Key

J: = Interviewer, Julia
DT: = Interviewee, Danny Teasdale
MT: = Interviewee, Maddy Teasdale
[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

DT: In a nutshell what do we do? We work with farmers, we work with landowners around Ullswater and adjacent area to show how you can have conservation, natural flood management, all in a way that works with farming. Basically a balancing act to try and juggle everything.

J: How did you get involved with it in the first place? What’s the story?

DT: You go back further so you can say how you got involved in this then.

MT: Well, I mean we’ve always been interested in… So, we’re from farming families and I’ve got some countryside management, I went to college and did countryside management a long time ago. So we’ve always been interested in that anyway, haven’t we? And your family farm we did some tree planting and things on that, just purely because we had the opportunity to do… it’s still farmed. And then it was after Storm Desmond that it kick-started things for us because obviously Glenridding was really badly affected and there was quite an instant reaction to clear the becks out and change things and make sure there’s no trees on the side of the becks so nothing gets washed down and blocks the bridge again. There was all that and we were already going, ‘Hang on a minute, there’s other ways we can deal with this and do this.’ So that’s where really it started, we became the liaison people between like parish council and community flood group to try and work with the Environment Agency and actually make things… Started tree planting and doing upstream work then and it’s kind of just ballooned from there really.

DT: Just kind of taken… Earlier on it was always… when we first started doing this it was all really binary and it was either conservation or it was farming. And it was so far away from each other, wasn’t it? It was like you can either farm or you can do conservation, you can’t do both. And, as Maddy said, we’re both from a long line of family farms but yet we both like our conservation. So I’ve messed around in becks since I was a little boy and Mam told me that she first lost me when I was about 18 months down the beck and I was messing around in there then. So I’ve messed on in becks forever. So it was just getting to that point where we said, ‘Well, hang on a minute, we can prove that you can do both of these things,’ and that’s done well. It’s been popular, hasn’t it, that approach?

MT: No, it has, yeah. I think it’s like you say, we’re from the area so we do know most of the farmers and the communities anyway which obviously is a massive benefit when we’re trying to make inroads into asking people can we look at this bit of land. Well, it wasn’t even us, they came to us eventually, wasn’t it. Originally we sort of had some very limited funding and then after, once we’d done a little bit, and I think it’s worked well because, for us, the timing obviously with the farm payments changing so farmers are becoming much more aware that they have to look at other options as well to make the business sustainable. So we’ve sort of hit it at that time when obviously so having to plant a lot of hedges, you make wetlands, and all these things can go into longer term schemes. So that’s always the aim that the work does is that the farm can use the environmental improvements as a way of making an income as well. So that’s really what we’ve always tried to aim it at, isn’t it? And now, well we don’t… they come to us, everyone comes to us, don’t they? We don’t go out looking for work.

DT: But it’s definitely a responsible role, the trusted role, the responsible role. Like anybody can plant a field up with trees or anyone can just let a beck go over a whole field and rewet it but it’s a challenge when you say, ‘How can we fit that into your farm? How can we show that we can do this, we can restore these becks so they’re better for fish and they’re better for wildlife and they work for flooding but how can we make them fit into your farm as well?’ That’s the challenging bit and I think you’ve got to understand, you’ve got to know the farming and you’ve got to know the rivers and the ecology. And, again like Mads says with the hedges, it’s such a win-win, they just work for everybody, the hedges. We’ve lost thousands of miles of them, we’ve got so many that we can put back in and they work so well with farming, don’t they? And the same with the rivers, if they’re done in the right way you can improve the drainage of the land as well as capacity to store water. So it’s just how you look at it really.
So throughout the CIC, the community interest company, that we run, we primarily try to be working around Ullswater. Ullswater, Matterdale, that kind of area. We’ll probably have about 70% of folk that we’ll have done something for within that area. It’s a big area but we’re also getting farmers that want us to go and work on their land outside of the area as well. We don’t advertise this, we don’t advertise what we do, this is word of mouth. And I think that’s quite nice when folk are just sharing it word of mouth and you think, well, we must be doing something half right.

