“Mr Cash went to Beckfoot … the submerged forest was not visible and I regret to say the residents he inquired from had not even heard of it”. So wrote Brian Blake in his 1955 book The Solway Firth, which is illustrated by black-and-white photographs taken by J. Allen Cash. Fortunately, Mr Blake himself did find the forest later, and was “delighted with [his] luck” when he walked South along the Cumberland coast from Silloth.
Forest and peat 2010
Peat, tree-trunks and dunes 2010
Peat overlying clay 2010
I first went to look for the forest back in 2004, and found the stumps and roots of the ancient trees on the shore near Beckfoot; I continued to find them in roughly the same area for the next 10-12 years, and they became part of the ‘itinerary’ of my guided low-tide shorewalks. It was not just the trees that made this forest area special. As I wrote back in 2004:
“the patches of black are like shadows along the sharp edges of channels in the sand. Walk down towards them, and the shadows resolve themselves into banks of peat. Poke them with your toe and feel how dense and sodden they are, smoothed by the friction of waves and sand. Walk on them and feel their sponginess. And gradually you will become aware that the dark organic mass is not only peat, but supports here a horizontal tree-trunk, or there a stump that radiates roots. Wander around and you will find trunks and branches, single and entangled, embedded in the peat and sand; and erect stumps, 20-30 cms high, their tops flattened as though cut by a chainsaw. The wood is still fibrous, soft and dark; you can crumble it and tease it apart, as though it were any rotting log in a woodland. But the difference is that this woodland thrived about 8000 years ago.” (1)
Then, a few years ago during a sequence of winter storms, the peat was thrashed and fragmented by the waves, the wet and fragile wood vanished, and nothing remained visible of the woodland and grassy plain that had once covered part of the modern bed of the Solway Firth.
Shingle, sand-waves and a distant rocky scaur
Yet that patch had been just a small area: underneath the new and ever-changing profile of the mid-shore near Beckfoot, where shingle was swept away, rocky scaurs – relics of glacial deposits – were exposed, and sand was piled in sessile waves and tiny ripples, the time-horizon containing the forest and peat and clay would still exist. It was a comfort to know that this evidence of the formation and changing development of the turbulent Solway Firth was still there (2) – but hidden, from sight and perhaps from memory.
So this month, after weeks of strong north-westerly winds and storm surges and Spring tides, I went down to Beckfoot again – wondering, hoping, that the secret of the submerged trees might once more have been revealed. The shore looked so different from back in the autumn that I was failing to find my usual ‘markers. The cloud was low and the air was grey, and across the Firth Scotland had (very sensibly) taken leave of the Union and was no longer to be seen. A mixed flock of gulls sat and preened near the water, keeping a silent watch on my movements, and I apologised as thirty or more oystercatchers failed to hold their nerve and rose up in a flock, trilling with indignation.
I zig-zagged between the tidelines, hoping to find ‘treasures’ like goose barnacles attached to flotsam, but the long mounds of tangled wrack and twigs were too tightly woven together by the waves. Dark shapes ahead were merely small boulders and rounded pebbles of a newly-exposed scaur.
Looking up to watch a curlew come gliding over the dunes, its outspread wings motionless as it let itself be carried on the wind towards its friends by the distant water, I suddenly saw that, higher up the shore towards the battered dune faces, there were smooth dark plates of – something.
Plates of clay 2020
Tree stumps in the clay
Tree stumps and clay
They were not peat, as I had expected when I went to look, but sheets of heart-stoppingly slippery, grey clay: the same type of clay that had lain beneath the peat layer that had preserved the forest. Its surface was speckled with embedded fragments of wood – and over there, there was a tree-stump with radiating roots; some fallen branches or perhaps more roots, half-buried in the clay. And more stumps, sticking up defiantly.
Had the peat been broken up and washed away, or was this one of those places where salt- or fresh-water had temporarily inundated the peat bog? Perhaps there had been a meeting of sea and river water, where the suspended sediment had flocculated and fallen – or perhaps the sea had broken through a barrier and washed out clay that had been deposited at the bottom of a still, small lake? For we know that the margins of the post-glacial Firth were always changing, as sea-level varied relative to the land. Finally the trees had died, their roots waterlogged as by a beaver-dam, their bodies gradually preserved as the sphagnum mosses grew ever upwards and compressed into layers of acidic, anaerobic peat.
