Key

CT: = Participant
K: = Interviewer, Kate
[time e.g. 5:22] = inaudible word at this time
[IA 5:22] = inaudible section at this time
[word] = best guess at word
… = interruption in sentence, trailing off or short pause

CT:I work for the National Trust as an assistant gardener here at Acorn Bank. I’ve only been here for a couple of years, so fairly new, and I’m also a local resident in Culgaith, again only fairly new into the area, couple years ago. So yeah, physical, emotional, it both works personally as well as professionally, so I’ll start at personally. So when I first moved to the local area, just discovering the local area, there’s a few key spots we like to go to, just together to get some outdoor space, and one of them was Acorn Bank. It’s a favourite of ours – one, it’s just down the road and two, it’s just a beautiful area, both within the woodlands as well as the river that runs through it.

K:Who’s we? Have you got a family and a dog?

CT:Me and my partner… yes, dog, yes. So first, me and my partner moved in and then we got a little puppy retriever together, which has always been a life ambition of mine. So we got our little retriever, Max, last year and he absolutely loves the woods. We love going for local walks together the three of us, just through the woods and it’s nice because I work here and I get to see the woods anyway, but it’s from a different perspective in my own time. I get to appreciate the views and the river and we both just love the river anyway, just ‘cause some of the views you get when you’re looking upstream and downstream are just incredible, incredibly beautiful. The dog, he just loves it as well because… it’s a bit of a fine balance ‘cause when he’s on lead, he can only go so far. He always has his favourite spots where he sits down and he doesn’t wanna carry on walking along the path ‘cause he’s urging to go in. He’s a bit of a water baby with swimming, so he absolutely loves it but he just loves being by it and listening to it and it’s something new. Especially when he was growing up, he’d never seen it before. It’s just the noises it makes and seeing the water moving along the rocks, he finds it mesmerising. On a particularly hot day, he loves having a bit of a splash, wetting his feet and just exploring a bit. But yeah, it’s a favourite spot of his.

K:So it’s not just the dog, is it? It’s you as well, from looking at your face .

CT:Yeah, it’s both of us. My partner as well, she loves coming here and it’s a mix of all three of us – her and the dog, me and the dog and sometimes, just us on our own and it’s really nice. We didn’t realise, actually, funnily enough; I was talking to my partner about this project. She didn’t realise the beck ran all the way through this far. So I was explaining a bit to her about it and she’s known this for a couple of years now and she didn’t realise actually, that was our connection to Acorn Bank. She just didn’t realise it stretched that far. I mean, I’ve always known the lakes but south of Cumbria, really, and I’ve grown up in the lakes. Love Cumbria and the Lake District itself and, like most people, you move here for the hills and then you very quickly discover the surrounding areas. There’s a lot more to offer in Cumbria than just the Lake District. So yeah, we’ve got a few favourites; there’s Kirkland, with the little loop near Cross Fell, we love there as well. Here, we’ve got Cliburn Moss, we’ve got a few little favourites and it’s all outside of the national park. There’s loads of other places, which we’re continuing to discover, which is nice.

K:So when you’re working in the garden, do you get the chance to go in the woods, or is this just in your free time?

CT:Yeah, aside from my free time, being local, coming here, I am quite fortunate with my position, where I get to go probably in the woods and near the river more often than the others, both volunteers and staff. So within my role as the assistant gardener, I primarily work in the gardens, supporting Heather and Bron, but one day each week, I work in the estate. So I get to be in the woods, I get to be at parkland, in the fields, so since starting, I’ve probably spent quite a fair bit of time near the water, doing various tasks. Luckily enough, I get to see the trees and the woods more often and the shape of the river, how it changes. Even since starting… it’s funny ‘cause rivers, they change shape through decades, really, but over the last two years, I’ve noticed the changes in the shape.

K:Is that because of storms or heavy flows?

CT:Yeah, so I’m still learning a bit of how rivers work and the impacts but I think a lot of it’s climate change, I think a lot of it’s the heavy rainfall. We’re getting more wetter seasons than we are drier periods, so it’s definitely had an impact, I think, with the amount of water flow. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget it’s a beck; feels sometimes more like a river and like the River Eden, really . Especially when it floods, it just reminds me of the power of what water has on us and the impact in the environment.

K:Where does it flood then? Where does the water go?

CT:So the main flooding points I’ve noticed… where we have our driveway to come up to the house, there’s a woodland on the other side of the river where it’s a big flood plain. It completely bombards there; it almost creates its own channel past where it bends. There’s another bit near our weir, where it floods up that pathway. It’s a pinch point where if we’re still open or we know a storm’s coming or it’s been heavy rainfall the day before, it can still be flooded, so it’s knowing when to close that area off. The weir itself becomes like a water rapids; it’s quite impressive to see but it’s not what the weir was designed for, really. It’s designed for a light water flow, not heavy water.

K:Have you noticed damage to it over the time you’ve been here?

CT:Yeah, so I know with the weir itself, there’s a lot of undercut damage, which can’t be seen, so I’ll be curious to see what will be done, even throughout my time here, of how it looks. But even just around the surrounding areas, there’s logs, debris, which are some small trees have been dragged onto that area and the surrounding stone ways and the land erosion has even eroded away around it, where the water pools and sits. So it’s quite incredible how it’s changed, really. That’s been continuous over years but even while I’ve been here, I’ve seen the difference.

K:So do you think it’s made a difference to the wildlife as well?