J: Do you think it was the flood, was it storm…?

MT: Desmond.

J: Desmond, that was it. Do you think that was the ignition point of this getting off the ground or do you think there was something in the background before that?

MT: I think it was coming, wasn’t it, and I think whether Desmond happened or not the changing in the farm payments and all that was just coming anyway. But I think for this area it was definitely the catalyst, I would have said.

DT: Yeah, yeah.

MT: I think we’d still be quite… we wouldn’t have done half of what we’ve done if we hadn’t had a Desmond. Because it wasn’t just Glenridding, it was obviously people’s boundaries and fields, it was everything, it was all the farms felt the impact of it. So I don’t know. Do you think… I think we’d be a lot further behind if that hadn’t… which is sad, isn’t it, but the reality is that.

DT: But it was, it was something… we’d been doing this kind of work on my family’s land anyways so we knew it’s possible. We’d been doing it, we’d been balancing all the time because we don’t farm, we let our land out so it still has to be tenanted and grazed but do this as well. But then it’s like, as Maddy says, that Desmond was the catalyst without a doubt, just because it wasn’t just a flood, it was so destructive in that it ripped out bridges and roads and walls and huge landslips everywhere. It was on a scale that it was…

MT: Yeah, no-one in living lifetime had known for our area.

DT: It was biblical, wasn’t it really? And I’m not using that lightly, it was biblical. And when they took all of the stone that washed down the becks and blocked all the becks up and they took it out and they put it on Jenkins Field down there, there was 18,000 tonnes. So it kind of puts it into scale. Unless you saw it, it’s hard to comprehend.

J: Is that stone washed down from the…?

DT: Yeah.

MT: Yeah, mainly from Glenridding Beck, wasn’t it? There was some from further down the valley but it was just [8:04].

DT: So Grisedale Beck and Glenridding Beck, so what’s been washing down. Because if you looked immediately after, there’s huge landslips up on the way to Helvellyn, and bear in mind this has come a long, long way down. There were boulders, there were literal… there were boulders that would be a couple of feet across on the main road in the village that it had washed it down. You couldn’t comprehend it. And I think that was massive, understandably. The village was cut off for quite a long time…

MT: Couple of days.

DT: We had no services because they were cut off because Pooley Bridge washed away and everything went through there.

MT: Through Pooley so we had no phones and no… no phones, no water because the pump, the electricity had gone over there hadn’t it, so there was no pumping. So we didn’t have any water, didn’t have any phones, had no mobile signal because the thing had gone off the hotel.

DT: And no-one could get here or get out.

MT: Yeah, no-one could get in or out.

DT: Because the [9:04] was about six or seven foot deep with water so you couldn’t get out anyways. So it was, yeah, it was a pretty monstrous event.

MT: Yeah. I think it hit… the vulnerability of us, it really for the community was like this is just… you know, it’s something you read about or see somewhere abroad, isn’t it, and I know that you’re going to get a lot worse sometimes. But, yeah, I think we just felt really, really vulnerable and everyone was just in shock, like how can this happen? You know, in this day and age, how can we be cut off for two or three days, literally cut off? But I think from that, I was going to say, from the point of view Desmond… obviously people became more aware of upstream works and natural flood management and all that came big on board, didn’t it? Because they always say that we can hold back water that will slow Carlisle flooding and so that became a big thing that… So the figures all were starting to come out, weren’t they, how much water was going through Carlisle and obviously they were flooding because it’s all coming from us basically. So it all just… it kind of built on that as well, didn’t it, and then that’s when the funding started becoming available for works, natural flood management works and river works, didn’t it, after that. So I think that… but, again, that probably wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t had a Desmond. They were looking at natural flood management, weren’t they, and upstream works but it wasn’t really a thing until after that. Well, for us and for Cumbria.

J: So if another Storm Desmond came, what do you think would be the differences this time? Do you think you’re better prepared as a community or any work you’ve done since then will have had quite a great impact on…?

