Where ships meet …

Goldilocks would have liked the tanker Zapadnyy’s cargo: molasses, at just the right temperature, not too hot and not too cold. Transporting molasses is tricky – it must be kept fairly fluid, so heating coils warm it to 24^oC in the ship’s hold. If the molasses is too cold, it is impossible to discharge, but if it’s too warm it undergoes a Maillard reaction, an exothermic reaction which turns it into caramel. Eddie Atherton told me that “it’s like coke! I’ve seen people having to take a jack-hammer to it to release it.”

The Zapadnyy, molasses cargo discharged, at the port of Silloth

Eddie, now retired, was Production Manager at Caltech-Carrs Milling, based at the Port of Silloth on the Solway and it’s there – to Silloth – that Zapadnyy is bound.

She’s my favourite ship on the Solway, a ship whose erratic behaviour collects stories. I first heard about her in connection with some emergency welding that had to be carried out on the dock, and all the Silloth pilots have stories to tell about her.  “She’s unmanoeuvrable!” (Bill Amyes); “It’s anybody’s guess which way she’s going to go” (Ed Deeley, pilot and former Harbour Master); “She’s got such a broad beam. It’s like trying to steer a coracle” (Chris Puxley, pilot and former Harbour Master).

Ships longer than 50metres going up the Solway Firth to Silloth must take on a pilot from just off the Port of Workington. It’s a 90-minute voyage with known and occasionally unknown hazards: the Admiralty chart shows uncharted areas and ‘Changeable depths’, and the pilot and ship’s Master must negotiate the English Channel  – limited to the North by the Workington Bank – then pass through the Maryport Roads followed by a wiggle North/North-East through the shifting channel off Allonby Bay (see Piloting a ship to Silloth for more stories).

This afternoon, Sunday 13^th January, Zapadnyy is due in to Silloth, and Workington’s Harbour Master, Russell Oldfield, has offered me a trip out to the ship on the pilot boat Derwent. At breakfast time, I watch Zapadnyy’s red icon on the live shipping website, making her way up the Irish Sea, turning East into the Solway, and slowing and anchoring off Workington just after 9am.

The Marine Traffic website gives all her details, her tonnage, her deadweight (weight including cargo), her length and breadth (77m x 14m) and more. She’s an old ship, built in 1988, and she’s registered in Belize – but I know that she has a crew of Russians and Ukrainians who, despite political differences, apparently co-exist amicably in this confined space.

The Solway’s English ports – Maryport, Workington, Whitehaven and Silloth – can only be entered at High Water and only, in Zapadnyy’s case, during daylight, so now she must wait off Workington for the late afternoon high tide.

But the wind has got up and the rolling brown waves on the Firth are streaked with white. The forecast is bad – a north-westerly wind, Force 5 or 6, increasing Gale Force 7 later in the afternoon. Tim Riley, pilot and Silloth’s current Harbour Master, phones me at midday – none of us will be going anywhere today.

I watch online as Zapadnyy’s icon swings round to the South-West and increases speed, direction 200^o. She will sit out the gale elsewhere, heading out into the Irish Sea and then sheltering off the Isle of Man overnight: no shore time for her crew tonight.

Monday January 14th: the wind has moderated and I see that the tanker is back off Workington, speed 0.0knots – her crew waiting, again.  The next high water at Silloth is at 1702h; pilot Tim will need to board Zapadnyy at about 1500h, so the Derwent will be setting out to meet her at about 1430h. At Workington’s Harbour Office I’m directed towards the far end of the dock where the Derwent is moored.

Pilot boat and harbour tug Derwent by the dock gates at Workington

Since I last wrote about the port (see Solway Shore Stories) there have been many obvious changes: the green bund of plastic-wrapped bales of Solid Recycled Fuel destined for Latvia has disappeared, as has the pyramid of incoming gypsum. The main cargo entering the port these days is timber and wood-pulp for the paperboard mill Iggesund: stripped tree-trunks are piled like small mountains, new ‘Wainwrights’ in the making. Black plastic pipes for West Cumbria’s new water supply wait to be transported to the scarred countryside. The port still receives cement, but the hoped-for container traffic did not happen, and the two enormous Nelcon cranes, iconic reminders of the port’s glory days, have been sold and are due to be taken away. The quays look empty and tidy, waiting for new business.

The Derwent’s deck lies fifteen feet below me, for the dock gates are open and high tide is still two hours away. Russell Oldfield is washing the deck. Despite my willingness to do so, he insists that I should not climb down the quayside’s metal ladder, and directs me to the far side of the dock next to the RNLI station (from where I drove the previous lifeboat, Sir John Fisher, two years ago) and the fretted metal ‘safety steps’. Oily water sloshes to and fro beneath them, and green and grey shadows shift and shape-change in this underworld amongst the concrete piers.

Under the quay

The cabin of the pilot boat – which is also the harbour’s tug – is surprisingly roomy and warm, and coxswain Phil Scattergood lifts a hatch to show me that there is a larger cabin below, with bunks and a ‘head’ (toilet). Then Tim and coxswain Ian Cormack arrive onboard, and immediately we are off, heading out of the gates and out to sea.

Dozens of cormorants perch on the railings of the breakwater, black as crotchets on a stave; a syncopated tune that falls off the edge of the page, its notes flying, as we roar by.

Out past the breakwater the swell is noticeable, and the view from the windows is bleared and distorted by blasts of spray as the bow plunges and slams into the waves.

Zapadnyy is visible now, idling under motor, her bow pointing West, but she is of course expecting us, and as her captain and Phil talk on the radio, smoke puffs briefly from her funnel and she slowly turns around, wallowing gently, waiting. She has come up from Avonmouth, where she took on her cargo of molasses from a bigger tanker, but she is not fully-laden for her red-brown hull is partly visible.

Phil slowly brings the Derwent along the starboard side, in the lee of the north-westerly wind; two of the crew are waiting to welcome Tim and – it happens so quickly that I miss taking a photo at the crucial time – Tim has climbed the short rope ladder and is aboard. Russell is laughingly sympathetic that I’ve failed to see and record the ‘pilot transfer’, the main point of my trip, and he and Ian say that Tim must be ‘camera- shy’. But Zapadnyy’s crew, rolling up the ladder, make up for my disappointment with their broad smiles.

In seconds, we’re going astern and the tanker is under way: the meeting of ships and humans of different nationalities, briefly united by the sea, has been terminated.

We loop away, and now Russell sits at a computer and Phil, watching another screen, steers us along a pre-ordained course towards the West. Under the terms of its licence to dredge, the Port has to check the movements of the dredged material where it has been dumped in the designated ‘Soil Grounds’ in the Firth, so now the boat’s sonar measures and records the depth along the current course.

I watch, and feel, the rise and fall of the waves, and a guillemot takes off in a flurry of wings and running feet as the sun’s rays suddenly fan out from a hole in the cloud, gilding the surface of the sea.

Sunlight gilds the Solway

The dark prow of St Bees’ head stands out to the West, and the low coast around Workington is busy with turning wind-turbines and plumes of steam from the factories. A dark-grey catamaran, one of C-Winds’ service boats for the Robin Rigg windfarm, passes us in the distance, moving fast towards the port; its skipper is on the radio asking for permission to enter. Zapadnyy is disappearing up the English Channel, her green-and-brown hull merging with the coastline. The Derwent turns and heads back to port, leaving a spreading vee of frothing white water astern.

***

Zapadnyy heading up the Firth in the darkening day

Driving East along the coast road, I catch glimpses of Zapadnyy in the distance as Tim guides her through the channels up to Silloth. A smirr of rain hides her as she passes in front of Criffel, but soon she is slowly passing the harbour entrance, losing way, idling – waiting.

Someone comes down from the Harbour office to check the tide-gauge by the dock gate: he waves at me and shakes his head – not enough water yet for the tanker to make her entrance.

Fifteen minutes pass, and then her masthead riding-lights appear above the wall and she approaches gently, gently, delicately turning into the difficult entrance, sweetly gliding through the outer dock and setting the anchored shrimp boats swaying; gently through the narrow entrance of New Dock, and safely into port. It’s almost dark now, lights from the the warehouses glittering on the water and scattering as Zapadnyy manoeuvres to her own special place.

Her entrance was perfect.

But it has not always been so trouble-free. One of the photos on the Marine Traffic website shows her elsewhere with a spectacularly damaged bow. And here at Silloth, where wind and counter-currents at the harbour mouth make for a very difficult entry, she has on occasion rammed the dock wall – the incident when emergency welding was required – and, worse, on Ayr pilot John Munro’s watch, grounded outside the harbour on a sandbank.

The day the Zapadnyy got it wrong. September 13th 2016.
Photo thanks to Danny Ferris, Solway Shipping

On that occasion, she had to stay put (much to the delight and interest of ship-watchers close by on the shore) until she could be hauled off on the night’s high tide.

This evening, though, she arrives quietly and calmly. The harbour staff in hi-vis are waiting on the quay, ready to secure the ropes and hawsers. She is declared ‘all fast’.

The crew wave to me again, and then busy themselves with their well-practised tasks. They will spend tomorrow at Silloth – there should be time to go ashore – and then Tim Riley will guide them back down to Workington on the falling evening tide.

Meanwhile, the pipe will be connected and warm molasses will start to flow, to be stored then mixed in the harbour-side factory to make Crystalyx for sheep and cows. Zapadnyy may be difficult to steer but, as pilot Ed Deeley says, “She’s got a very competent bridge team as well as a very good echo-sounder! And she’s the only vessel that manages to keep molasses in a good state.”

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Port Carlisle: canals and ships and trains

The Port, the Firth, and Scotland (photo: Ann Lingard)

Red line marks steamer pier; oval the position of the locks (photo: Ann Lingard)

When the tide is out, Port Carlisle’s former life is laid bare in stark, dark shapes.

A line of rotten wooden stumps, marching out across the mud, scarcely hints that here was once the steamer pier.

Posts of the steamer pier, the dock, and the coaling wharf

Out beyond the whale-back of mud and stone in the centre of the dock is a long, stone wharf, a jumble of straight lines and ragged edges: red sandstone blocks, their intertidal surfaces dark with fucoids, greened at the high tideline, and speckled with yellow and grey lichen – the coaling wharf, disconnected from the shore, disconnected from the sandstone quay, disconnected from the village.

The coaling wharf (and ‘garden’)

To reach the wharf I squelch across mud and shelly sand, noting the footprints and beak-probes of waders; I climb over fallen blocks of dressed sandstone, coated green with Ulva, up onto what was the working surface of the wharf – and find a wild garden of blazing yellow gorse, grass and pink thrift.

Out on the wharf

Out on the wharf

Wooden fender, steamer pier in the distance

Looking towards the steamer pier

 

There is a wall of part-dressed red blocks, some shifted by the tides, and granite bollards, pale speckled grey, geologically incongruous  – fallen sideways, unmoored. Sandstone steps, green and slimy, lead down to the muddy seabed of the dock. I find strange shapes of flattened metalwork in the stone, bolts that are twisted and rusty, decayed wooden fenders, and dislodged sandstone, the edges of the wharf no longer neat and protective. And a strong sense of the past, a place of bollards and hawsers, where boats came up from Liverpool, picking the right tides to negotiate the Firth’s notorious sandbanks; and tied up to collect or deliver coal and goods and people, that were then transported up the canal to Carlisle.

On the wharf

Granite bollard

Bollard unmoored

The eastern, seaward side slopes gently towards the water, a shore of mud, red clay and shells, from which pebbles have been scooped and thrown up onto the wharf.