Burrow entrances
Burrows in the clay
There was another puzzle too, for the surface of the clay was pock-marked with tiny holes, the entrances to burrows. I broke off a piece and found the burrows had been filled in with yellowish sand. What creatures had lived in this clay, and when? I had previously found peat that was riddled with the burrows of piddocks, bivalved molluscs that usually bored their homes in rock, which showed that the peat must have been exposed to the sea before it was buried, and later un-buried, by the sand. But these burrows were smaller and regularly spaced, and clay is a firm, dense substance that would not be easily penetrated…
Here were the lost stories of the inhabitants of land and water – aurochs and oaks, bog-plants and bivalves. Here on the Solway’s malleable edges, focus always switches between the geological past and the passing of a few tidal cycles; between the landscape-scale of scattered woodland to the microscopic archive of peat and clay.
The samphire, Salicornia, looked grey and wizened, worn down by the winter and there were still traces of snow on Criffel’s northern slope. It was a cold, windy day in March on the Solway Firth, and I was heading out onto the merse and mudflats of the River Nith with Adam Murphy and Andy Over, both Reserve Officers at Caerlaverock National Nature Reserve. We were on an ‘expedition’ to look for Mudshrimps, Corophium volutator, at Scar Point, on the east bank of the River Nith. The Point is also known as Fishermens’ Bush (it’s a favoured spot for fishing when the tide flows in) or even Phyllis’s: Phyllis Laurie, who died in 1942 at the age of 72, lived nearby and according to the Solway Firth Partnership’s little booklet Tide Islands and Shifting Sands, was a “character” who was “feared by local children”. She owned a horse and cart, and the story has it that if she became incapable of driving after visiting the pub on a Saturday night, the horse always knew its way home. Phyllis might be pleased that the Point has been given her name – but perhaps less impressed that her name also distinguishes a nearby creek across the mud.
Footsteps
Adam, in his thirties and with a reddish-brown beard, strode out onto the merse, and Andy – older, shaven-headed, recently arrived at Caerlaverock from ten years with SNH on Harris – kindly held out a hand whenever creek-jumping required longer legs than mine. As we walked across the merse Adam pointed out the partly-exposed gnarly rhizomes of sea-aster, the fleshy spikes of arrow-grass and the shiny leaves of two species of scurvy grass, amongst the thin film of sediment on the short ‘turf’ of salt-tolerant Pulcinellia.
When poet Norman Nicholson wrote about the saltmarshes on the Solway’s English coast in the 1940s, he was writing during a time when iron-ore smelting and steel-making around Workington were important parts of the West Cumberland economy. He was attracted to the marshes even when “as around Workington and Maryport, they are soiled and smeared by smoke and scum from the iron and steel works.” The residues of industry affected even the white flowers of scurvy-grass – “Many people despise this plant, perhaps because … it gets clogged with coal-dust as in Workington Harbour, or with red ore-dust in the iron country.” Those industries are long-gone and in March the scurvy-grass flowers were “a welcome mass of white”, and the surfaces of the saltmarshes unsullied. Adam told me that sailors used to eat it as a source of vitamin C. Norman Nicholson noted, “It must have been nearly as unappetising as boiled cabbage” (1)
We found otter spraint, glittering with fish-scales, and discussed whether it smelled of violets (it did not, but was not unpleasant); and wind-blown mermaids’ purses, the square matt-black egg-cases of the Thornback Rays which are common in the Firth. The north-westerly wind was ferocious and cold, blowing our words away and tearing the pages of my notebook. Five Pink-footed Geese came beating across the flats, heading slowly into the wind, their wingtips almost touching the mud. The edge of the merse was ragged and unfocussed, a perfect example of the estuary’s give-and-take. Little troops of samphire had boldly marched out during the previous summer, and had gathered new ground around themselves before losing heart and shrivelling.
Just beyond the saltmarsh’s edge the mudflat was stippled with tiny holes, and conical mounds of mud, a couple of millimetres high, betraying the openings of the Mudshrimps’ burrows. I dug the spade into the mud and lifted it gently so that the divot of mud broke apart but remained on the blade, and Andy – who was unfamiliar with Mudshrimps – exclaimed at the burrows that were exposed, some caught in section, others clearly U-shaped. In one of them, a small Mudshrimp wriggled, its antennae waving. The burrows were barely two centimetres deep, and the shrimps seemed small. Further down towards the falling tide there were drifts of empty shells of Cockles and pink Baltic Tellins, and here the Corophium burrows were densely packed and deeper, the Mudshrimps larger, many at their full size of about one centimetre. The spade came free of the mud with a loud gloop-ing, sucking sound, water spurted from the burrow mouths, and Mudshrimps seemed to explode out, then crawl away. They are defined by their long antennae, nearly as long as their bodies. We watched a shrimp burrowing, and it appeared to sink into the sediment, so rapid was its activity. Here the shrimps had burrowed deeper, some of their tubes reaching down five centimetres, and there were fine burrows containing slim brown polychaete worms, the Ragworm Hediste, too.
