Key

L: = Interviewer, Lesley
NF: = Participant, Nick Franklin
[time e.g. 5:22] = inaudible word at this time
[5:22 IA] = inaudible section at this time
word = best guess at word
- = interruption
… = trailing off or change of thought, mid-sentence

L:First of all, why did you come to Acorn Bank?

NF:It’s a lovely working environment, it’s a very special, peaceful place. Yeah, I was just drawn to the property, I think it’s just a really, I’d come many times before I was employed here, just as a casual visitor, and I was very interested in the woodland and the walks particularly. The house has always been a bit of a closed environment, and although we have a little bit of it open now, the focus for visitors is very much on the woodland and the gardens, and that was my interest. I’m the bird recorder for North and West Cumbria, the county recorder at that level for Copeland and Allerdale really, so I do all the processing of bird records for that area and am passionately interested in birds. I also am the recorder for bees and wasps, I suppose for a better word, aculeates, which are the stinging species, they call them. it includes ants but I don't know very much about those.
So since I’ve come to Acorn Bank I’ve developed a real interest, and it started in 2018, we had a beautiful hot summer that year, very dry, but it was in a fantastic year for invertebrates, for bees and wasps, both in the garden, the woodland, not so much Crowdundle Beck itself, but they do need the water to drink and you will see wasps coming down and drinking at the little ponds and things. But I just became very interested in the whole area, so I’ve been recording here ever since and scribbling it all down and keeping spreadsheets of it and things.
My interest is mainly in the bird life, as well as the bees and wasps, and the Beck is a very good resource for those birds. We get specific nesting species that require fairly slow moving water, like Dippers, really interesting species that rely on the invertebrates from the Beck, and the healthier the Beck is, the more invertebrates are in it, the better the populations of these things like Dippers. That would also include Grey Wagtails, both of which nest on the property, particularly down at the Mill, we get quite a few Grey Wagtails nesting, and we get Pied Wagtails as well in that area, but they are specifically river or water, flowing water invertebrate specialists, so they need that environment. Dippers are a wonderful little bird that swim underwater. You can see them dropping their eyelids over to cover their eyes and you can actually watch them swimming underwater. And they will occasionally flip a stone over and dig underneath. Sometimes they actually even walk along the base of the Beck, pushing things over, looking for small invertebrates and things, which is fascinating if you can watch them doing that.
Also the Beck produces a lot of insect life for things like Swallows, which we have nesting in the Mill buildings, so we have about five pairs of Swallows nest in the Mill buildings, and we had House Martins recently as well. What we don’t get of so many nesting is Sand Martins, but they come onto the property to use, I think they nest in the bigger riverbanks nearby where the Beck flows out into the Eden. So you will see, on a summer’s evening, lots and lots of Sand Martins coming to join the Swallows to feed on anything that’s hatching or flying around. And that’s not just the Beck, that’s grassland flies and all that kind of thing as well, but the Beck is a really good resource for that.
We also have Daubenton’s bats, which nest or roost and breed in the Mill, and they are a water species of bat in the sense that they take flies from water surfaces and just above the water surface, so they’re reliant on a water source to produce the right kinds of insects. We have four other species of bat, but they’re not, we have Brown Long Eared bats and two Pipistrelles, but they’re not as reliant on the Beck for producing insects, they’ll take them from anywhere.
We get Kingfishers as well, but they don’t nest on the property, as far as I’ve been able to find, but they fly through quite regularly and they like the small, minnow like style of fish that you get in the smaller rivers, like I’ll occasionally see them fishing on a low hanging branch and dropping in and plucking out and then off they go to wherever they do nest, which I suspect is just slightly off the property to the south.
Sticking with the Beck, we also get otters regularly on the Beck. It seems almost impossible to find where they nest, halt, but obviously I haven't tried too hard for fear of disturbing them. I guess if you walked down the Beck and looked hard enough, you would find where they are. We see footprints regularly on the sand, again particularly down in the Mill area, there’s quite a few areas of little sandy beach and quite often you see the footprints of otters, water voles as well, but also sadly mink occasionally, and I’ve seen a mink once here, being an invasive species they’re not ideal for nesting small birds in the river environments, duck, mallards and that kind of thing, they’ll take the eggs, moorhens and things as well.

L:Has that been more recently?

NF:No, it was a couple of years ago and I’ve not seen it since, so hopefully it’s kind of a transitory, looking for a territory kind of mink passing through. I think if they were here all the time, I would see them more. The otters, but then you’d only see the otters occasionally because they’re so dawn and dusk, so unless you specifically go and sit down by the Mill, you don’t see them very often. But I did manage to take some lovely photographs once by sitting right on the Beck edge.

L:I might ask for those later.