Standing on top of the wharf I look North across the Solway to Scotland and the sheds of Eastriggs munitions depot, that are low and an unnatural pale-green, failing to be inconspicuous. To my right is the vast Rockcliffe marsh at the head of the Firth, barely visible beyond a low headland that anchors the shiny mud of the low-tide bay in place; intersecting lines of mud and sand and water, silver, pewter, ochre, where  oyster-catchers and two curlews pipe and forage. And here on my left, across the dock, are the houses of a port that was once an insignificant place known as Fisher’s Cross.

That dark mound in the centre of the dock, that rarely gets covered by the tide, is not a merely a heap of pebbly sediment, swirled and dumped by the tides: originally built as a stone breakwater, it forced a splitting of the ebbing and flowing tides, to reduce the silting of the harbour. Beyond it, the red sandstone of the quay where ships once unloaded passengers and goods, is still visible.

Looking across to the harbour wall

From the top of the harbour wall

Winkles pick their way …

The tide is coming in fast now, the wave-fronts creamed with brown froth, and I pick my way back across the mud, where the mouths of tiny burrows spurt water with each footfall. The mudflats are home to a rich community of animals. Winkles crawl amongst the pebbles and spiralling fucoid fronds, and the empty valves of pink tellins and chalky grey clams crunch underfoot. A Little Egret, shocking in its whiteness, flaps slowly along the shore.

I find a few ragged-topped wooden stakes, blackened and soft, which hold memories of the narrow rail track along which horse-drawn wagons teetered to the wharf.

The quay by the village is disrupted by a gap, through which a sluggish stream of water trickles across the mud at low tide. Here is the ghost of the sea-lock that marked the end of the Carlisle canal.

Wall of the outer lock

The outer lock

The tide creeps in

Little remains except the sandstone walls, and it’s not easy now to imagine the two lock-gates with their associated wheels and handles. Between 1823 and 1853 the canal was the route to the Solway, and thence to Annan, Liverpool and Ireland, for ships carrying goods from the warehouse at Carlisle, and for goods and coal in the other direction, brought up along the coast. Laden barges and ships travelled in both direction along the canal, being swung round in the now-overgrown turning circle by the lock. High walls of dressed stone are almost hidden by shrubs and dangling ivy.

People travelled, too, mostly away from Cumberland – to Scotland, the Isle of Man or Ireland or further, emigrating from Liverpool to America. The jagged line of stumps, like broken teeth, to the West of the port are all that remains of the steamer pier, which was built out into the Firth so that arrivals and departures would not be limited by the tides. Outgoing passengers and sight-seers crammed onto passage-boats that left the Carlisle basin and travelled along the canal, the schedule timed to rendezvous with the steamer.

The bath-house today

 

The former Solway Hotel and the Steam-Packet Inn offered shelter and refreshment; a bath-house with heated sea-water pumped from the Firth provided ‘spa’ facilities, and the Wesleyan Methodist chapel on the outskirts looked after people’s souls.

 

All ports require a Customs House, preferably large and imposing, and new local housing was equally smart: a terrace of elegant Georgian houses – now Listed – each with individually designed fan-lights above the door; a house with a sandstone Roman altar embedded in the stone-work; a Wesleyan Methodist chapel.

Fanlights

Fanlights

Fanlights

Fanlights

 

Port Carlisle had style, it had stunning views, it was busy, a tourist destination and a stepping stone to the New World. By 1854 it even had a railway station.  The canal’s working life had been relatively short, and eventually uneconomic. It was filled in – and railway tracks laid. At first steam trains carried passengers and freight. When that too proved a financial embarrassment, passengers were pulled in the horsedrawn ‘Dandy’ along the rails between Burgh and the Port. But finally, after a range of transport methods had been tried and failed, the line closed and was dismantled.

Station platform

Back in the village I wander round a weedy, grassy rectangle, kicking weeds from the low brick-edged platform which is all that remains of the station terminal. The station house itself has been converted into a private dwelling.

 

 

The Port’s former life is imprinted in large detail on the landscape and the shore. It’s not too difficult to imagine the comings and goings, the excitement of a new vessel’s arrival up the Firth; the driving rain and fast-ebbing tides that kept ships stalled across at Annan; the passage boat’s arrival at the final lock, laden with sight-seers, emigrants, and their baggage; the wet, impatient, hungry, passengers drinking in the pubs; the racket of the crane and laden shaky wagons; or the soft light of a tender Solway day encouraging walkers to stroll along the road.

But it is the small details that stay in my mind: letters ‘JW’ precisely engraved in a block by the canal; rusty bolts; flattened metal shapes found both on the wharf and on the quay; the zoned colours of sea-weeds, weathered and wave-washed sandstone and lichen; the glistening mud speckled with stones; the single dark pockmark on each dressed block where pincers lifted it into place.

Details

“J.W”

A square-sided bollard

As the tide flows into the vacated basin of the port, the place is again populated, with hundreds of gulls and ducks, sitting quietly on the silvery surface of the water, enjoying the ride.

The incoming tide

And now …

This is not a sad place. There may no longer a busy-ness on the streets and quay, but the inner life of the village is full of pride and warm memories. The lady who lives in the former Bath-house once invited me inside to look at its original features; friends have been given impromptu conducted tours along the quay, and recently villagers and other local people took party in the ‘Remembering the Solway’ oral history project, meeting regularly in the Methodist Chapel: their reminiscences were recorded and transcribed, and in the accompanying film Daphne Hoggs remembers learning to swim in the harbour, and how she and her friends would swim from the central ‘island’ to the wharf steps.

The ‘heritage’ group discuss the lock

One result of the Heritage Project

Oral history in the Methodist Chapel

In the related ‘Port Carlisle Heritage Project’ run by the North of England Civic Trust, the villagers explored the Port’s history, and illuminated it for visitors with helpful information boards.

It’s a place where people get on with their daily lives, yet are able to delight in their village’s very special place on the edge of the Solway Firth, a stepping-stone between land and sea and distant countries.

 

Where to find out more:

David Ramshaw’s history of The Carlisle Ship Canal, 2013, P3 Publications, ISBN 978-0-9572412, is packed with photos, newscuttings and maps.

 

Remembering the Solway oral history project. In the film,  Daphne Hogg remembers her childhood, and swimming at Port Carlisle

The Port Carlisle Heritage Project: Ruth Lord gives an illustrated talk about the Port and the project

The ‘Dandy’ is now in the National Railway Museum

Tracking Triops, the elusive Tadpole Shrimp

Triops cancriformis adult (photo thanks to Larry Griffin)

In August, after the long weeks of cloudless blue skies, and heat that shimmered over the cracked mud of the merse, the rain came. The jet stream had looped into another orientation, and the rain fell day after day for a week. Dr Larry Griffin emailed me: “the rain after the heat has brought the eggs out of stasis in at least two pools” and so he was ready to take a small group to have a look.

Larry is the Principal Species Research Officer at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) Caerlaverock Reserve on the north coast of the Solway Firth, near Dumfries, and Caerlaverock is one of only two places in the UK where the rare and elusive tadpole shrimp, Triops cancriformis, is – occasionally – found. [1]

The modern story of Triops is a story of discovery and loss and re-discovery. But this is an animal that has scarcely changed since the Triassic period – its fossils date back two hundred million years. It is a freshwater Crustacean, belonging to the Order Notostraca, and looks very similar to (but is unrelated to) a small horseshoe crab as it trundles around on the bottom of a pond: its head and thorax are covered by a carapace, like a shield, so that from above its legs and mouthparts are scarcely visible.

Was it always the case that Triops lived, fed and bred in freshwater pools? This is a dangerous life-strategy yet despite, or because of, this danger the animals evolved a means of surviving when the pools dried out. Today, they are found only in ephemeral pools in the New Forest and on the saltmarshes (merse) and wet pastures around Caerlaverock. They can live for two to three months, or until the tide inundates the merse – and when the pools dry out under the hot summer sun, the adults die and disappear. But in the drying sediment their eggs live on, yet ‘switched off’ in a state of diapause.

When the rain comes and the pond re-wets, the eggs are stimulated to hatch – and the larvae feed and grow very quickly, so that adults are ready to lay eggs within as little as two to three weeks from hatching. As Larry says, “They can flash in and out of existence – it’s just luck whether you find them. It needs an inquisitive person … in the right place at the right time, who thinks ‘Oooh, what’s that?’ ”

This explains why the Triops’ story has been so exciting and challenging; for me even more so because this special animal survives just across the Solway from where I live, and I now have a chance to see the creatures alive, rather than – many years ago – pickled in formalin in an undergraduate Invertebrate Zoology class.

It was more than 100 years ago that Triops (then known as Apus) was found on the merse, by F. Balfour-Brown. Forty years later, in 1948, in a paper to Nature, he wrote (or narrated – the style of scientific writing was much more like story-telling than it is now):

“In September 1907 I discovered two shallow grassy pools on the Preston sea merse, near Southwick, Kirkcudbrightshire, in which Apus was present. In one of these it was so abundant that when I raised my eleven-inch ring net out of the water it was half full of specimens, mostly full-grown. I searched many other pools in the same area but without finding it and, returning to the same pools a few days later, I found the edges covered with the shells and very few specimens left in the water. The gulls had discovered this mass of food and had destroyed most of the Apus. I have visited the area many times during the last forty years but not until this month, working the merse near the mouth of the Southwick burn, have I again seen Apus. My son found three specimens in a pool which then yielded us about thirty or more, and several other pools near the first produced small numbers, mostly immature.”

These pools were subsequently lost through erosion of the merse, but Tadpole Shrimps were found again, nearly 20 kms away, in 2004.

Larry grinned as he told me about his own discovery. “I’d been out looking for natterjack tadpoles, it was quite a late season. I thought I might as well have a look in that pool – and there they [the Triops] were, tons of them!”

A Triops in the hand …

Several Triops and other invertebrate animals

He wasn’t immediately sure what he had found, until he took some of the animals back to the lab. “It was a gradual dawning… I was looking in the back of a Collins book, I think it was – there was a drawing, a silhouette. And then I had a memory of someone from the RSPB, who had been talking about trying to introduce them somewhere – and then it was ‘hang on, this is that incredibly rare thing’!”

Collaboration with Dr Ruth Feber [2], from Oxford University’s WILDCru, and Professor Colin Adams of Glasgow University’s Scottish Centre for Ecology and the Natural Environment (SCENE), and their colleagues, led to discussions, then further investigations and research at WWT Caerlaverock.

Colin and colleagues collected sediment from the bottom of 86 ponds at Caerlaverock. It was known that the eggs or cysts needed to be desiccated to enter the quiescent, diapause, state, so samples were dried out and then incubated in fresh water at 20^oC. Samples from just two ponds produced living larvae (nauplii). And then, “During the preparation of this [scientific] paper, on 29 July 2010, a population of c. 100+ adults of various sizes up to 3cm were discovered by chance in another ephemeral pond 80m west of the original 2004 site on the Caerlaverock upper salt marshes. This pool was largely created by tractor wheel ruts and cattle movements in an area of gorse (Ulex sp.) and rushes (Juncus effusus).” [3]

As a result of this serendipitous discovery, just three ponds at Caerlaverock were found to be home to Tadpole Shrimps!

Rubbing post & pond where Triops has been found

Cattle on the merse

It’s thought that eggs are spread in several ways – through the guts of animals, on the feet of cattle, deer, or geese, “Anything traipsing around, really,” Larry says. This includes the tyres of tractors and quad bikes, and because the Tadpole Shrimps are hermaphrodite, “It just needs one egg, and after it hatches and survives, you could then get hundreds.”

