The River Rother book launch

Members of ERA’s steering group were pleased to attend the launch of a new book, very relevant to some aspects of ERA’s endeavours: ‘The River Rother – a Short History of a Lowland English River Catchment and Prospects for Future Management’, edited by John Boardman and Ian Foster.

This book summarises a wealth of scientific studies of the Rother and its catchment as well as looking back to the areas distant, and not so distant, past with chapters covering archaeology, ecology, palaeoecology, hydrology, soil erosion as well as ‘Human Interference’.

The final chapter summarises the book and then brings things up to date with reference to the Rother Summit held in November 2023 and which has led to the formation of the Rother Partnership in an attempt to bring together interested parties and form a coordinated management plan for the river.

Richly illustrated throughout with historical and current photographs plus many charts to summarise data, this book is a fascinating read for anyone wanting to understand the River Rother, its history and its current issues, many of which are complex and take some unpicking.

One major theme of the book is how the Rother has always existed in a state of flux and that there is no one time when the river was in some perfect state which would be just the state we would want to return it too. That is simply not how it is with rivers, they are always responding to changes by changing themselves. This has included climatic changes plus, increasingly, changes in human impact (and, of course, human impact now also includes climatic changes!). Finding a sustainable, adaptable, management system will be an ongoing challenge.

We depend on our rivers for irrigating our crops so that we can eat and for providing water to drink and yet we have allowed them to deteriorate such that they, including the Rother, do not achieve Good Ecological Status under the terms of the Water Framework Directive. The list of factors negatively impacting the Rother is long, but includes changes in agricultural practice particularly the increased use of agri-chemicals; removal of trees and hedgerows; an increase in the amount of land covered by impermeable surfaces due to development; pollution from road run-off and from ‘spills’ of untreated sewage from Waste Water Treatment Works. Climate change is already increasing the amount of rain in the winter months, plus reducing rain during summer months. Our rain is coming in greater amounts within shorter periods, increasing the likelihood of flooding, while droughts are also becoming more common.

Some of these factors work together to create one of the Rother’s biggest issues – sedimentation. Much of the course of the river runs through Lower Greensand, with river banks prone to breaking down. Arable farming of crops growing in discrete rows leads to heavy rains rinsing soil from fields into ditches and onto roads, all inexorably heading downstream to the river. Then, when all this sandy sediment reaches the river it cannot flow away downstream without coming up against one of the 18 weirs or other man-made solid impoundments (often associated with the various historic mills along the river) which slow the flow of the water, allowing the sediment to settle in long tailbacks behind every one of these structures. The life of the riverbed, be it benthic invertebrates (grubs and larvae of the ‘riverflies’) or the fish eggs and newly hatched fish, all need mixed gravel and oxygenated water, not these dead sandy deposits. And we have not yet mentioned the missing species, and species that shouldn’t be there in the first place. The Rother has a plethora of Invasive Non-Native Species (INNS) including Mink which have all but eradicated our native Water Voles in the Rother Valley, and Himalayan Balsam which grows densely, swamping out native plants and then dies back to nothing during the winter leaving unprotected bare soil which will then be highly vulnerable to being damaged and swept away by storm waters or floods.

The final chapter of the book also asks 4 fundamental questions: What should the Rother and its catchment look like in the medium to long term (25-100 years)? How to assess what needs to be done? How to fund mitigation? How to measure the effectiveness of interventions?

There is no halcyon day in the past that we can identify and quantify such as to say ‘this is what the river should be like’ so answering the first of these questions will be a question of setting targets/priorities in agreement with all river stakeholders and that each nudge the river and its catchment towards a more ecologically sustainable and climate resilient future.

When assessing what needs to be done there will be no ‘one size fits all’ solution, rather, individual situations will need assessing and acting upon, but a catchment wide approach will allow for lessons learnt in one place to inform decisions made in another.

Monitoring ecological recovery will need to be done over a range of timescales and in range of ways, including the type of citizen science monitoring that ERA has supported for some time and which is now headed up by the Western Sussex Rivers Trust.

It is indeed a big ask: Effective, integrated management of the Rother catchment that supports ecological recovery while being acceptable to all stakeholders, capable of being funded, and able to adapt to a changing climate. This book does not pretend to have all the answers but does, however, provide a comprehensive backdrop to the issues, and although somewhat technical in places, provides a fascinating and thought-provoking introduction to the subject for members of the general public with the inclination to read it and ponder its contents.

When my grandchildren are my age, will they be able to stand by the River Rother and see a much improved scene?

Let’s pull together and make sure that they do!