DT: In the bigger scheme of things ten years isn’t a great deal because it takes you a little while to get things like trees in the ground and to start to… Yeah, it will have started to make a bit of difference on smaller floods, I’m sure, but when you’re looking at something on Storm Desmond… To put Desmond into context, it was on like the 5th or 6th December wasn’t it?

MT: 6th December.

DT: And in the November we’d had 60 inches of rain in Glenridding so everywhere was absolutely drenched anyways. And then did we get 400mm was it about?

MT: It was 3.8, yeah, metres of rain in the…

DT: It wasn’t 3.8 metres, it was about 380mm, wasn’t it?

MT: 300… 380mm wasn’t it.

DT: Yeah, so it was about a foot.

MT: Yeah 380mm. So I don’t do metres, yeah, in that 24 hours, wasn’t it?

DT: Yeah it was about a foot of rain in 24 hours on top of that. So it’s hard to sort of…

MT: I don’t think we’ll have done… we won’t have done enough, obviously, to have a massive impact if it happens again. But with the flood plain reconnections and Goldrill Beck has obviously been done since then. So there is lots been done but whether it would be enough still to actually have a huge impact yet, don’t know really.

DT: There’s still a lot… there’s a lot more to do and then there isn’t the funding. It’s just never funded sufficiently because people still time and time again they come back and they look at, ‘Oh, we’ll build the wall a bit higher, or we need a flood defence that’s a bit higher and a bit higher.’ But Carlisle now, Carlisle flood defence, is completed to a level of Storm Desmond so it could withstand that. But future predictions all show that by 2030 plus years Storm Desmond will be the smaller event, it’ll be much bigger than that. And yet Carlisle can’t get built any higher. So we’ve got to look at further upstream options but, yeah, the government won’t fund. We’re never going to stop it, are you, but we’re just got to, as you say, get more resilient to it and accept that some places are going to flood, some places we want to encourage to flood, and some places we have to try and protect it. And we’ve just got to try and mitigate to whatever sort of level we can, really. But it will be challenging, very, very challenging.

J: You can’t do it on your own, can you? You’ve got to have people.

DT: No.

MT: No, that’s what we always say. None of these targets, none of these helpful strategies that will help mitigate the flooding are going to happen just by just us doing stuff or just by other conservation organisations doing it. We have to work with farmers because most of the land is farmed and if we don’t try and help them to help mitigate it it’s never going to happen. You literally can’t do it otherwise. So it’s everything – soil health, infiltration – it’s everything, it's all that and it starts right at the basics. And unless you get that right, you’re never going to be able to reach these targets. That’s why we very strongly think that working with farmers is the right way to go because you could be years down the line and nothing gets done. But if you’re working with them, they’ll work with you.

J: Do you think local people and visitors know what you’re doing and understand what you’re doing? How do you make them aware of what you’re doing because it’s such amazing stuff that you are doing?

DT: That is a really good question, isn’t it? Speak for myself, we’ve never expected what we were doing to become this, really, to get this sort of big. So we didn’t do monitoring, we didn’t do baselines and all that sort of thing. We’ve just been doing, really, we just want to do stuff, that’s all. So it’s hard to quantify what it is that we’ve done other than you could say, ‘Well, we’ve planted that many trees or we’ve done that many ponds and that many rivers.’ Social media, we use that to get that out there now.

MT: But we’re not very… we’re pretty crap at putting ourselves… sorry, you probably can’t [15:20 IA]. We’re not very good, are we?

DT: There’s room to be improved on social media.

J:

MT: But it is a balance for us because we… it’s just us two and then we have contractors, obviously, that do a lot of the bigger work and stuff. But you do all the designing and the project stuff and I do all the behind the scenes stuff and there’s a limit of what we can do. We’d love to do loads more stuff but then it’s stepping up a level and become more than what we are and then actually does that detract from what we’re doing anyway and will the farmers really want to get involved with another organisation. You know, there’s a lot of stuff about that, isn’t there. It’s very personal at the minute and people know they can come to us and talk to us about anything, like ideas and whatever, and there’s just no pressure, there’s no expectations. It’s just this is us doing this and so we’ll see what we can do for you.