NF:Yeah, I think that was 2019, just on the flat water, just right by the Mill. But we’ve also seen otter crossing the parkland, which always seems slightly strange to me, and one of our volunteers reported seeing them down where we have a wildlife hide, in front of that is a flooded mine and the otter was swimming in there. But I have seen from our reception point, the shepherd’s hut, an otter running across from the Beck, right across the parkland, obviously heading for that area, which I thought was good because you don’t really associate otters out of water.

L:What about the changes you’ve seen, especially when we’re referring to the weir and things, have you seen any massive changes?

NF:The weir erosion, which I’m sort of aware of as part of a project is underwater, so we tend not to see that, but we have it checked regularly and it is obviously increasing. My understanding is that the latest plan is to put a boulder ramp in to replace the concrete weir itself, and that will allow the waters to still be contained so the leat can run off still, but it will provide a much better access for fish to move up and things.
We have a couple of areas of concerning erosion, one is maybe only 10 metres upstream from the weir where the river turns a corner, and as it hits that banking it is eroding, and it’s an area that’s been repaired historically but is now collapsing again, so needs work on it. And we also have a very heavy area of erosion south of the Mill, which is going to necessitate a lot of work. We’ve already had to fell three oak trees so they didn’t fall into it, because obviously if they’d fallen, they would have ripped their root bosses with them and that would have caused even more erosion, so we had to very sadly fell them. But there’s now a big product, which I’m not involved with, which is to move our driveway and try and work with the Rivers Trust and see what we can do in that area. But that is an area of erosion which really has only appeared in the last three years, which is amazing because something obviously changed in the river channel, possibly a fallen tree or possibly just the ferocity of the river, the Beck, but it has eroded quite seriously in the last three years, and it’s very near our driveway now, so it’s obviously causing a problem.

L:Do you see any changes to how the bird life is going to be affected, or the invertebrates?

NF:I think not so far, no, thankfully, because it’s fairly localised to one area, the erosion. The rest of the beck, although it floods, I think, more than it used to, we seem to get more periods of intense heavy rain, which probably are causing that erosion, I don't think that they are effecting the bird life. Birds are lucky in that sense, in that they can move away. Your Pied Wagtail or particularly your Grey Wagtail, if it needs to, it can move to a little flooded area to feed in the parkland or whatever. The Dipper would be the one species that would probably struggle if the river levels got too high for too long, because they can’t really hunt very easily in a cloudy, silty environment. But so far, fingers crossed, it doesn’t seem to have affected Dippers, Otters, Kingfishers and things. And I like to think once we get the weir sorted into a much more fish friendly thing, that that will increase the benefit of the Beck for fish, because they will be able to move past it to breed.
And I haven't noticed any insect issues either, but river invertebrates are not my speciality at all, so I don't know, there may well have been changes that I’m not seeing. We’ve had a fascinating little fly appear, which you’ll have to forgive me because I can’t remember its name, but it appeared, it’s a beautiful little iridescent thing, and it appeared initially on the little ornamental pond that we have in the garden, but I’m now finding it in quite large numbers adjacent to the Beck, where Dorothy put in ponds in the 1930s, which do enhance the Beck environment because they provide a still water environment right next to it, and those ponds obviously get newts in and things that the Beck maybe wouldn’t, but I just noticed in the last few years they had this interesting fly, and apparently that is a sign of global warming because it’s not been present in Cumbria until very recently.

L:Would it be a sort of thing that the birds would eat?

NF:Yeah, I think birds will eat any flies, certainly a Wagtail or something would predate on it.

L:It doesn’t sound like it’s invasive, but are there any invasive species that have come in?

NF:Other than giant hogweed, which we do get in the environments of the Beck, we’ve had two or three times, which obviously we take very seriously. Again, not really my remit, Heather and Bronwyn know an awful lot more about that than me.
I don't know if its relevant but my focus on invertebrates in the garden have seen probably half a dozen or more new species of wasp and bee to Cumbria, so entirely new species. I found a wasp in the garden, [Ergotis lavipi 11:41], I think it’s pronounced, that was the first record north of Sefton on the Wirral, so that was quite an exciting invertebrate increase. So I think in terms of the property as a whole, we are seeing an increase in the number of invertebrates as we warm up.

L:Anything that’s changed the feel of the place to you?

NF:No, not really. I think we’re very lucky here in that the peacefulness of the beck and the quiet of the property is really nice. As soon as you get away from the busy environments of the house and café, down by the beck has a very special feel to it because it’s very quiet. The beck is a relatively quiet beck when it’s not flooded and raging, so it sort of meanders nicely along, but it really soaks up the people somehow. Even on a busy day, there’s not huge numbers of people down there. And there are bits of, one of the benefits of working here is that there are bits of the beck you can get to that the public don’t go, so are even quieter. There’s two or three stretches of probably 100 metres of the beck that is not accessible to the public because the path is not next to them. That’s just fine for me because I can put my wellies on and sneak through the vegetation, but it keeps them very quiet.
So yeah, I’m not aware of it, it certainly doesn’t feel in the six, seven years I’ve been here that it’s changed much in terms of feeling the beck. I think it has a wonderful, the whole of Acorn Bank does, but I think the beck has a wonderful feeling to it, a sort of quiet sort of meandering kind of peaceful feeling to it that you probably don’t get on a main river which has lots of water flowing through it. We have that very peaceful feeling, which is nice, and long may it last.

