Welland Rivers Trust

Before coming home to do my eve-of-poll delivering, I went to a meeting about the setting up of the Welland Rivers Trust:

The natural character of the lower river was lost centuries ago when the Cambridgeshire/Lincoln Fens were drained for agriculture and that of most of its middle reaches destroyed in the 1960s by an excessively robust land drainage engineering scheme which widened, straightened and lowered the river bed to enable the floodplain to be converted to intensive agriculture, as had most of the sloping land already.

The recreation of naturalness and the reconnection of water, people and nature has begun in the Welland, as it has in many parts of Britain. The middle Welland is the only place in the country where one might see both English osprey and red kite wheeling in the skies at the same time, as a result of successful reintroductions at different parts of the catchment.