Sometimes the shrimps themselves have been found, other times it has been the presence of the eggs in washed and filtered sediment samples. Larry reckons there could be stores of eggs of different ages in some of the sites. “I feel a lot better knowing that it’s not just in the one pool!”

Dried mud samples in the lab

He has collected mud from the ponds, as a safety precaution and also as part of his research. There’s a shelf in his office piled with polythene bags that contain mud-samples dating back to 2008. “I wet them every September – so far, they’re still hatching out. This year will be the tenth year [to test them].”

 

Larry uses tanks of de-chlorinated tap-water, bubbled with air for a day to oxygenate it, then throws in the mud-sample containing eggs. “It’s really low-tech! I feed them on fish food and a bit of sea-weed to provide some iodine. They show good behaviour! They learn that when I come into the office, I’ll feed them. They come up to the surface – and I sprinkle the food on the surface, and they turn over and swim on their backs so they can take it with their little legs.”

The adult shrimps lay their eggs in little scrapes in the mud. From an egg less than 0.5mm diameter, an adult can grow up to 7 cm long when reared in the lab. It reaches maturity by passing through several larval stages, each of which grows then moults its skin, or exuvium, before passing on to the next stage.

How often does Larry find the Triops out on the merse? “Most years. It depends on the weather, but if conditions are right, you can easily see them crawling around. One clue is the exuviae, you find them wind-blown at the end of a pond.”

When Larry emailed me after the rain, it was because he had seen these papery skins at the edges of a pond and found some nauplii. But finding a date for even our small group of privileged people to join him proved impossible – and the pools dried out again. This was not to be the year when I would see living Triops in the wild.

Are they living on the other Solway saltmarshes, at Rockcliffe, say, or at Campfield or Newton Arlosh? After all, these are no distance as the goose flies (and large flocks of geese do fly between these sites).

Barnacle geese at Caerlaverock, February 2016

People have looked, and Bart Donato, of Natural England, who has a great interest in Rockcliffe, says the shrimps have never been found there. But it needs someone to be there at exactly the right time, someone who can recognise what they are seeing.

 

 

 

Now, though, there’s a new molecular diagnostic technique available, to test environmental samples for a range of ‘eDNA’ – fragments of genes that are species-characteristic and which may have been left ‘lying around’ in the environment. Graham Sellers from Hull University has recently developed this ‘DNA bar-coding’ technique for Triops and, working with Larry, has established the existence of the shrimp in six ponds at Caerlaverock. [4]

Location & condition of Triops egg-banks: Fig 4 from the paper by Sellers et al 2017 (see below)

Perhaps this technique can now be used for pools on the other Solway saltmarshes?

It would be exciting, and a relief, to find that the story of the rare and elusive Triops can be expanded to a few more chapters: that this enigmatic survivor will remain an important addition to the ‘shrimps’ of the Solway.

Meanwhile, I’m hoping for a hot dry summer in 2019, followed by a spell of rain …

 

Notes:

1.Triops cancriformis is classified as Endangered, listed as a priority BAP species, and specially protected under Schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

2. Ruth Feber et al. June 2011. Ecology and conservation of the Tadpole Shrimp, Triops cancriformis, in Britain. In British Wildlife, p334

3. Colin Adams et al. 2014. Short range dispersal by a rare, obligate freshwater crustacean Triops cancriformis (Bosc). In Aquatic Conservation: Marine & Freshwater Ecosystems. 24: 48–55

4. Graham Sellers et al. 2017. A new molecular diagnostic tool for surveying and monitoring Triops cancriformis populations. PeerJ 5:e3228; DOI 10.7717/peerj.3228

“What’s the point of them?”

I was handing round photos of various colourful marine worms – polychaetes with euphonious names, Lanice, Sabellaria, Pectinaria and Arenicola: like the names of operatic heroes and heroines, to be sung aloud.

It was still early – the best low tides on the Solway Firth are always early – and we had been paddling, peering and pointing, amongst the sculpted neighbourhoods and high-rise apartments of the honeycomb worm reefs at the bottom of the shore. We had used a hand-lens to admire the delicate precision with which these Sabellaria had constructed their tubes of sand-grains; compared them with the single, scruffier tubes of mason worms, Lanice; and had talked about the surface coils of sand above the mid-shore burrows of the lugworms, and how all these different species had developed and fed.

We had seen the external evidence of these creatures’ homes, but of course we had not pulled out the occupants.

So I handed round the photos, of the worms’ multi-segmented cylinders; the haemoglobin-rich, fat-bodied Arenicola; the crown of sensitive tentacles with which Sabellaria had reached out to seek and pick up sandgrains.

“But what’s the point of them?” a young woman asked. “Of the worms. What are they there for?” She appeared genuinely puzzled.

I was stunned: I looked out across the Firth to Scotland for inspiration, but the rounded bulk of Criffel provided no clear answer, though I tried.

“They’re not there for a purpose, they don’t just exist to be eaten by other animals … they’re each beautifully adapted to live a particular type of life, in a particular place. To be themselves…”

I could have given all kinds of reasons why polychaetes are special; I could have told her that there were species that attached to rocks, or burrowed in the sand, or – fierce predators – scurried across the surface; or shone with bioluminescence in the dark; or swarmed and mated at a particular phase of the moon. I could have told her that ‘worms’ had been on this planet millions of years longer than we had; that they were so special that July 1st has been designated International Polychaete Day. I could even have burst into song, like a confused Orpheus without his lyre: “Harmothöe! Aphrodite!”

But that was not why she’d asked the question.

On that still, blue morning in the carpark, when everyone’s attention was turning to thinking about breakfast, I could only reply with more questions:

“What’s the point of mussels – or oarweed? What’s the point of us?”

She shrugged, and smiled.

But that shore-walker’s question, “What’s the point of them?” remains with me, and keeps me awake at night, indicating as it does the perceived gulf between ‘them’ – the more-than-human, as Mark Cocker calls the creatures with which we share this place – and ‘us’.

It’s a surprising question, that will, I hope, help me find new purpose, and new ways of showing and discovering, on my guided shore-walks and saltmarsh writing days.

 

Notes:

There is more about the honeycomb worm reefs of Allonby Bay’s Marine Conservation Zone on Solway Shore Stories and elsewhere in this blog.

Some ‘fun facts’ about polychaetes (marine bristle worms).

Low-tide guided shorewalks and saltmarsh creative writing on the Solway shore.

 

Recording the Solway’s amazing nature: a guest post by Deborah Muscat

Why we need to pay attention to the other living species with whom we share this area, and identify and record them. My thanks to Deborah Muscat, Manager of the Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre based in Carlisle, for writing this guest post.

In mid-April Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre (CBDC) and the Solway Coast AONB launched the Solway Nature Networks as a small project to encourage people to tell the CBDC what nature they had seen on their walks and travels around the area.  So why are we doing this – surely everyone knows what nature there is on the Solway?

First, a bit about me. I have some very early memories: one is looking at wiggly things in a hole filled with water in a tree, another is poking snails to make their eyes go in.  Cut to fifty years later and natural history still makes me excited – just as it did when I was four.

Having lived here for many years I have explored both the Solway coast and the plain.  I know that we live with wildlife that my friends in the South can only dream about; Hares, Natterjack toads, Curlew, Grey Partridge, Corn Marigold, Mudwort (more about these later) etc. But, because we have so much wildlife it becomes commonplace, and that is when it starts to become overlooked.

This was brought home to me when I started to work in Tullie House Museum for the CBDC, a small organisation that few people have ever heard of, but one that has a unique insight into 150 years’ of Cumbria’s natural history.

A wildlife (or biological) record consists of: what was seen, where it was seen, when it was seen and by whom.  Currently, CBDC has over 2.2 million individual records from the whole of Cumbria, and they include flowers, ferns, trees, seaweed, snails, worms, butterflies, beetles, flies, fish, to name but a few. But digging deeper into the data, it was clear that apart from information about birds and toads, CBDC receives only a few records from the Solway area each year.

Why does this matter?  All decisions about land use, management and development must consider biodiversity and this is where biological records are vital.  Increasingly makers look at dots on maps to discover the presence or absence of a species. However, an absence of a dot does not mean that something isn’t there!  But if decisions are made this way then we need to make sure that we record our wildlife so as to put the dots on the map.

This leads me on to another issue.  Observations of common species like the brown rat are not noted down; sightings of rare species like red squirrels are always recorded.  This skews our view of what is really out there.  Take the rat as an example.  According to the National Biodiversity Network Atlas, an online source of information used by Government about the distribution of species in the UK, there are two records of Brown Rat on the Solway Plain.  Experience tells me this is not true!  The Atlas also shows a similar number of House Mouse records.  Once a common sighting, few ecologists have seen a House Mouse recently and it could be becoming extinct without us even noticing.  Thus we need to start recording the common species as well as the rare and interesting ones.

It was this last fact that started to make me feel guilty – I hadn’t sent a record to CBDC for  years.  So, inspired by our new Solway Nature Network project I too have started to take a note-book and camera with me on my local walks.

I know a bit about wildlife but I am far from being an expert.  Like a lot of people I rely on photographs, books, other people and the internet to find out what I am looking at.  But even with my basic knowledge I am finding out what a remarkable place the Solway is.

Anyone travelling by Dub Mill at this time of the year will see a field yellow with flowers. These are corn marigolds (Chrysanthemum segetum), a species which was probably introduced to the UK in Neolithic times with grain from the Mediterranean.  Once an abundant sight in the cornfields of Britain is becoming rare.

Corn marigolds (photo: Debs Muscat)

Similarly, the nationally scarce Mudwort (Limosella gallica) thrives in the Summer on the dry muddy edges of Edderside pond.  Found on only 6 sites in Cumbria this small unassuming plant is disappearing as UK ponds are not allowed to dry up, or are lost altogether.

Many people are aware that the traditional Bluebell (Hyacynthoides non-scripta) is also in decline as it hybridises with the larger Spanish Bluebell grown in many gardens.  Here on the Solway Plain most of the ones we see are the native variety.  This fact inspired one of the new Solway Nature Network volunteers to go out and map the Solway’s bluebells, especially those on the banks at Crosscanonby.

The more volunteers we have the more eyes there are to spot rare and unusual wildlife. One such plant is the endangered small-flowered catchfly (Silene galica). I spotted this in New Cowper several years ago.  It had previously been seen in Silloth in 1877.  The catchfly has now almost disappeared from Northern Europe, and I have not seen it since in New Cowper as the field was reseeded with more vigorous clover and rye grass.  However, the catchfly could still be lurking in sandy soil around the edge of a field close by.

Having rediscovered the four-year-old in me I am always looking under stones, logs and leaves for “bugs”.  It is surprising what has turned up. On a dog walk at very low tide near Mawbray I picked up some sandstone. Underneath I spied something that looked like a woodlouse.  It turned out to be a waterlouse (Sphaeroma serratum). As it was only 0.5cm long I am not surprised that it is not something anyone had recorded before.  Because I am not a waterlouse expert I needed help from someone who is.

Fortunately, CBDC is part of a network of wildlife recorders and museums and we can usually track down someone who will confirm what has been found.

Indeed, a little brown thing, about 1 cm tall that I discovered on a leaf in Flimby Woods took a year to identify.  I found out from a gentleman in Scotland that it was a chocolate tube slime mould.  A Google search followed and to my astonishment I learned that a slime mould consists of several different types of single-celled organisms that exist as slime on decaying plant matter.  When the food starts to run out or conditions are not right these single-celled organisms begin to move and join together to create the reproductive structures that I had found.  I then read that there are scientists currently studying the slime mould “decision making” algorithm which is described as “a tendency to exploit environments in proportion to their reward based on previous experience”.  Apparently this is similar to the algorithm used by Amazon when it finds items that you might like to buy based on previous searches!