DT: Can you come and have a look at this?

MT: Yeah, literally that’s all it is.

DT: Generally that’s what it is: I’m thinking about this, can you come and have a look at this? What do you make of that idea? Grand.

MT: I think other people promote us, don’t they?

DT: Yeah, yeah.

MT: So other people like James Rebanks, we’re friends with him, and James Robinson that has the farm down in… and he’s really vocal on social media. So other people do, yeah, promote us. And actually, to be fair, the community is pretty much aware and they are really supportive. They’re really generally really supportive of what we do, aren’t they?

DT: Someone’s promoting us because we keep getting random farmers from all over the country getting in touch and saying, ‘Is anyone doing what you do down here, or whatever? Is anyone doing that? I’m a dairy farmer from Devon.’ And it’s like…

J: Is there anybody doing what you do in other parts of the country?

MT: There’s a couple of… we’ve spoken to a couple of people, haven’t we, that have been trying to get farmer groups together and do it.

DT: Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t come across any.

MT: There was that one farmer that… I can’t remember, he rang us up and he said… Literally, he was doing it voluntary on his own, wasn’t he? And he was trying to… do you remember that guy, was it Norfolk or somewhere, and he’d been just literally a one-man band trying to…

DT: Oh right.

MT: Do you remember, he was…?

DT: Yeah, yeah.

MT: But literally and he was really struggling to find funding and all that kind of thing because he hadn’t set up a CIC or anything, had he? But we’ve hosted farmer groups from Dartmoor, Shropshire, all wanting to do exactly what we’re doing, isn’t it. And they are taking some things forward, aren’t they? The Shropshire group are doing some stuff, I think. But we’ve been lucky with the teams that we’ve worked with. We’ve always said that – if we hadn’t had the staff that we’ve known from the Environment Agency and National Trust and Woodland Trust, if we hadn’t known those people and had those relationships it wouldn’t have worked as well. That’s worked really well and you don’t get that in every area, do you? Some people don’t have as proactive staff or teams that are really keen to get involved. You don’t always get that.

J: Yeah. I think it’s so important that you two as locals have been here for years and years.

MT: Yeah, that’s definitely…

DT: You see that plenty and we see it plenty and then you can see it glaringly obvious why it doesn’t work because somebody has a bright idea somewhere that they think is fantastic so they’ll put that on a map and well the mapping says that that’s the best location to do that so therefore let’s work up this huge scheme in the background. And then when they’ve done all of that and then found the funding, the last part of it is then go to the farmer and then say, ‘What do you think of this?’ And then they say, ‘Get stuffed, that’s my best field. That’s not going to work.’ And then they think, ‘Oh, he’s a grumpy old bugger, isn’t he? I’m not going to work with him.’ We’re the other way round, we build it from the ground up with the landowners and the farmers. And then if they’ve helped say where it’s going to be and they’ve helped design it, they can’t really complain about it at the end because it’s partly their idea. So it’s working with everyone right through from the start.

J: Yeah, it’s so important, isn’t it, to get them on board right from the out.

MT: And I think conservation and reforestation stuff has that reputation of that and has done for decades. That someone’s going to come and tell you what to do. So already landowners and farmers are like, ‘Sorry, until you engage with me…’ I think that’s why this has flipped it on its head because that’s never happened with this, it’s completely the other way. And I think it’s hard to change that reputation on a national scale because it’s all they see in the news all the time, isn’t it, and it’s constant ‘Farmers need to do this and farmers need to do that and we’re going to take 10% of land for rewilding.’ That’s all they see and it’s really difficult for them to then… someone, like you say, is plopped in the middle of it from any of these organisations because they haven’t got a clue who they are, why should they engage with them, why should that be? Why should they be expected just to do that? You wouldn’t do that in any other business or, I don’t think, industry. It is just literally that people feel that have a say in everything, don’t they and that it’s all… And, fair enough, it is, it’s the nation’s land ultimately, isn’t it, but you’ve got to respect who has been there and who has made it as it is. And that’s what gets overlooked, they just think, ‘Oh, we can do what we want with it.’

