Water Level Management Plan

We all heard about the Water Level Management Plan a year or so ago, sat in several meetings and to a degree there was a certain amount of head shaking and a lot question asking, one of the main questions being "will any of these plans actually reach the river"?

Well I can tell you that the Environment Agency have excelled themselves, and delivered some of the finest habitat improvement projects both on the river Avon and closer to home on the river Frome.

Yesterday we were kindly invited to view a WLMP engineering project just finished on the river Frome below Dorchester, and I have to say we were all blown away by the scale of this project and the results that we confidently feel it will achieve.

Some serious thought has gone into this project, using some new restoration practices, for example the use of whole very large trees as flow deflectors, a twenty tonne slew to, shall we say adjust the bed of the river, and a monster gravel washing machine to clean hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of previously dredged gravel, returning it to the bed of the river to restore much needed Salmonid spawning habitat.

A new method of "sliding" a grand term for narrowing the river by "sliding" the bankside into the river, causing it to narrow and at the same time extending the wet marginal habitat.

I think a huge thank you from us all is the order of the day, all this was completed by Environment Agency staff, the WLMP team, in particular Alasdair Maxwell and Allan Frake, slew driver Tony Frampton, and a profesional team of very competent machine drivers and ground staff, a credit to you all.

We have done the Redd counting on the Frome now for many years, And I can tell you, after all the work that has taken place over the last few months we are seriously looking forward to carefully monitoring all these new sites this coming winter, as the amount of Redd cutting in these now restored areas was practically nil.