Stemonitis, the chocolate tube slime mould (photo: Debs Muscat)

More recently a shiny black beetle caught my eye.  Looking closely at the indentations on the wing cases and the shape of its “feet” I decided it could be the rare Chrysolina oricalcia, one of the leaf beetles.  This time I sent my pictures to John, a reknown beetle expert in Whitehaven.  He agreed with my identification and followed it up with “this beetle has not been seen in Cumbria since 1835.”

The beetle Chrysolina oricalcia (photo: Debs Muscat)

The more I look the more I am inspired to look again, and the more I learn – just as when I was four.  We really do live in a place that is home to some amazing plants and animals.  Our area is special and we should be proud that we haven’t lost as much of our wildlife as other parts of the UK.  However, we still need to know more about what is here to keep it that way. 

So why don’t you rediscover your inquisitive inner child and join the Solway Nature Network volunteers to find out about the wildlife on our doorstep?

To join in or find out more contact CBDC on 01228 618717 or visit their website.

 

The charisma of Corophium, the mud-shrimp

The level of the salty, sediment-laden water in the Upper Solway is dropping with the ebbing tide, turning increasingly brackish as the waters of the rivers Esk and Eden dominate. The edges of the saltmarshes stand proud above glistening mudflats that are sweeps of ochre, sienna-brown and grey; the smooth glossiness of the upper slopes shades down into roughness, speckled with stones and weed.

 

‘Others have been here before me …’

 

That smoothness, as seen from the comparative safety of the saltmarsh, is an illusion, for if I step – squelch, slide – out onto the glutinous surface and look down, the surface is pockmarked with tiny holes and the wriggling trails of wandering creatures. Other animals have been here before me: there are bird footprints – the precise three-toed prints of waders, the webbed prints of gulls and aggressively sharp footsteps of oystercatchers; rough-edged holes where beaks have probed; and a line of paw-prints of an otter which has trotted from low-water mark to leap up onto the short, silty grass of the saltmarsh.

 

Trails and holes

 

Some of these are signs that animals have been busy on the surface while the tide is out, but the minute holes hint at other animals that are here for much longer periods, burrowed down below. For to live on this apparently featureless and changeable shore means there is nowhere to hide – except within the mud.

To find the mud-dwellers I can search for where the density of holes is greatest or, since waders are specialists in finding their prey I can be guided by their footprints and probe-marks – and use a spade.

The divot is heavy and sticky; at the top are sections through U-shaped burrows opening to the surface. Each is the home of a tiny pale brown mud-shrimp: mud-shrimp – a uninspiring name for a small animal that is so beautifully adapted to where it lives – the crustacean, Corophium volutator. It is not as iconic as a polar-bear, nor as obviously charismatic as a curlew – yet, as the ‘keystone species’ of the mud-flat, it has its own special charisma.

 

Burrows and (marked) individual mud-shrimps

 

The elegance of limbs

Unlike shrimps in rock-pools or cooked and ‘potted’ in butter, Corophium belongs to a group of related animals, the amphipods, that are dorso-ventrally flattened – from top to bottom – rather than laterally, from side-to-side. Also unlike shrimps and lobsters, it doesn’t have a carapace – its head and the middle segments of its body aren’t covered by a single curved piece of armour but all the segments are visible from above. I place some of the mudshrimps in water in a pie-dish. With a hand-lens it’s easy to see how different parts of its body are perfectly adapted for different functions. There are flexible joints between the segments so that – lacking a carapace – the animal can straighten or flex its body; each segment has a pair of jointed limbs, and groups of adjacent limbs are modified in size and shape to carry out different functions.

At the head end the appendages are adapted to ‘read’ the surroundings, and find and deal with food. The two pairs of long, flexible antennae that are so characteristic of Corophium  have a sensory function, but the second pair are also used as rakes to pull food towards the mouth. Behind the antennae and on the underside of the body, are small ‘feeding limbs’ with different sizes and shapes –the maxillae, maxillipeds and gnathopods (‘jaw feet’) – all specialised for separate roles in the capture, handling and ingestion of food.  Inside the mouth (unseen by my lens), a pair of hard mandibles act as macerating-machines.

Some of these feeding limbs have a second function, too – they have small thin-walled flaps of gills at their base to take up dissolved oxygen from the water.

Corophium: note the long second antennae

 

Under the middle section of the body are the legs, the pereiopods (‘transporting feet’), by which Corophium crawls on the surface of the mud, and further back, tucked beneath the abdomen, are small, feather-like limbs, the pleopods (‘swim feet’). The pleopods beat like paddles when the Corophium swims, or they can beat more slowly to send a current of oxygenated water over the gills. I am happy to be re-visiting old friends – it was watching how these pleopods beat perfectly in unison that so captured my imagination so long ago.

At the back end of the body, a broad flat telson and a couple of leaf-like uropods form the tail fan, a small version of a lobster tail: if the abdomen is suddenly flexed forward, the fan acts as a paddle that drives a current of water forward – and the animal backwards: a useful method of escape from a predator.

This then, is what a live Corophium looks like under a lens.

Synchronicity

In retrospect I realise that Corophium set me on the road to becoming a research scientist. When I was an undergraduate in London, the field-trip for our marine biology course took us to Swansea and the Gower for ten days, where we were offered a range of short projects to help us learn about research: the constructing of hypotheses, the practicalities of ‘materials and methods’, the gathering and interpreting of data. This brought, too, the realisation that the lives and activities of intertidal animals worked to a different schedule than our own, their lives governed by the shifting clock of the diurnal tides: depending on your project, evenings might be spent in the lab, not in the pub. I chose to investigate how Corophium responded to the falling oxygen levels in its burrow – did it become quiescent and sit out the low-tide period, or did it pump the water in its burrow more rapidly over its gills?

So how do you watch an animal that lives in a burrow? You fill a narrow glass chamber with muddy sand from a Corophium colony, and hope the animal will construct its burrow next to the glass… You fill the chamber with seawater of different oxygen concentrations, you hope you can see the delicate pleopods and count their rate of beating … A short project, naively simple through ignorance, yet a mixture of logic, planning – and hope. As the lecturer in charge drove me back to the lab one evening, he asked, ‘Do you really enjoy doing this?’ Yes, I really did!

(What were the results and conclusions of this research? I can’t remember. All I remember is the delicate, synchronised beating of the pleopods, and the animal’s elegant, questing antennae.)

I didn’t go on to research the physiology of marine animals but, years later, when I moved to Glasgow University, one of the other lecturers in the department was Peter Meadows, whose early research, in the 1960s, had been on the burrowing and feeding behaviour of Corophium (1).

Mudflats might look fairly uniform to us, but Corophium swim about and use their antennae to test the nuances of the size of sediment. Peter Meadows had written that the animal is ‘apparently quite deliberate’ in choosing where it burrows: some patches of mud are perfect, others are rejected like Baby Bear’s porridge. The sediment must be not too fine or the burrow might collapse, and not too coarse. Most important, the particles must be coated with organic matter – a slimy biofilm of bacteria, microalgae,  and other organic material: a larder as well as a building block. Having found the right conditions, the shrimp burrows into the mud using its antennae and pereiopods, and stabilises the compacted particles of the walls with a sticky secretion (2).

Dimensions and planes

Our own lives are carried out on the surface of our world; few humans penetrate above or below that single plane. But an animal that burrows in the intertidal zone, has an extra freedom – to pass through that plane in either direction, from solid to liquid, liquid to air, depending on the tide; to live, crawl, swim, mate, feed, in three dimensions.

There is, too, the extra dimension of time. For an intertidal animal, time is synonymous with tide. There must be periods of waiting, when the animal keeps a low profile, hiding from predators, ‘house-keeping’, digesting, defaecating – and anticipating the return of the water that brings fresh oxygen and food (and sometimes, sex and procreation).

This coming and going of the sea, and the behaviour and activity of these marine creatures – and of all the animals that depend upon them – are influenced by the moon and sun, on a daily and seasonal schedule.

View to the mudflats from Campfield Marsh

Making trails

 

Now, in late April, I walk out onto the shore below Campfield saltmarsh; the water of the Firth has shrunk to a grey ribbon between me and Scotland, and rainclouds are sweeping in from the West. The surface of the mud is squiggled with trails, and I squat down to watch mud-shrimps as they part-crawl, part-swim in the shallow film of water that remains on the surface of the mud: the moon has sent the signal that it is the time for mating, so most are probably males, searching out the burrows of females.

Food-chains and feeding

Fortunately for them there are few waders around. The upper reaches of the Solway Firth have multiple conservation designations (3), reflecting the enormous importance of the mudflats in providing food for local and visiting waders such as dunlin, knot and redshank. Corophium and the mud-snail Hydrobia are special favourites, and the birds scurry hither and thither, following the falling tide, rapidly probing the mud.

But to think of the Corophium colonies merely as unwitting suppliers of thousands of tasty snacks for visiting birds is too simple: we have to turn the idea on its head – the invertebrate animals and single-celled organisms, the algae and bacteria are the core of the life of the mudflat, and without them the ‘mudflats’ would be a sterile shifting slurry of mud and sand, washed this way and that at the whim of storms and tides.

The shrimps themselves feed in several ways: by using their mandibles to scrape and gnaw the biofilm that coats the sediment particles; by raking around the burrow-mouth with their large second antennae; and by using bristles on their gnathopods to filter and sort organic particles like diatoms from the water circulating through their burrows – the pleopods may pump 25-100mls of water per hour through the burrow (1). Look again at the contrasting colours of the mud on the spade. The deeper mud is black and anaerobic, containing little oxygen, but around the mud-shrimps’ burrows it is pale and yellowish-brown, oxygenated by the animals’ activity.

 

A foreign shore?

Corophium are almost unknown, rarely seen – for why would anybody bother to venture out onto a sticky muddy shore?

Indeed, to most people mudflats and saltmarshes are probably as foreign as another country and, as David Attenborough has said, “No-one will protect what they don’t care about; and no-one will care about what they have never experienced”.

For a while, now, various people have been arguing that we ‘need new words’, simpler concepts to talk and write about the places that we share with other organisms (4, 5). Richard Mabey, writing about barn owls, found he was constructing “extravagant phrases. …  I was rather pleased with my poetic metaphors….” Then, delightfully, he saw that he should think of the owls as his neighbours. “For much of my working life I have been trying to find way of talking about other organisms that neither reduces them to mechanical objects nor turns them into sentimentalised versions of ourselves. Neighbours are fellow creatures, but independent souls. You share their territory (their parish) and often their fortunes, but you can care about them in full knowledge they may not even recognise you.”(6)

We can think of Corophium as the engineers of the mudflats, through their feeding on biofilms, their burrowing and ‘bioturbation’ of the sediments, but they are so much more than ‘mechanical objects’ or food for wading birds. We may not share their territory but we can visit them, physically or in our minds, and perhaps this will help us to care about these important creatures – and their neighbourhood.