DT: You cannot, you just can’t, discount that or underestimate the value of it. Because, as you say, however good a computer model is or something like that, you just don’t know when there’s going to be a curveball in it and someone said, ‘Well, actually when it does this, you’ll tend to find that that does that.’ And like, ‘Oh, my computer didn’t say that.’

J: Yeah, you think, ‘Oh, well, should have listened.’

DT: Yeah. So it is, it’s really important to value local input as well, right at the start.

J: What sort of impact has that had, a) the flooding, or sort of climate change general, on the ecological systems within the rivers and becks?

DT: Yeah, yeah, there’s been a lot in… there’s definitely been a lot in mine. So the little beck that runs through where I was brought up at Penruddock, runs into Dacre Beck at Eamont, the Eden, and it is really sad. I’ve seen it, I used to go fishing, I’ve always loved messing in becks. All my life I’ve always just played about in them, I’ve always been fishing. And I can remember that beck being just full of trout and young salmon and it just fascinated me all my life. I loved it. You always took it for granted, almost, that you would go down to the beck with your fishing rod and you would catch a trout because there were just so many there. It was never doubted. And because of that as well I’ve always, always, probably since I was about ten years old, understood how salmon cycles work. I used to watch the salmon run upstream because they come up to spawn in autumn. And again you talk about climate change, I’ve seen that move back. It always used to be October half-term, on my birthday, that week I was off school and that’s when the salmon came up. That’s when they used to run, almost… yeah, you could guarantee it. And it was fantastic, I could go down to the beck and I could watch them and in each pool there would be ten or a dozen salmon in each pool. And these are big, big fish, and that was every single pool. And every year it’s just gradually deteriorated, every single year it’s just dropped and dropped and dropped. And the time has gone further back so now, whereas they used to run up end of October, it’s now end of November, early December generally, when they start moving up. I don’t know whether that’s got anything to do with warming… change, I don’t know what it is but that is just purely my observation. But these pools where you were looking at and there would be ten or a dozen salmon, I could go down the last couple of years and if you saw one or two in one pool you’d be thinking, ‘Wow, that’s really good.’ We are at cusp now where I would say it’s debatable whether they are actually viable now because there’s so few of them left now, which is terrible. When you talk to… I used to talk to my granddad when he was alive and he said that when he was a farmhand salmon were so plentiful that they got sick of eating it. And he said that’s what they got given and that’s what… it’s like salmon again today and he was like, ‘Ugh, sick of salmon.’ You think well how can we go from that to virtually extinct? They’re on the endangered list now.

MT: They used to say that, didn’t they, with… obviously not allowed, poaching, but they would go up the becks and just that’s what you lived on when the salmon were running because there was that many. And the farms and people would just go because there were that many that that’s what they would do. And obviously you’re small scale, you’re talking like a few people from a valley doing it, it’s not obviously netting it or anything like that. But that’s what they did, isn’t it?

DT: Yeah.

MT: But even they were probably still doing that 30-40 years ago, really. But there’s absolutely nothing there to do that with now.

J: Is that a gradual decline or has there been a point, five or ten years, when it’s suddenly gone down? Or do you think it’s just been a gradual decline.

DT: Yeah, I think I’ve just noticed it as just a gradual… I’ve noticed it as just a gradual decline, just year on year on year. It’s just this gradual reduction. There’s all sorts of things, it’s hard to say. It’s hard to say exactly what the causes are but there’s water quality, there’s overfishing at sea. A big issue of mine is predation, over-predation now. We don’t have the habitats, they’re predated on far too often.

MT: And more easily.

