, God forbid, an actual crayfish or invasive species into the catchment. So the risk is there but I think in my experience we don’t have… the actual on the ground reality is that at the moment we’re not inundated with invasive species but there is a risk there, that’s for sure.
It's a local angling club that have the fishing at the River Eden where Crowdundle Beck joins it. That’s a club I’ve been in since I was eight or nine, so a lot of years now. That’s one of the first places my dad took me to river fish, really, so I feel very connected to that area. In the context of Crowdundle Beck, where we’re sat next to now, Crowdundle Beck is likely to be producing juvenile brown trout and species are then dropping down into that main River Eden. So the importance of tributaries to the Eden, like Crowdundle Beck, can’t be overlooked in terms of supporting its fishery, it’s recreational fishery for people who are enjoying it. The angling club that have that stretch, Penrith Anglers, are a lovely little local angling club with lots and lots of like-minded people who care about the river passionately and they’re a huge asset to the river. That’s one thing I would say is anglers in particular are a massive asset to the river and to wider conservation efforts because they care and they’re the voice that cares and they’re the driving force behind a lot of good stuff. So very important.

J:And you’ll see a lot of change and, as you said earlier, things that are going wrong or don’t look right, they’ll immediately see.

PR:Absolutely. Anglers are crucial in that respect because they know rivers and they know what’s right and what’s wrong. They’re incredibly valuable as the voice and the eyes and the ears on the ground.