 

1. Peter Meadows & Alison Reid (1966) Journal of Zoology, 150, pp 387-99.
2. Rachel Hale: The 3-D structure of Corophium burrows;  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z75cJSLLgz
3. http://www.solwayshorestories.co.uk/shore-stories/sac-spa-sssi-and-more-the-acronyms-stories
4. George Monbiot: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/09/forget-the-environment-new-words-lifes-wonders-language
5. eg Mark Cocker https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/06/death-naturalist-why-new-nature-writing-so-tame; Peter Reason https://peterreason.net/2015/09/18/on-nature-writing-the-cockermacfarlane-exchange/
6. Richard Mabey: https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/owl-winter-richard-mabey/

 

Capturing a saltmarsh in words: a creative writing day on the Upper Solway

Saturday May 19^th 10am-4pm; RSPB Campfield, Bowness-on-Solway, CA7 5AG

Looking across the Firth from Campfield Marsh

When you think of Cumbria you probably imagine the Lake District; you might even think of the Solway’s beaches like St Bees’ or Allonby – but it’s highly unlikely that you ever think about the saltmarshes that line the margins of the Upper Solway from Grune Point to Rockcliffe.

And yet, these are some of the most special and protected areas in our county (see for example, my piece about the conservation acronyms and their ‘stories’).

When people visit the upper reaches of the Firth, especially around Anthorn, Bowness-on-Solway and Burgh-by-Sands, they are often surprised and astonished that such scenery exists in the same county as the fells and lakes.

But this isn’t just ‘scenery’: these are places that are home to a huge abundance of living creatures. My greatest wish is that more people should be aware of and care for this area of mud and marsh, where waders and migrant birds feed, and where the inhabitants  need to be so exquisitely adapted. Not only must these plants and animals live with the changeable weather and the seasons, but also with the twice-daily cycle of the tides, and the consequent shifts in salinity and currents, and the changing presence of food and predators.

The saltmarsh by RSPB’s Campfield Reserve is, like other saltmarshes,  fretted with creeks. It’s an open – but not dauntingly vast – space, bordering acres of mud at low tide, and looking across the Firth to nearby Scotland. You can feel a ‘strong sense of place’. The sounds, the sights, the smells, even the history – how will you experience, and record them?

On this day of creative writing – fiction, and non-fiction (but not poetry, I’m afraid) – we will spend time out on the marsh, wandering, observing, examining the minute creatures that live in the muddy creeks, listening, chatting. And then we’ll go back inside, into the Solway Wetlands Centre on the reserve, to warm up, eat and drink, and each – with the help of some simple writing exercises – think about what might have inspired us during the morning.

Important information:

This event is run on behalf of the Cumbria Wildlife Trust; it’s free but, as charities, CWT and/or the RSPB would be delighted with a small donation, perhaps a minimum of £5

Where: The venue is RSPB Campfield Marsh, Bowness on Solway, CA7 5AG

When: Saturday May 19th, 10am-4pm

Booking:  through Cumbria Wildlife Trust, either by phone 01539 816300 or email mail@cumbriawildlifetrust.org.uk . See also the Events section of their website.

What to wear: You will need wellies (essential) – and bring warm clothes and waterproofs.

What to bring: Tea and coffee (and cake) will be provided, but bring your own lunch. And don’t forget a pen and notebook, and perhaps a camera.

If you want to do a little preparation (but this isn’t essential): you can read more about the saltmarshes on Solway Shore Stories , and there’s more about specific saltmarsh topics on this blog.

There are interesting pieces about the ‘new nature writing’, by for example Mark Cocker  and Peter Reason.

George Monbiot writes about the ‘need for new words’.

And should you want to read about my own fiction writing (novels, short stories) please do browse the relevant sections of my Eliot and Entropy blog.  I taught creative writing classes for the Adult Education Centres in Oxford, Cockermouth and Keswick for several years.

The secrets of saltmarsh stints (The Solway saltmarshes 3)

The saltmarshes of Skinburness & Calvo, Newton Arlosh & Saltcoats and Burgh on the Upper Solway are divided into stints. The stints are privately owned but unfenced, and so the marshes are ‘shared grazing’ – the letting of which is auctioned annually. It sounded simple, but after I’d met Eileen Bell (*), Secretary of the Newton Arlosh & Saltcoats Marsh Committee, I realised I’d been naive.

modified from Google Earth

That day, I drove along the edge of the Firth under an orange-yellow sky, its dusty light louring over the flatlands (**); the red ball of the sun showed fleetingly through the hurrying clouds. But the forecast rain hadn’t appeared, and when I reach Eileen’s house she at once suggests we get booted up and go out onto the Marsh.

We head West in the Land Rover through the village, and down a lonnin past the barns and red sandstone of Orchard House (“That’s where I was born and brought up”), past  another farm by a large pond where mallard and a moorhen scull undisturbed. That farm was hers and her husband Willie’s, but they have handed it over to their younger son, Edward; their other son, Richard, has the farm across the road. Eileen’s family have lived in this area for three generations; she tells me her paternal grandfather “worked tirelessly for the Marsh”.

We park by a gate that leads onto the Marsh. The entrance has clearly been a favourite gathering-ground for cattle, as it is poached by their hooves to a slurry of ankle-deep mud. Clinging onto the fence we teeter round the edge and onto the close-cropped turf. The Firth is barely visible, a distant sliver of silver.

The Marsh is bordered by the River Waver and the River Wampool where they open into Moricambe (or ‘Hudson’) Bay, and its extent is much greater than I had previously imagined. There is no sign here of the creeks that carve deep muddy fractals through the outer edges.

Eileen explains that the Marsh is actually made up of three separate parts, Saltcoats, Middle and Wylie. Although well-grazed, the landscape is not monochrome, but a palette of greens and ochres. “You see over there,” she points, “it’s different from this top part. The green colour changes, it’s a different sward, a paler green – that’s because it’s more tidal, the big tides cover it.”

By the gorse-covered raised ground at the top of the Marsh there are large tree-trunks that have been carried in by the overtopping tides.

New fencing on Saltcoats Marsh

Further along we come to a new fence – actually a trio of fences in close parallel lines – that heads out towards the Firth. The inner fence is higher and looks more robust, and Eileen tells me that it’s made of high-tensile wire, while the flanking fences are of barbed wire. It’s not just to keep the cattle separate, but to stop them coming into physical contact, a measure supposedly to stop the spread of TB (TB, apparently originating in imported Irish cattle some years ago, is now present in parts of Cumbria.)

The Marsh is a SSSI and qualifies for Higher Level Stewardship payments, which have helped towards the cost of the fencing. The whole marsh is fenced, even at the water’s edge. “Burgh [Marsh] isn’t fenced – but it’s all fenced here, so the cattle are less often mired.”

That’s important. Eileen says she can remember her father having to dig cattle out of the creeks with ropes and spades. “Before it was fenced, cattle would get out onto the sand at the Wampool. I’ve crossed the Wampool to Anthorn! The cattle were out on the sands, one night after supper, and we had to go down and get them. We herded them to the other side, and then we had to get permission to put them in a farmer’s field that side. And then we had to go back with a wagon in the morning and get them.”

The Bells breed pedigree Friesian cattle, and Eileen and her husband Willie were founder members of the British Friesian Breeders’ Club. As we drive round to our next stopping-point, we talk about the impact of the 2001 epidemic of Foot-and-Mouth Disease. Even now, Eileen clearly finds it a very difficult topic. “We’d built up the herd over forty years,” she says. “They all had to be killed, two-to-three hundred animals. I remember Willie bringing the bull – he was a big bull and no-one else wanted to do it – out of his pen to be shot, I think that’s when Willie lost heart… But we had some semen stored. And then other members [of the Friesian Breeders’ Club] started getting in touch when they heard what had happened. We were offered brilliant stock – it brought a lump to your throat to think they’d give you such stock.”

She goes quiet for a while, then we turn down another lonnin and arrive at a field where there is a cattle-crush and large metal cattle-pens, built a couple of years ago.

Cattle-crush and pens

Now, in October, the cattle are due to be brought off the Marsh and, as she points out, “You’ve got to have somewhere you can bring the cattle in”, so they can be sorted and dispersed. Some will be sold, some will be used for breeding, some will be fattened: the Bells’ heifers will go off to be served by their pedigree bull.

During the winter months the grass is kept down by geese – barnacle geese, over-wintering from Svalbard and Greenland, often come over from the WWT’s reserve at Caerlaverock on the Scottish side of the Solway to graze. “And if the grass doesn’t look good they’ll come into the barley fields – and I usually let the farmer know so he can chase them off!”

Our next stop is on the edge of Middle Marsh, nearer to the village. Young steers come galloping across a field to snort and snuffle by the gate, perhaps hoping that our Land Rover, with sacks in the back, means food. We squelch down a track between two hedges, one trimmed to almost suburban neatness, the other rich with red, wizened haws and deep-purple sloes as large as damsons. A heron extends his neck and lumbers into the air.

Again, the Firth seems far-distant and scattered cattle are indistinct specks. There is no sound other than the faint hissing of wind in the grass. Eileen tells me how she has always loved being out on the Marsh, by herself and with the children; her face lights up as she points out several hundred starlings, previously hidden, which have lifted off the grass and now perform a small murmurration before settling again. And now, too, the yellow-orange sky suddenly clears, and the sun is warm on our faces: colours brighten and the Marsh seems more alive.

Picking our way back to the lonnin we pass large circular water-troughs by the gate, and though the grass is now wet enough that the cattle don’t need to drink, nevertheless the ground has been churned to sloppy mud, through which a quad bike and a very muddy border collie are splashing towards us.

The Herd heads out on his quad bike

Eileen introduces Steven, the Marsh Herd – he tells her that he’s decided to move the cattle off a couple of days early because big tides and high winds are due (ex-hurricane Ophelia is blasting in towards the West). Eileen tells me later that Steven “is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. He’s disabled, but he knows the cattle, he learns who they belong to.” The Marsh Committee pay the Herd and “He does everyone’s cattle. And if he has a problem he shouts for help.”

Later, from Eileen’s house, where we are having tea with scones and bramble jelly, we can see the distant cattle starting to move westward in a line. I can just make out the quad bike chivvying them, darting round them like a border collie. One beast with divided loyalties breaks away and heads back towards a group that hasn’t yet started to move; Steven circles and sets them moving, galloping after the others. “He’ll be moving them to the pens I showed you. There’s a big ditch down the middle of the marsh, but there’s a bridge, and they’ll know where to go, they’ve been out there since May.”

The owners of the Marsh’s stints meet once a year, and decide who will be on the Committee. At present, Eileen is Secretary (“I like it, I get to meet all the people. I was thinking the other day, I might just carry on until I’m eighty – if no-one else wants to do it!”), Willie is Chair, and their son Richard and two others make up the other members.  Eileen says, “I first got involved when I was about nine! I was given the balance sheet to type out. We did it with carbon paper in those days. Mum would do a lot of the writing” – she shows me a book filled with neatly written notes – “and my sister was Secretary in 1974.”

The area of the Newton Arlosh saltmarshes is 440 hectares (about 1100 acres). So, what size is a stint?

‘Carrying capacity’

I now discover that a stint isn’t a set area. And the measure depends on the grazing offered. “One stint can be let as a ‘stint-and-a-half’ because of the abundance of grass.” Eileen laughs and shakes her head at my expression. “So if I have three stints, I let them as four-and-a-half. But it’s a temporary measure, it depends on the grass.’

In other words, as  Winchester and Straughton explain in their interesting paper on ‘Stints and sustainability’, stinting refers to the ‘carrying capacity … a notion of the total number of animals that should be allowed to graze there.’ Further, ‘once calculated, the total number of animals which could be supported would be apportioned between those having a right to graze.’

Knowing the ‘carrying capacity’, the number of species and livestock that can be grazed on each stint can be varied depending on circumstances (such as the abundance of the grazing).