DT: Yeah, a lot more easily. There’s just a whole plethora of reasons and then when you look into the data as well in our job, you realise that now that we’ve got the technology to tag salmon going to sea and it used to be a case of 15% of the young salmon that went back to sea… Sorry, of all of the young salmon that went back to sea, if 15% came back as spawning adults that would keep a continuing cycle. Well, that 15% now has dropped to about 2% so it's kind of on the cliff edge now, really, of… That’s what I’m saying about viability because I don’t even know…

MT: Collapsing, isn’t it?

DT: Pretty much. It’s pretty much… I think it has pivoted beyond… I’d definitely say we are beyond the point now where we can get them back. So I think it’s crucial that we try and make the habitat as good as we can in the freshwater to try and give them as best chance as possible, to try and send as many out to sea as possible. But, yeah, I took our daughter a couple of years ago to go and watch the salmon spawning and she is a teenage girl and I didn’t really think that that was going to be her bag but even she was amazed. She was amazed, she was like, ‘Look at the size of that, that’s massive,’ and she was right into it. And afterwards it was really bittersweet because I thought I love the fact that she’s seen that because I honestly think that her kids, they’ll be gone by that point. They’ll be extinct.

MT: That’s so sad, isn’t it?

DT: Yeah.

MT: So sad if that happens.

J: What do you think we can do to help that?

DT: On a small scale I think we need to do as much as we can to our rivers and becks. Like all too often people just look at big rivers and think, OK, we’ve got to spend millions of pounds and do these and what have you. No, the salmon, they come up into there and live and thrive and spawn in the cold upland waters, that’s where we’ve got to really start focussing on. You’d be amazed, the tiny little streams that salmon get themselves up into to try and spawn. We’ve got to look after these a lot more, that’s what I think… I think we really need to switch the focus around. Once the fish are big enough to start falling back down into the bigger rivers and the deeper waters, they can tend to look after themselves more in those big rivers because generally the main rivers, the big rivers, are pretty clean now, they’re not in bad condition. But I think we need to really look at these upstream spawning streams and nurseries and see them as what they are. That’s the next generation of salmon that we must look after or they’ll be gone.

J: And there are so many of those lovely little becks, like Crowdundle which we’re focussing on.

DT: Exactly.

J: People are often… in the message I get, they all want to help and do something. But it’s getting exactly what, isn’t it, and a coordinator, definitely. A bit like your flooding.

DT: It’s that again. It is that… it’s that again. I think there are about 400km of watercourse on the Eden so there’s a lot to go at. Yes, it would be fantastic if… If the government decided that this was actually a serious thing and that they were going to put serious funding into it then we could upscale massively, couldn’t we? As it is, funding is very limited for certain protected… for SSSIs and SACs. It’s just very challenging to get that. Yeah. But unfortunately that’s what it’s going to cost a lot of money to restore these things. I know, I know. I’ve been obsessed with becks all my life so anything remotely close to Dacre Beck, I’ll have traipsed up and down that beck from the top to the bottom multiple, multiple times.

MT: And all the offshoots.

DT: Everything, all the little tribs, all of that. I have misspent, spent, however you want to describe it, my youth [ratching] in becks so I know them all, yeah. Which helps in the job now when we’re trying to restore becks because you also know it’s really bad, don’t you.

MT: Well yeah, but also because you’re accessing a lot of the land now because we’re working with those farmers and you can just say, ‘Oh, do you mind if I pop down to see if the salmon are up?’ So, you know, it’s a bit… places that people, the public, would never go up because there’s no footpaths or whatever. So that’s another benefit of it, isn’t it, of working closely with the landowners and the farmers because then you can monitor these things, can’t you, and you can see. But, yeah. But they used to come up into Matterdale and everywhere, which is a big valley. I don’t think people… I don’t think they’ve hardly seen… we see trout, don’t we, but… yeah, it’s just changed massively where you can see. My son farms in Scotland and we see more… He has a beck that runs through and that’s where we see them and that’s where you them most, isn’t it? It’s sad to see because it’s lovely. It can be full and you see them jumping up the waterfalls and everything and then you come here and… Which, I don’t know, it’s a different set of problems, isn’t it, I think, because they’re a different side. You know, their river comes in a different… from the sea and stuff. But we all want to get back to that, don’t we, really?