L:Well, exactly, so I suppose we’re trying to maintain it and keep the interest in. Is there anything that, as visitors do come to the beck, you would like them to take note of?

NF:I always encourage the kids to, we give out spotting sheets and magnifying glasses and tell them to tell me what they see. Yeah, I encourage them to look for otters, particularly where the mill leat, having been through the wheels, runs out into the beck. There’s a lovely sandy area and you get mammal footprints like otters and voles and things which I always encourage the kids to have a look for.
Sadly, we used to do bat walks, which we don’t do now, which I think would be nice. The rangers used to do those and we used to take the kids down to the river, down to the mill to look for bats, but we don’t do those so much these days.

L:Presumably that was at night, was it?

NF:Yeah, dusk, so it was a special event, which I don't think we’ve really got the capacity for now, but yeah, they used to quite like those.
I think we very strongly encourage visitors to spend time at the mill and invest as much of their visit time as they can, because the mill is an astonishing thing, how they’ve renovated it and rebuilt it and grind flour off it, and obviously we sell flour for them to help with their upkeep and things. But fascinating, they have a timeline of the whole mill upstairs in the property, which is really interesting. So if I’m working on reception or the others are working on reception, we do encourage them to spend time down at the mill, particularly at the weekends. I think what would be lovely would be to have the mill open and fully running every weekend, but I understand that they don’t have the capacity for that and probably would produce too much flour as well, I don't think we’d sell it all.

L:Is there any element that you feel is overused in the area of the Crowdundle beck? You said that there’s an area that only staff can get to, I didn’t know about that. Would it be an area that you would have opened up … Oh, we’ve spoken to some of the kids who come down here in the forest school and things like that.

NF:Oh, they love that.

L:It’s really interesting, but I suppose what I’m sort of going for is where we can develop something around the beck that hasn’t been developed yet?

NF:I don't know really. You could put a little bit more pathway in. We have one off spurt path which goes down to a little bench by the beck, which is a very nice place to sit, and it’s sort of 20 metres off the main path, so it’s quite nice. I don't know how practical it would be, because of Dorothy’s ponds, to put more paths in round the back of them, because the path comes away from the beck at that point and does a kind of inland loop and then rejoins the beck, so that area there is the area I’m talking about, is quite nicely protected. I think in a way it’s nice to have some areas for the beck’s benefit where there aren’t visitors seeing it too much, because there’s plenty of bits they can get to, and I think if you have the whole of the beck accessible it might make some of the species, like otters and water voles and things, less enthusiastic about using it because it might become too busy.
I think probably one of the big benefits to the wildlife but not necessarily to the visitors, is that we now close in the winter, which we didn’t used to. So when I first worked here we were open virtually every day, I think, apart from Christmas day and New Year’s day, and that just puts more pressure on the environment of the beck and the gardens and everything else, because it never gives them a rest. Whereas now I think because we’re shut early November through until February, it just gives the beck a little bit of a breathing space, the animals on the beck particularly, and the bird life, where they can kind of relax for the winter almost, and that is, I think people don’t realise how important it can be, for birds particularly, to be allowed to feed undisturbed in the winter, because it’s a time of pressure for them, if they get disturbed all the time, they’re using up valuable energy that they could be hosting to survive a hard winter period, and therefore if there’s lots of people down there all of the year round, particularly in the winter, I think it’s potential for flushing a Grey Wagtail or a Dipper endlessly because someone walks past and they move, and that uses up a lot of energy. So in a way, being shut in the winter is good for the wildlife.
There is a concern I feel with global warming and this, we get periods of more intense rain now, so we had the whole valley bottom of the beck flooded last year and that required quite a lot of path work and repair and things, and I think there’s a potential there, if that continues for washing out banks and washing out plant environments and around the edges of the beck and things, which would be a serious worry, but I think that’s a worry everywhere. Quite what you do about it is, you know, very hard for us here or even the National Trust at a national level to try and do. Obviously they try and do everything, but to achieve things is, you need everybody to do it, not just one organisation or one property.

L:There’s no flooding areas that have been completely damaged or …?

NF:Not yet, no, but I think if we continue to have intense floods, where the paths go next to the beck in the valley bottom there, the vegetation was quite heavily ripped out over last winter, it reseeds itself and continues fine, but I think if it was repeated events, it would be difficult. And I think that’s obviously what’s causing the erosion of the area just downstream from the mill.