On Newton Arlosh & Saltcoats, two cattle are permitted per stint. They must be heifers or bullocks – cows in calf are not permitted not only because of the danger of contagious abortion, but also because it would be difficult and time-consuming to deal with an awkward calving out on the Marsh. Eileen checks her book, and tells me that this year the available stints have been let to 12 farmers, with from six to 63 head of cattle. No sheep are permitted on the Newton Arlosh & Saltcoats Marsh.

The Marsh Committee of Skinburness & Calvo Marsh, in contrast, allocates either one head of cattle, or two ewes and four lambs, or four geld sheep per stint (and after August 1^st, this changes to four sheep or four lambs per stint).

Sheep on Skinburness & Calvo Marsh at high tide

At Burgh Marsh, the grazing is not as good, so the allocation is only one head of cattle to a stint – although in 1794 William Hutchinson stated that it was

(from The History of the County of Cumberland, by William Hutchinson, 1794)

There was a time when the Solway salt-marshes were extensively used for over-wintering Fell sheep and ‘saltmarsh lamb’ was much valued, and the rent would pay the Marsh Herd’s wages, but this seems to have all but died out.

For all these Marshes, the stints are auctioned annually on an evening in late March, and this year’s ‘stinting day’, when animals may be brought graze, was May 1^st or 2^nd. Animals must be gathered in from across the Marshes and removed, with the help of the Herd, in mid-October. But since these saltmarsh graziers are dealing also with the Solway Firth, those start and finish dates are dependent also on the tides and weather. Ultimately, the Firth is in charge.

“I’d rather not disclose.”

Eileen smiles to take the edge off her refusal. I’d asked how many stints there were on Newton Arlosh & Saltcoats Marsh. When I probe a little more, it seems that the availability of stints affects the price, so the numbers are not disclosed even at the auction! “One time the prices got really high, but they’ve settled back down now,” she told me. Certainly, back in 2011, the rent rose to as much as £110 per two-cattle stint on Newton Arlosh; it seemed that word had got around that cattle did well there because the grass was rich so no expensive fertiliser was needed (as might be the case on inland pastures) and the salty grass reduced the likelihood of infection by parasitic worms.

Hopes of Wigton are the auctioneers, and I asked Betty Graham, an acquaintance of mine who works there, if she could explain the secrecy about the number of stints for auction.

She laughed, and told me, “It’s a strange rule! We’re never allowed to tell anyone on the night how many stints we’re auctioning. We can give little hints, like ‘not many left’, or ‘we’re down to the last few’ … On Newton Arlosh, we auction them in lots of ten, it’s twenties on Skinburness & Calvo…”

Moreover, the number of stints to auction changes every year. “It depends. Some owners” – like Richard Bell – “graze  their own, but others let them. Some of the stints have been passed down for generations. A lot of the owners are, shall we say, senior citizens, but there are some younger ones too. The number is set by the separate Marsh Committees. We don’t know until the night!”

from Hopes’ 2017 catalogue

_____________________________________

*Eileen Bell was a contributor to the ‘Remembering the Solway’ oral history project; the recording of her memories will be deposited in the Carlisle Archives

** This NASA visualisation shows how Hurricane Ophelia picked up Sahara dust and smoke from the Portuguese wildfires and spun it up over Britain and the Solway

 

 

The Solway saltmarshes 2: Rockcliffe Marsh

“The marsh is not set in the way that the English landscape is set.”

Two lines of hoofprints, large and small, dropped down from the saltmarsh and meandered across the firm sand towards the low-tide mark, then looped back landwards. The heifers were no longer in sight; indeed only a few of the several hundred head of cattle out on the Marsh were visible, as black- or brown-and-white specks, so vast is Rockcliffe Marsh.

Wind hissed across the drying sand of the empty foreshore; an oystercatcher trilled; a heron called harshly, once, as it flapped heavily across the estuary to Scotland.

Rockcliffe Marsh is surrounded on three sides by water: it dominates the head of the Solway Firth, bounded by the River Eden on the South and a loop of the River Esk on the North.  Like all salt-marshes, it is low-lying land, jig-sawed by muddy creeks.

Low tide: the Eden & the Esk wrap aound the marsh (from Google Earth)

Rockliffe from the air (photo: Ann Lingard)

‘I got cut off by the tide one time,’ Imogen Rutter tells me. ‘I’d been on a transect right to the other end of the Gullery, near the pioneer marsh, and I realised the tide was coming in. I had to wade through knee-deep water to get back! It’s quite scary, the speed the water comes in, really impressive.’

Imogen Rutter was Cumbria Wildlife Trust’s (CWT) Summer Warden for 2017, employed to monitor the numbers and species of breeding birds on the Marsh. She was my guide on a quiet but overcast May morning, and we walked out along the high bank that was built to protect the landward side, then dropped down onto the Marsh.

The embankment

Imogen, a bridge-marker, and traces of who else has been here

Within a half-hour we were far out amongst the cropped turf and creeks. It would be easy to lose one’s bearings, without the distant bank to orientate oneself. There are other markers too, less easy to see on the Marsh’s slightly undulating surface: wooden posts mark the few bridges across creeks, and a dotted line of white posts marks the route for wildfowlers, where they may cross the Marsh but may not shoot. By one of the bridges, we found the scattered remnants of a gull. We poked around looking for the leg-ring and found it on a dismembered bright-orange leg: it had been ringed in Norway at Skagerrak Museum, and had died here on the border between Scotland and England.

The growing marsh

Maps drawn three hundred years ago show that Rockcliffe Marsh was little more than a small outgrowth of the border between Scotland and England. Since then it has grown and grown, extending out into the Firth between the main river channels.

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(Aglionby’s 1590 and Crawford’s 1832 maps from Annals of the Solway)

It is one of the largest saltmarshes in Britain, at about 1100 hectares, but its margins are constantly changing through accretion and erosion; one year it grew by 26 hectares. This, and the fact that it is farmed as well as (or despite) having multiple layers of protected status, makes it an intriguing and special place.

The Marsh and its considerable foreshore are owned by Castletown Estate, and when I contacted the owner, Giles Mounsey-Heysham, in mid-July, he immediately suggested we meet and he would tell me more about it. As we chatted, we looked at photos and plans, and at maps spread out on the table in the estate office. Measurements of the Marsh’s perimeter have been made since 2001, using GPS and a quad bike; more recently  the Environment Agency’s high-resolution LIDAR maps of elevations across the Marsh are being used to inform work on water-retention.

LIDAR map; loops of  Esk & Eden north & south of the marsh. Arrow shows embankment

Giles took over running the estate when he was twenty-one, due to the early death of his father; he will retire and hand over the management to his son in 2019, and in the past fifty years or so the use and management of the Marsh has undergone many changes. Since the late 1990s it has been managed both to preserve its importance as a saltmarsh and for grazing stock. Giles’ enthusiasm for the Marsh is obvious and he was very keen to take me out and show me its many facets.

So, two days later, wearing waterproofs and a helmet, I was given a ‘tutorial’ on driving a quad and then left to practise in a field while he courteously retreated to the office. I was very relieved when (clearly having observed my timidity through the window) he suggested I ride on the back of his quad instead. This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve sat on a board on the back of a quad, travelling over very uneven ground on the margins of the Solway, so I knew what I was letting myself in for! But it was well worth the couple of hours of discomfort (and occasional rapid elevation) to travel across and around the margins of the Marsh.

We stopped briefly to watch two haaf-netters standing in the shallows in the mouth of the River Eden, then drove beyond the embankment and onto the saltmarsh. Although many of the creeks are small or dry, all have names.

We made a large looping diversion to avoid the wide inlet of Stony and Yellow Creeks, and later at Near Gulf, Giles told me to climb off and wait while he drove the quad down the muddy bank, into water that churned black under the wheels, and up the glossy brown incline on the opposite side.

A barrier of mud, sand and water

The crossing is safe

A crossing was possible – he returned to collect me. Judging by the sheets of spray, the trick is to drive fast through the water. He had been telling me stories of guests who had become stuck in creeks, and he laughed (kindly) when I said that that if I’d been driving my own quad I would definitely have been left whimpering in the mud. ‘We don’t get cross when people get the quads or the pick-up stuck – it happens all the time.’

To the South was a raised carpet of gold, where the now-dead stalks of thrift had formed a glorious pink carpet not long before. This huge new area of salt marsh, consolidated by grass and thrift, had developed in the past six years. Near the mouth of the Eden, an island had recently grown and was already hazed with green.

We drove across a bridge towards the Gullery, and then dropped down onto the pale sand of the foreshore, which stretches way out into the Firth, and headed North. Opposite the mouth of the River Sark, near Gretna, another island, potential future salt-marsh, is growing. From Sarkfoot Point we could see the distant stream of lorries and cars grumbling along the motorway to the East, where Metal Bridge crosses the River Esk.

The grazing

Stock are the economic lifeblood of the castletown estate. When Giles took over the estate, there were a thousand head of cattle, “with one man on horseback to keep an eye on them.” “One farmer had been putting his cattle on for  about 50 years, but then the rules for the stocking rate changed and farmers were no longer interested.  So we started putting our own cattle on – we now have quite a big beef enterprise, 800 cattle, of which 500 are our own.”

There are also 2500 sheep in the summer, about 800 ewes – mules, Texels, and Romneys – and their lambs, although they were not out during our quad-bike expedition. We saw them later in the steading beyond the embankment, being dosed and checked amidst a cacophony of noise as they milled around in the pen, watched by muddy dogs.

Earlier, on Eskside, about 50 gipsy horses, black-and-white and brown-and-white, raised their heads to stare, then galloped away, flanked by their foals, whinnying and kicking up their heels.

There may be hundreds of acres of useful grazing, but a saltmarsh also presents problems – the hazards of sticky mud and creeks and river-banks.  Giles tells me about trapped cattle, stuck in a muddy creek by the Eden with the tide coming in. The fire-brigade, the coastguard and local helpers all worked hard to get them out. “The fire-brigade used their pressure hose to act like a lance and wash the quicksand away from around the animals’ feet.”

Since then the estate’s technique for rescuing mired animals is to bring out a quad-bike and trailer with a pressure-washer and tank of water.

‘Alphabet soup’

Back in May, Imogen and I picked our way across the uneven sward and around the creeks, larks filling the air with song, occasional lapwings whistling and diving around us.

Then suddenly, a sheet of birds rose up in the distance, wings beating heavily at take-off. Flighting, the flock came towards us – hundreds of barnacle geese, flying low over our heads, talking to each other, perhaps grumbling at the disturbance, and heading across the Eden to Burgh Marsh. And then another black-and-white sheet rose, and then another, stirring the air with their wingbeats. My skin prickled as geese flew over and around us, changing the Marsh’s character, inhabiting the air completely with their bodies and their sound.

Barnacle geese take flight

But in a few minutes they were gone. Within a week they would probably have left until the autumn, having built up their strength by grazing on Solway grass for their long flight back to Svalbard, and their short breeding-season.

Rockcliffe Marsh provides grazing for farmed mammals and for geese, but it’s not just a vast expanse of pasture. It also has many conservation designations (the ‘alphabet soup’ of acronyms): it’s an SPA (Special Protected Area), is part of the Solway Coast AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty), the Solway SSSI and the SAC (Special Area of Conservation) and the Ramsar site; a new Marine Conservation Zone has been proposed for the area around Rockcliffe. (For an explanation of these off-putting acronyms – and why we should care about them, especially now, please read The acronyms’ stories.)

Because the marsh is so comprehensively protected under national, European and international laws, its management is overseen by Natural England (NE) as the government’s ‘statutary body’ – and over the years NE have built up a good relationship with Giles and the Estate.

For the important question is, how can the needs of the tens of thousands of birds of different species – feeding, migrating, nesting – be balanced with the potentially conflicting requirement to raise stock, and with the international importance of the Marsh as a saltmarsh?