DT: It’s amazing to think that if you’re looking at a little stream that’s from here to five foot across and then you see two salmon that are this big, nearly three foot, spawning side by side in it, it’s amazing. Well, I think it’s amazing, don’t you?

MT: Yeah, they’re huge, aren’t they.

DT: But, yeah, it’s those old stories, really, that… And I can recall back in my own mind thinking, well, that was really good. You know, there was a lot then. But then I’ll talk to my granddad and then he would say that that was on another scale again. And he would say, like…

MT: It wasn’t anything [32:40] for them, it just wasn’t…

DT: No, he said it was just… at that time of year the beck was full of them. He said there was places where you couldn’t even walk across the beck without standing on one because they were so prolific. And I just think how have we got to this? It’s shocking. It’s really bad.

J: That’s two generations, as well, if you’re saying your granddad said that.

DT: Yeah.

MT: And last year we did a planting group with some Outward Bound kids. So we got them to come and help us plant up a shelter next to a river. We knew that there were salmon in there and there was… Well, some of them saw them, didn’t you, you saw them, some of them saw them in the water, but there was a dead one that obviously an otter had had. Yeah, so you pulled it up to show them and they were just like, ‘What is that?’ as if it was something out of Jaws or something, wasn’t it? They couldn’t believe…

DT: They were amazed.

MT: They couldn’t believe it and it’s not a big… it’s a biggish beck but it’s not that big is it? And they absolutely couldn’t…

DT: They were blown away by it because they thought that salmon came out of a tin, didn’t they?

MT: But this is… they had absolutely no idea.

J: Or little chunks .

MT: Yeah, they just couldn’t believe that this is a salmon and the size of it and everything. It was really good, it was really good. That was a really good moment but also a bit of a realisation of, oh my God, how many people know nothing about any of this. You know, it’s education, isn’t it.

DT: If you don’t have the education you don’t have the connection and you don’t know what you’re looking after, do you? You don’t know what you’re preserving. I think the education is going to be a huge part of it but yeah.

J: Because if you had a vision and what in five, ten years’ time would you like to see happening?

DT: What do you want to see? What’s yours?

MT: I would like to see no, or very little, sewerage in them. That’s a big issue for me because lots of other things get blamed on actually what is generally failing sewage systems. So I’d like to see that definitely sorted out and I think that’s had a massive impact on the biology and the ecosystems and it’s gone under the radar for so long. So for me that’s one of the biggest things. I know we can influence it by actually putting pressure on them to do that. But, for me, that’s that. And actually just looking at how precious some of these areas are. So even just people pressure as well and acknowledging that people pressure has a huge impact on our rivers and our waterbodies like the lake and the habitats around it. I don’t know whether we’re ever going to get lower numbers, we’re probably not, but we need to learn to look after what we’ve got and manage it and make sure that we don’t lose anymore other than what we’ve already lost. And I just think that’s a big ask but, for me, from that point of view of our bodies of water that we have around us, that’s huge. Yeah. And obviously improving fish numbers and all the rest of it. But you’ll [35:59] about that.

DT: No, I just think that, yeah, it’s right though, isn’t it? There’s multiple issues with it and a lot of them we need to stop siloing them and just saying, ‘Well, it’s either that or it’s that or it’s that.’ We’ve got a model here that works around here that balances. Yeah, it’s trying to find that balance of everything, isn’t it. With the exception of putting sewerage into the becks, you shouldn’t be doing that. You just shouldn’t be doing that, I’m not advocating that you do that even in moderation. But with the rest of it, like once you start restoring rivers back to natural states then you are looking after the ecology, you are helping with the flooding. If you look at the straightened rivers, if you start to add the meanders back to them you increase the length of the river. Well there’s an increased capacity. You take down redundant flood banks that we don’t need anymore, you’re storing water on the floodplain. And again the sediment drops out on the floodplain and that helps the water quality. You’re slowing the water down it then holds more gravel upstream and then that gravel is what the trout and the salmon use to spawn in. So you can get a lot of multiple wins if you just apply it and don’t just think, OK, well I’m just going to focus on that and I’m just going to focus on that. No, just think a little bit harder.