The mud on the spade was pale, and below 15 centimetres or so was interwoven with orange-brown fibres, possibly the decomposing roots of former plants. Andy collected some of the mud in my kitchen sieve, and swirled it in a shallow pool before tipping the captured objects into the white enamel pie-dish. Mudshrimps swam about, testing the meniscus and the bottom of the dish with their long, sensitive antennae. We watched them, entranced; they seemed so small and delicate – and yet they can burrow, so very quickly.
Further out on the mudflat were scattered islets, new “lumps of merse” as Adam called them, now stabilised by thin patches of grass; he had watched how the merse had grown outwards in just two seasons. Now, at a low Spring tide, the estuary’s width was obvious and Adam explained how the river channel had shifted over to the western side, leaving great sloping mudflats here on the East. But deep crevasses were carved through the central whale-back of mud, as though the river was trying to break back through again to nibble at the newly-accreted merse. At Campfield Marsh on the southern side of the Firth I had seen metre-high towers at the seaward side of the marsh, capped with vegetation but with steep bare sides. Some of the towers and hummocks had collapsed and were being smoothed and re-distributed by the sea. Here too at Caerlaverock the tides had picked away at the lower tier, shifting the mat of vegetation and exposing compacted sediment and a sharp ‘cliff-edge’. Columns of merse had been isolated. “We call them merse-bergs,” Adam said. “If you’re out here on a quiet day, sometimes you hear a rumble, a bit like thunder – and then you realise that one of the bergs has collapsed.”
Growth-rings in trees, fish-scales, stromatolites and oyster-shells: they are the sequence of responses of living organisms – plants and bacteria and animals – to diurnal and seasonal changes in their environment. The bodies of the bergs and towers of the saltmarsh are not alive, but where they have been sliced open by the tides their inner structure is exposed, striated with subtly different colours and textures, bands of jagged white shell fragments and rounded pebbles between the layers of silt, a record of particles that have been swirled into their environment throughout the years. The marshes and merses erode and accrete, the removal and deposition of sediment changing with the weather and the tides, the seasons and the years and on geological timescales.
(1) Norman Nicholson (1949) Cumberland and Westmorland. London, Robert Hale
Yesterday I stood leaning on the pitchfork by the glowing ash-pile, just looking around at the trees and the hedges and our sheep. Two weeks ago, on a blue, still morning, there had been a sound like a gun-shot from our wood and the rooks all leapt into the air, shrieking and shouting. My husband went out to remonstrate with (presumably) someone who was shooting into the rookery – and found an enormous branch had cracked off from one of the Scots pines. Luckily no human or other creature was hurt, although some of the smaller trees had been hit. Hence the bonfire out in the field, to burn the brash (the sap-sticky logs have already been sawn and split, and will dry out for at least a year before being used on the wood-burner.)
We run a small-holding of about 2 hectares, in NW Cumbria and looking across to the Solway Firth: woodland, hedges, vegetable and flower garden, pasture for the 6 Hebridean sheep, and a beck which rises from a spring just outside our land and runs through the pond that we created. Our small wood is at least 160 years old, presumably having been planted at the time our Victorian house was built, and has a mixture of native and non-native trees, including a very tall and increasingly straggly redwood, its trunk pitted with woodpeckered holes (where, my birder brother-in-law assures me, wrens might huddle together in the winter).
The previous owner (and the original Victorian owners – they had carriages not cars) kept horses, and the pasture-land had become rank and full of docks; a narrow strip alongside the wood was damp and dull.
After we moved in eighteen years ago we, and two kind and energetic friends, planted many more native trees – including alders, hornbeam, willow, birch, oak, Scots pine, guelder rose, hazel – singly and as a copse, and thickets of hawthorn, blackthorn and wild rose, in an attempt to make the local woodland and garden birds feel more at home, and migrant warblers and other birds to stay.
Some years later chiffchaffs came, and a pair of blackcaps; there are 2 pairs of breeding nuthatches now, a tree-creeper, and Great-spotted woodpeckers, amongst others. We also planted a windbreak in the field, of suckers from the wild cherries, and a mix of other trees and shrubby bushes – all fenced to keep out the sheep, who always enjoy a bit of novelty in their diet.
But a couple of years ago, there was a threat that a limestone quarry might open at the top of the hill behind the house, creating dust and noise and destroying some old woodland in the process; United Utilities had started mutilating West Cumbria in the construction of a new water pipleine for West Cumbria (hundreds of tonnes of concrete are being poured into a new reservoir on the other side of the hill as I write) – and my despair at the effect that this would be having on the wildlife surrounding our village kept growing.