Management for wildlife:

“At Rockcliffe it’s about the birds, it’s about the saltmarsh as a vegetation community; it’s about the geological interest in the development of saltmarshes. Many other saltmarshes have been enclosed and changed because of agricultural methods, but the Solway marshes haven’t suffered to the same extent.” Bart Donato

Giles Mounsey-Heysham refers to Bart Donato as the Estate’s “guru from Natural England”, which makes Bart laugh, but when we meet in a café near Kendal in August, it’s immediately obvious that he is really enthusiastic about his involvement.

He explains, “The marsh has been part of an agricultural system for a thousand years or so – it’s not wild, it’s not a natural marsh, but a by-product of the agricultural system set on a natural landform. Local farming systems were once dictated by local needs, but over time have become subsumed within agribusiness on a global scale – we have to try to buffer the system.”

The rôle of NE is look at and secure the SSSI designation. “We look at the natural heritage, and think what’s the right management to look after that asset …We have to look at the flora and fauna and work out what’s best to support them. As for birds, it’s not just the breeding waders but also the wintering populations, the really big flocks of barnacle geese.”

In 2004, Bart said Giles asked for his help because “the grazing régime wasn’t working.” The result was that the Marsh was put into the Higher Level Stewardship scheme, with funding for managing the saltmarsh better for birds.

Managing the grazing:

“We don’t have the magic grazing system [for the birds],” Bart acknowledged. “We probably never will because the market drives things like the time and the type of grazing stock.”

Geese “like a bowling green” but breeding waders prefer rougher vegetation, so the challenge is to balance this, to manage the grass growth to provide a mosaic. “We’re bringing the Marsh back to something more goose-y and breeding-wader-y.”

I imagine the long, muscular tongues of cattle, ripping off the grass, and the crisp snipping by sheep. Bart “was quite excited to see the horses – they take on the rougher vegetation like tufted hair-grass, they take it down, and they behave very differently [from the other stock].”

In the winter, most of the sheep and cattle are taken off. “The Marsh needs to be grazed enough to stop it growing, yet to keep a bit on it until the geese come again,” Bart says. “The winter grazing is problematic because of the marsh’s great size, the creeks and the winter tides.” Ultimately, “The tides are in control – creeks become quagmires, the pens get churned up.”

Total inundation of the Marsh also, as might be expected, has dramatic effects:

‘Both tides and weather play an extremely important role in the everyday life of Rockcliffe Marsh. Complete tidal inundations of the whole marsh occur perhaps no more than two or three times per year … When they do occur, the effect is to leave parts of the marsh under water for days particularly in the winter when little or no evaporation or natural drying out takes place. Should complete inundations take place during the [bird] breeding season, the effects can be catastrophic.’ (from Mike Carrier’s 2006/2015 report for NE and Cumbria Wildlife Trust):

The power of the storm

 

During Storm Desmond (winter 2015/16), the Marsh was underwater. The extent and power of the flooding is made obvious by the trunks and roots of trees, deposited across the marsh and against the bank.

 

The Gullery

Giles drove me out to the Gullery in mid-July. There were Lesser Black-backed and Herring gulls standing and sitting on the cropped grass all round us, and several Greater Black-backs in the distance, but as we approached the area enclosed by the electric fence, hundreds of birds – previously hidden amongst the tall grasses, thistles and rough vegetation – lifted off into the air, wheeling and screeching in a dense cloud. A fledged chick, speckled brown, scurried with extended neck into the longer grass. Fortunately I was wearing a helmet: Imogen had told me that “getting dive-bombed by gulls and pooped on is not so much fun!”

The Gullery

The Gullery has been a cause of changing concerns over the decades. Giles told me, “In the olden days I can remember when there were about three pairs of nesting gulls. By about 15 years ago that had risen to more than 10,000 nesting pairs, and the cattle couldn’t venture into the Gullery.”

When the breeding numbers were high, the gulls attacked the cattle, dive-bombing them and chasing them away, and rank grasses and thistles grew in abundance. But gradually “the cattle took it back and grazed it down” – at the same time as the gull numbers were declining.

Mike Carrier, Cumbria Wildlife Trust’s Honorary Reserve Warden at Rockcliffe for 22 years, has collated all the results gathered by CWT’s Summer Wardens since 1969, the start of the Trust’s involvement in monitoring birds and vegetation. The graph for the Lesser Black-backed and Herring gulls shows how dramatic has been the fall in numbers in recent years, from the peak in the 1990s.  This is not a problem confined to Rockcliffe but has been seen nationally and in other Cumbrian sites such as South Walney Island too, the reasons for which are much discussed.

From Mike Carrier’s report for NE & CWT

The new Higher Level Stewardship agreement for the Estate provides for an additional three kilometres of electric fence along the bank, from the Esk to the Eden, which, it is hoped, will decrease access by ground-predators such as fox and badger. But this year, despite the supposedly predator-proof strands of electric fence around the Gullery, Imogen counted only 344 pairs of adults and 15-20 chicks, and noticed fox scats and short-eared owl pellets in the Gullery.

Anatomising the saltmarsh (with PlayDough)

Bart Donato had talked about the need to manage the grassland as a mosaic of ‘bowling green’ and tufts and longer vegetation.

But the HLS scheme is also about managing Rockcliffe as a salt-marsh, a mosaic of wet ground and creeks and open water amongst the vegetation, “a Swiss-cheese effect of water-bodies and big sheets of water.”

To do this, it’s important to understand how the saltmarsh forms and develops.

Rockcliffe isn’t only growing outwards, it’s growing upwards too.

Terraced marsh at Campfield

Traces of the rich in-fauna at Rockcliffe

Crustacean (Corophium) burrows in Rockcliffe mud

Marsh edge at Rockcliffe

At the edges, ‘pioneer’ plants like Pulcinellia grass, Salicornia (samphire) and, as at Campfield further down the coast, the alien grass species Spartina, establish a root-hold. The meshwork of roots stabilises the silt trapped by the plant and forms a tiny island. Small changes in water-currents cause more sediment to be deposited and the islands fuse. Sediment accretion raises the level of the new-formed ‘land’, plants colonise, more sediment is trapped … and so a terrace is built up and the diversity of plants increases.

The Solway Firth has famously sediment-laden tides, the sea often the colour of milk-chocolate during strong winds. When the incoming tide reaches the head of the Firth at Rockcliffe and meets the outflowing freshwater of the rivers, it deposits its load of silt. Moreover, during storms, sediment also washes down the rivers “from everybody’s fields”, as Bart says, and much of this gets trapped upstream of the ‘neck’ of the Firth at Bowness, so that above-average amounts of riverine sediment are deposited too.

Upward growth, though, is caused by ‘topping tides’, the high Spring tides that happen when the Moon and Sun are in alignment and their gravitational pull is greatest. Then, the water, “brown with muck”, creeps in through the creeks and overspills onto the Marsh. The vegetation creates at its base a layer of still water from which the sediment precipitates out. On a big tide, there’s a relatively long period of slack water at the head of the Firth, which means a longer period for sedimentation to happen; as much as 1cm of silt might then be deposited within a few tidal cycles amongst the grass and herbiage.

Near the elbow of the Esk, Giles jumps off the quad and shows me a line of fence posts. “They’re gradually getting buried,” he says, lifting his hand to indicate they were nearly one-third higher when knocked in. And as the Marsh rises, the top of the protective embankment becomes relatively lower. “We’ll probably have to raise the height of the bank again before too long.”

 

‘The posts were previously this high’

Giles receives the Tye Trophy in 2017 for conservation work

The sediment deposition affects the creeks and pool formation too. In the café, Bart gets out the PlayDough, and fashions a blue creek in a pink surrounding Marsh to illustrate what happens. When an incoming tide overtops the banks and spills onto the Marsh, the vegetation traps sediment close to the creek, so that levées gradually form along the banks. As the tide drops,  the water on the Marsh cannot escape and forms ephemeral pools, stretches of open water, which slowly decrease by evaporation.

Pools remain outside the levee

Cuttings through the levee allow the water to drain away

At one stage in the marsh’s earlier management for sheep, drainage ditches were dug and the levées breached so that the standing water could drain back into the creeks. Now, under NE’s management, the drains are being blocked and the gaps in the banks filled, to restore the hydrology of the Marsh to its former state. Under the terms of the HLS agreement, NE have also been blocking drains, digging out wet flashes for waders, and heaping shingle into scrapes for breeding ring plover. (Ironically, when the Marsh was used for turf-cutting, gravel was dumped on the grass to make a track; this became the ring plovers’ favourite nesting-site – at that time there were 24 pairs, instead of the 3 pairs this year.)

Ungrazed, the Marsh flowered.

In 2001, the Foot-and-Mouth epidemic struck, and millions of sheep, cows and pigs were slaughtered. Giles lost most of his cattle and sheep. The Marsh was not grazed, and was later cut for hay.

Jacqui Kaye, CWT’s Summer Warden for Rockcliffe Marsh in 2001, wrote that

 “Every large creek was edged with the longest vegetation, typically tall grasses and Meadow Buttercup (Ranunculus acris), in addition to Common Birds Foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus). This gave the impression of yellow rivers running through the Marsh, as they followed the creeks. .. Further down, a lilac swathe of Yorkshire Fog (Holcus lanatus) covered a strip from the top of Yellow Creek to the Eden.  …[at the Fleam] the creeks were edged with daisies (Bellis perennis), Thrift (Armeria maritima), grass which was calf-length in height, tall buttercups and patches of mid-thigh length Spear Thistles (Cirsium vulgare). … On leaving the Marsh, heading back across New Bridge the final impression was of First Field, apparently a mono-crop of the white, daisy-flowered Scented Mayweed (Chamomilla recutita), divided only by the path in the middle.”

And Brian Irving, former Manager of the Solway Coast AONB, once told me

“It was the first time in my lifetime that I saw the marshes really flower, you know. The first time in their history of grazing – an increased level of genetic diversity going on because the plants were allowed to flower and set seed, rather than propagate by roots and suckers. Stunning, the quality and texture of the marshes. A once-in-a-lifetime sight – and it was there for all the wrong reasons.”

Ungrazed, the Solway’s saltmarshes were transformed. The sky above Rockcliffe Marsh was loud with the singing of larks.

 

The Solway saltmarshes. 1

 

Dawn over Calvo Marsh (photo: Ann Lingard)

At first light on a Sunday morning in late September, Norman Holton sat on the edge of Campfield Marsh near Bowness on the Solway. On the Scottish side the starlings were, as usual, gathering in great wheeling clouds, and as usual there were several sparrowhawks flying above them, attempting to pick off a few for breakfast. This time, though, the starling-cloud spiralled round and round, and the mass of birds coalesced and flew across the Solway. Norman estimated that there were two million birds: “They were flying low, about 10 feet above the water, coming straight towards me. I couldn’t see the ends of it, from Cardurnock to beyond Herdhill Point, the flock was so wide. It must have taken 10 minutes to pass over – it lifted slightly to pass over the marsh, flying right over my head. The noise! And the wind of their wings, the draught! I was absolutely plastered in crap. But it was fantastic – the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up just telling you about it!”