MT: A little bit of everything everywhere, that’s where we say, isn’t it. If someone did just a little bit everywhere it could make a huge collective difference. And I suppose that’s what we’re trying to do around here but it would in 10, 20, 50 years’ time have a huge impact on the biodiversity and the future management for flooding.

DT: It already… So, anecdotally, because as I said we didn’t monitor anything but anecdotally there are rivers that we started working on six, seven years ago, and I would love to think it’s a turn in the trend, but this last November just gone I actually saw the most salmon in one of the becks that I’d ever seen before. And we have done quite a lot of work on there and tried to improve the habitat. And I don’t care whatever the reason is, to be honest, it wasn’t like it used to be, it wasn’t like the glory days, but you know what? It was definitely an uptick from how it always has been. And I thought that’s great. If it is something that we’ve done, well brilliant. If it’s just a fluke, well I’ll take it anyway because it was lovely to see.

J: On a personal level what do you get out of that being next to water and near water?

DT: Oh God, how long have you got? I just love it, I love it. I am always describing myself as a self-professed beck nerd. I just love watching them, I love seeing what’s in them. I love how they react. I like to think that if I put a big stone in somewhere then it’s going to change the flow somewhere and it’s going to do something else. When I was a little boy I used to build, put stones back into becks and build things so that fish could go in them. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing but I was making some habitat. I just love doing… Yeah, I love to see them, see how they change, see how they evolve. Yeah, I’ve just got this really encyclopaedic memory of becks. It’s properly sad, it’s really sad. It is really nerdy but I just love it. I love watching them and I love seeing what’s in them and if I think well that’s looking really good and then when you go through, you take it to the end, and then you see some fish in it, decent fish, and you think oh that’s great. Yeah, it just makes me happy that.

MT: I think for you it’s a source of… if you were going to be thingy about it, like mindfulness really, isn’t it? It’s the way of you switching off as well, even though you don’t… You’re doing it because you love it but when you’re there you’re in the moment and that’s it.

DT: Oh yeah. Yeah, I could just get lost. I could just wander up a beck and just get lost looking in it. And that, for me, is really good for my head. So yeah.

MT: Yeah, definitely. I think the energy they give off is quite incredible as well, isn’t it? And again you don’t but you pick up on that when you’re near them and what they’re doing and just naturally doing is just… it’s beyond anything we… You know, we can’t do anything about it, can we? And it’s just there and I think to be next to them or be in them and not freezing, it’s such a good thing to feel. You feel it in your feet and the gravel’s in your toes and all that kind of thing. It’s just that grounding thing that they fetch as well. Water that’s been here for millions and billions of years is running past you or through. You know, it’s amazing, isn’t it?

J: So worth protecting.

DT: Oh definitely.

MT: For us, the Crowdundle is probably the same for the locals isn’t it, but I think we don’t recognise either… it gives people identity, like Ullswater. For people that have lived here or grown here or even if you’ve moved here, I think the identity of it is itself. People don’t realise how much of a pull that is. I know it’s the landscape but actually like my auntie was born on the side of Ullswater and she moved to Wolverhampton or somewhere in her 20s when she got married and she always said, ‘I couldn’t not see the lake.’ I know that was just her but I think it feels like that for a lot of people that have… I think recognising it as more than just this water that’s flowing through is… and it’s the same probably with Crowdundle Beck for the farmers or people that have lived next to it forever. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? You can’t think of never having it or not having it or not seeing it as good as it should be.

J: It never leaves you, does it, really?

MT: And that’s the thing and that’s physically as well as emotionally and everything. Like you say, we’re all made up of this. I just think we don’t put enough, as humans probably… I’m going a bit deep here but I just think we don’t put as much recognition into it, actually what it does give people, like the benefits for that.