CT:Yeah, I think so. I think good things and bad things. As certain species and certain animals thrive in one area… an area where animals don’t thrive and they’re struggling, others are allowed to thrive. So there’s probably a bit of an imbalance, potentially, with what’s living in there, due to the impact of other things not making it to that point. So fish, for example, not being able to swim up the weir, there’s probably an impact of the amount of invertebrates or that sort of thing thriving ‘cause of that, maybe. But yeah, it feels like a nice environment for the wildlife to live. I know there’s deer – we rarely see it, but there’s deer that go down there and love the quiet areas and I’ve seen them every now and then. So it’ll be interesting to see, with the changes, how that impacts for positive, negative, but I’m learning a bit more about that myself. In the future, I’m gonna, I think, be taking part in some surveys to see what is going on and the numbers and whether they are good or not so good.

K:What have you actually noticed, then? Otters?

CT:I’ve not seen any otters, no. I’ve heard it’s the legendary rare otter where they’re around but I think I have the luxury to be working in that environment but not day to day where I get to see the otter there. It’s the same near where I live, there’s apparently an otter around , still yet to see. I’ve seen herons though, or kingfishers. See them fairly regularly ‘cause where our erosion is near the drive, I have set up a wild cam to capture the images of the river erosion. So all I do is once a month, or once every couple of months, I’ll go and see the data, collect it and upload the images to our SharePoint, where the Riverlands team can analyse that and see, really, what the effects are over the months, ‘cause they can’t be here every day. So when I’m going down there or even just at an eye’s glance, rather than to collect the data, you do see some really nice wildlife there and they do appreciate it. Especially that side in the woodlands, it’s a safe haven; visitors don’t go there, you’re guaranteed some quietness for the wildlife, so it’s lovely. So yeah, very regularly see those birds there.

K:So what has your camera picked up?

CT:So I joined July 2023 and the river erosion’s been ongoing for a number of years but really, it was since I started, it started to escalate quite drastically. So over last winter in ’23-’24, the erosion really impacted, going up closer towards the drive and that’s where we had to have a number of very old oak trees to be fallen. The impact if that didn’t happen is they were gonna fall anyway and there’s evidence of that because where one of the stumps are left, it’s snapped in half and it’s fallen into the bank that’s eroded. So it was gonna go anyway; the only difference is that we did it in a much safer environment where we could control it, rather than just have a 200-year-old oak falling into the other side. The point’s been made that anywhere else, that would be normal, that’s absolutely fine, but the worry for us is that the roots would’ve potentially uprooted our drive, not allowing any access for emergency services, just our day to day, visitors. So the reason was just really ‘cause of that, so that was the decision. But it’s changed really fast and the ask was just to provide images to the Riverlands team and what we’ve been able to do using previous experience is to create a timelapse video, so they can see through the months of how it’s changed – and I’ll show you the video shortly. And that’s really helped one of the specialists just to try and predict the future of how the movement’s gonna happen and when we might need to move the drive or how that goes. So it’s really helped them, within their meetings, make these decisions, so I think it’s been really good data, which I’ve been part of. I remember, when I first heard about this erosion, we did a tour with our general manager and a few other staff members and we were talking about areas in the estate and some future ambition. We got to the weir erosion at the end, ‘cause we did a big loop around our estate, and I always knew about the erosion and I’ve thought, ‘Oh, it'll be kind of small.’ We’ve got other bits of river erosion near our woodlands at the lower part, which are big but they’re kind of small; it’s kind of what you’d expect. And this erosion was just massive, absolutely massive and it’s about 15, 20 foot in depth to where the land and river is. So when I remember seeing it for the first time, the erosion was way bigger than I was expecting. So it shows the seriousness behind what’s happening and I think, through speaking to the specialists, they’ve said, usually, you have a problem like erosion and you can solve it with, ‘You do x, y or z,’ and fix, it’s sorted. But she said the worry with this is that you have so many variables – you have the mill, you have the drive, you have the farm opposite, our land. There’s all of these things in place and the type of sediment from the erosion and the speed of it – so you create a solution and then it’s changed because the speed of it’s changed. So it’s been a really tough one but it’s been quite incredible to see… it’s not nice to see the erosion but in a point in history, it’s been really incredible to be part of that. You think the oaks, for example, they’ve been there for centuries and for that now to reach its tipping point, where things are changing in the land and we’re there to witness that, it’s quite a key point. Through the history of Acorn Bank, it’s never happened in that spot. The river erosion’s been happening for years, throughout Crowdundle Beck’s history, but for the history of Acorn Bank, it’s there and then. That’s never happened before, where it’s been eroding near our driveway. So that’s been exciting and we’ve done various estate tasks on the other side in some of our fields. Where the river runs along, we have our woodland and we own the land on the other side as well. It’s a nice balance, where we get visitors to view our estate but then there’s areas where visitors just can’t access, where it means it’s just for nature and it’s just for the wildlife and trees and the flora and fauna. So it’s nice to have those areas, so we’ve done some work where we’ve had to cross the beck to get to that area, which has always been an interesting one. It’s the morning of the day we do the work, it’s assessing where’s the best place to cross, is it crossable? And it’s been interesting to see, depending on the rainfall, is it a no-go to get to that and we’ll do a different job for the day. It’s been interesting, even through crossing certain areas of the beck, seeing the formations of the rocks change just from heavy rainfall and where you’d cross usually, you’ve had to go a bit more upstream. I’ve walked a wheelbarrow across the beck, which I never thought I’d do, just to clear tree guards in areas which aren’t usually trodden on. So it’s been interesting