Creeks at the edge of Campfield Marshfurther up the Solway (photo: Ann Lingard)

Campfield Marsh and Bowness Common

Cardurnock, with Moricambe Bay beyond

(Photos taken from a gyroplane flight: see The design of the Solway, an aerial perspective)

Norman Holton [*] was Senior Sites Manager of the RSPB’s Cumbria Coast Reserves until 2016, and not one to exaggerate about bird numbers. The Campfield Reserve, based at North Plain Farm, and situated between Anthorn and Bowness-on-Solway, has 2 miles of coastline and about 50 hectares of saltmarsh, as well as about 500 hectares of arable land and raised bog, and it is host to thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of wildfowl and wading birds. But on the day I first met Norman, back in 2004, the tide was well out and the bird-flocks had dispersed to feed across the miles of glistening sand. Our wellies made perfect prints in the overlying layer of mud as we, too, left the saltmarsh and walked out into the estuary.

There was food all around us: small shore crabs scuttling; patches of tiny black flecks that were snails, Hydrobia; the surfaces of shallow pools suddenly churned by the skittering of minute fish and gammarid shrimps; sandy coils ejected by lugworms; minute holes made by burrowing shrimp-like Corophium; and the empty shells of cockles and pink tellins that, when alive, had burrowed in the sand near the low-tide mark.

Even though the Scottish coast was only three miles away across the Firth and houses and cars startlingly clear, the space and emptiness – and silence – were almost overwhelming. Sheep and cows were grazing the marsh in the distance, the sun was a pale disc above the haze, and for a while, until the tide turned and the birds returned, there was peace; a privilege.

Grazing stock at Campfield Marsh (photo: Ann Lingard)

If you stand on the bridge at Boustead Hill, between Drumburgh Moss and Burgh by Sands, and look North-East, the salt-marshes of Burgh and Rockcliffe are pale green and deceptively smooth. Cattle are grazing or dozing, and beyond them lies a gleaming sliver of water in the channels of the Esk and Eden; there’s little movement except the speeding rectangles that are lorries on the distant motorway near Gretna – it’s all very domesticated and safe. But common sense as well as the notices warning of quicksands and dangerous currents will tell you that it’s probably not a good idea to wander on the sands here at the head of the estuary, that the sea will come charging in when the tide turns. Of course you could hurry to the safety of that smooth green saltmarsh … Norman spoke about a day on Rockcliffe Marsh when the tide came in fast, quickly rising to cover the grass; grabbing his tripod and telescope he hurried back towards his car, trying to watch for hazards in the turbid water – and fell into a deep creek. “It was February, freezing cold,” he said, “it took me ages to get to the car and I had no dry clothes.” “So what did you do?” “Put the heater on high, stripped off and drove home in my underpants.”

However, on a warm August day at Campfield he led me across the saltmarsh, stepping over deep potholes, jumping across creeks, and following the cattle-trails that divert around the meanders and oxbows of the water-courses; it is certainly not a smooth, safe surface.

Accretion and erosion after the winter 2015 storms (photo: Ann Lingard 2016)

 

The topography of marsh is always changing, a balance between water and plants. Norman pointed to a metre-high tower, capped with grass but with steep bare sides: some of the towers and hummocks collapse, while elsewhere the sediment builds up, the amount changing every day with every tide.

 

 

Despite the mutability of the lower reaches, if you look carefully at the marsh and its surrounds you can see that there is a logic to the structure. The single-track road is built on a raised beach, and the marsh steps down from it in three tiers. At the top there is gorse and tough creeping couch-grass, thistles, clumps of pink-flowered rest-harrow, and low purple asters; damp hollows are filled with rush, Juncus, and sedge. Walk towards the sea and you step down a small “cliff” of sand onto the next tier, where the salt-tolerant grass, Pulcinellia maritima, is like shiny wire, and there are low broad-leaved plants like silverleaf. The vegetated cushions, speckled with pink thrift, taper down towards the sand and there, at the edge and marching outwards towards the sea are the “pioneer species”.

Solitary, upright, their limbs pointing defiantly upwards, they appear intrepid and surreal. I had a distinct impression that they would advance a few centimetres, triffid-like, the instant I looked away. Some had gathered a little sand around themselves to form an embryo island, some of the islands had accumulated a tuft or two of grass; each island would consolidate and grow and the marsh would spread outwards. The plants are samphire or glass-wort, Salicornia, pale-green and fleshy. Norman said he used to fry them in butter and eat them when he was an impoverished RSPB worker on The Wash, and he picked off a piece for me to try. It was juicy and salty and delicious. I was an instant convert.

Samphire & Pulcinellia grass

Samphire: brave pioneers

 

On the seaward side of a small green island is a mat of a surprisingly spiky plant, Spartina anglica. Spartina, too, is a pioneer and in more than one sense, for the genus is an import from America.

Spartina on the right-hand side

 

“It’s an absolute pain,” Norman told me. “Once it gets a foothold it spreads and spreads.” The seeds come in on the rising tide, and get deposited as the tide goes out; they germinate and grow and trap silt, raising the level of the marsh.

Later we found perfect unblemished mushrooms, but the most exciting though inedible find was a crumbly, grey deposit, thumb-sized, that glitters with fish-scales when I picked it up. Otter droppings! I’ve been told (by an otter-spotter) that otter spraint smells of violets unlike that of mink which stinks – and it certainly smelled sweetish, although “violets” didn’t instantly come to mind.

Down the coast, the sea nibbles away at the dunes, sea-walls and shores. The northerly longshore drift and storms that stir up the shallow Solway ensure that at high Spring tides or when the wind is driving the water up the Firth, the waves deposit their load of silt on the saltmarshes. A so-called “mucky tide” may deposit a few centimetres of sandy silt, and thus the potholes gradually get filled in and vegetated, the meanders get cut off – and the grass becomes salty and unpalatable, ungrazed until the next rain.

It’s astonishing to realise that the Solway marshes have been grazed for over 1000 years. Grazing has made them the globally – not just locally – important places that they are, the place where “the world population of barnacle geese”, as many as 30,000 birds, overwinters, for example, and because of this the marshes have a string of initials after their names: SSSI, SAC, NNR … all those somewhat distancing though extremely important conservation gradings (see The Acronyms’ Stories).

 

“Summer Shower – Grazing cattle on Campfield Marsh.” John Rogers

(My grateful thanks to John for permission to use this image)

In 2001, during the Foot & Mouth crisis when the grazing stock was “cleared”, the Solway’s salt-marshes changed dramatically. Brian Irving, Manager of the Solway Coast AONB which includes the Skinburness marsh near Silloth, told me: “It was the first time in my lifetime that I saw the marshes really flower, you know. The first time in their history of grazing – an increased level of genetic diversity going on because the plants were allowed to flower and set seed, rather than propagate by roots and suckers. Stunning, the quality and texture of the marshes. A once-in-a-lifetime sight – and it was there for all the wrong reasons,” and he enthused about the overall orange hue, the buttery-yellow, the coppery tones of the fescue, and the pink drifts of thrift.

Thrift at Campfield. (With thanks to Judith Rogers)

Most of the marshes are predominantly common land whose area is divided into “stints”; a Marsh Committee allots each grazier a certain number of stints, each of which may carry a set number of cattle or sheep. The animals roam free, the stints are not limited by fences – except around the RSPB Reserve, where a neighbour’s Texels, probably muttering about their right to roam and humming “the other man’s grass is always greener” were that day chomping at the turf. However, they casually, without quite appearing to capitulate, wandered back towards their home stints when they saw us. Campfield is grazed by up to 100 beef cattle between May and October; in theory the stocking density is 0.6 units per hectare, the optimum to get the sward “into condition” for feeding and nesting birds and to minimise trampling of lapwing and redshank nests.

Norman told me that his system for managing the grassland was simple: “When I came here 12 years ago my complete knowledge of farming came from ‘The Archers’. But with the help of the local graziers we’ve learnt to balance the birds’ needs with the cattle’s needs. Basically, when the grass is up to my ankles it’s about right, below that I need to take a few stock off. Managing the grass looks very scientific, but in the end, it’s how far it comes up your wellies!”

Cows at Campfield

Sheep on the flooded marsh at Grune Point

 

Redshanks prefer tufts of grass to nest against; lapwings like to nest in open areas; roosting waders prefer short grass so they can watch for predators when the tide pushes them off the mudflats. The diversity and number of birds that come to the Solway coast is astonishing, and sightings are well-logged on many websites and blogs – for as well as the expected waders like dunlin, knot, red- and green-shank, godwits, curlews, oystercatchers, and the species that prefer the fields and wooded fringes like the plovers, tree-sparrows, linnets and so on, there are sightings of cranes, spoonbills, egrets, red kites, short-eared owls and ospreys. While Norman and I searched the edges of the small pools on the upper tier of the marsh for natterjack toadlets, a green sandpiper swooped down to the water, and a ruff had been seen the day before.

Then there are the geese. Their arrival is an event of local importance, something to anticipate. “Are the geese back yet?”: everyone is listening for their honking and calling; looking upwards, away from the flickering masses of knot and dunlin skimming over the sands and the black-and-white binary flashes of the oystercatcher flocks, hoping to see geese circling to land instead of passing over in a V.

In mid-September, the first of the Pink-footed geese start flying in from Iceland; most carry on to The Wash and Martinmere from Iceland, but a couple of thousand remain on the Solway. Those who went further South start moving North again in the New Year, and from mid-January to mid-March you can see them in vast numbers on the salt-marshes and fields. Barnacle geese from Svalbard arrive on the Solway in early October, and they stay, right through to the end of April and early May.

Barnacle geese on a  field next to Campfield Marsh

It is during that period, from mid-September to April, that the grasslands and the carefully-managed sward on the saltmarsh are especially important as they provide grazing for the geese that are escaping the Arctic temperatures of the far North.

 

But you don’t have to be a “birder” to fall under the spell of the salt-marshes – even here, where the Firth is narrowing down, constrained by its banks at the top of the estuary, it seems to be the sense of spaciousness and wildness that exerts the strongest emotions.

“It’s the wilderness … to come back to the Solway and sit on the saltmarsh at dawn … Everything has got its place. The birds start to fly off the sands, the golden plover first, then curlew, godwit. Every dawn is different because of the tide – the different height, different wind, it’s very variable. It’s rare for there to be the same conditions from one day to the next. I love the dynamism of the tides and the wildness of the marsh. On the seaward edge there are no street-lights, you can’t hear any traffic. Even after all this time it still makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck,” Brian Irving told me.

John and Judith Rogers’ house overlooks the Solway, and the salt-marsh’s character is part of their lives: it can be “transformed in moments by a storm sweeping in from the Irish sea: the wind picking up – hail showers sweeping across, pushing the tide relentlessly into the creeks and channels and overflowing, even on to the roads… But all this can change again within the hour. The tide goes out, the clouds disappear … sunlight sweeping across the mud flats; highlighting swathes of golden gorse; catching the sudden glint of gulls and flocks of waders wheeling back and forth …”.

And Brian Hodgson, a wildfowler (see The Wildfowler’s Story), told me, “I just like being out here and being part of it, the early morning, the solitude of it.”

In memory of Norman Holton.

“If I was a cow, I’d be happy on the marsh! It’s just the best place to be”

(Photo: Ann Lingard, 2004)

 

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[*] Norman Holton died in the autumn of 2016; a great ‘Solway man’, he continues to be very much missed by his many friends and colleagues.

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This is the first of a series of posts about the Solway saltmarshes. The second is about the ever-changing (and growing) Rockcliffe Marsh at the head of the Solway Firth.

The first version of this article was published in Cumbria Life in 2004; I have since updated it with extra information and photos.

RSPB Campfield Reserve, tel: 016973 51330, is a reserve that is open to all. The Solway Wetlands Centre is also there, with an information area and a comfortable room in which to sit and drink coffee!

There is an excellent blog by John and Judith Rogers on what is to be seen at the Campfield Reserve.