So, last year, we sold 4 of our 10 sheep – the Herdwick ewes, since they were in good condition for breeding – and planted up a third of a hectare of pasture with native trees. But it was the year of the Beast from the East, which was followed not long after by – unheard of for this area! – six weeks of drought. I don’t like tubular tree-guards, and we’ll remove them when each tree is sufficiently tall and robust to look after itself, but the tubes ensured a warmer, damper micro-climate around each sapling. By scooping water from the dribbling slimy beck with a bowl and into buckets, we managed to keep the trees wet enough in the drought so that we only lost about 8 percent. The survivors are already looking good this Spring, and we recently – with the ‘help’ of our grand-children – planted hawthorn slips to make a hedge along one side.
We’ve learnt a lot about managing woodland during our time here: when to trim branches so that light can reach the smaller species or the wild violets and cowslips; when and what to plant. We pollarded a big old ash by the pond, partly because it had a crack between two branches, but also because it was throwing so much shade that there was no chance that dragonflies would stay.
I managed to persuade my husband that the grass in the wooded areas doesn’t need to be cut like a lawn! At the moment the floor of the old wood is a white froth of cow-parsley, mixed with the deep purple of self-seeded Honesty and a jumble of pink- and white- and blue-bells, all of which are now the ‘Spanish’ type (although I’m sure they were ‘English’ when we first moved in). This has been a good year for celandine and dandelions – and also for cuckoo-pint, whose pale sheaths and glossy leaves have proliferated in every shady patch. Earlier, there was a carpet of snowdrops, followed by daffs – both species seem to proliferate naturally as well as with some help from us (splitting and re-planting clumps when they’re ‘in the green’).
The newest woodland was planted on a pasture which has for decades been fertilised by horse- then sheep-droppings, and kept well-grazed. A range of grasses grew up last year amongst the saplings, plus chickweed, creeping and meadow buttercup, and some milkweed. We had to cut the grass at the end of the summer and remove the cuttings – this was during the hot dry weather when the flies swarmed and I spent the time whining, raking and sweating – but already this year we’re seeing many more milkweed growing and I’m hoping the grey furry-leaved mulleins and foxgloves that I retrieved from inappropriate places elsewhere (the gravel path, the veg garden) will flourish in their new sites.
The pond has evolved with time. When you think of the Lake District you think of volcanic rocks and slate, but that massif is fringed with limestone – and our village sits at the base of a low plateau, where the rain gathers in sink-holes and flows into aquifers, eventually emerging as springs where the limestone meets the harder rock. Our beck is surprisingly ‘flashy’ during heavy rain in winter – very soon the percolating water explodes out of the ground and flushes silt from the field behind us into the pond; then still rising, spreads out onto the mini-floodplain of our field, before finding its way back into the water-course again. The volume and speed of the water that comes down is spectacular.
But that hasn’t happened this winter, and there has been very little heavy rain for weeks. Last week shingle banks were showing in the River Derwent in both Cockermouth and Keswick (seeing the water so low, it’s hard to believe how high the river rose during the floods of 2009 and 2017, over-topping the defences) and already our pond is so low that it is fringed with mudbanks, and much of the weed is no longer floating but resting, humped, upon the mud. I don’t know how the tadpoles and caddis-fly larvae, the whirligig beetles and various snails are faring – they are scarcely to be seen, presumably finding refuge amongst the water-forget-me-not and watercress and mint; even the base of the reed-bed looks dry and the reeds themselves are not growing as fast as usual for this time of year.
Perhaps there are no longer tadpoles anyway; for several mornings it was apparent that something had been rooting in the water-forget-me-not, patches of which were left floating, roots pointing to the sky. Our trail-camera picked up a male mallard arriving in the dark and leaving at dawn: mystery solved (but see note below, three weeks later). One year a female mallard made her nest on the small island in the pond but it wasn’t a wise move to nest within site of a wood that is so aurally and visibly beloved of corvids – there are about 40 rook and several jackdaw nests, and there is a crows’ nest at the top of the field – and of course the constantly vigilant magpies patrol the hedgerows. The duck eggs didn’t last long.
Last year
the introduction of more light to the pond paid off, because it was finally
visited by a large yellow-and-black hawker dragonfly and several red-bodied
damselflies. But there’s not a chance that they’ll come to stay this year
unless the water level rises – and now, in this period of lush growth, the
vegetation upstream on the plateau will soak up any rain that falls.
As I stood beside the ashes of the bonfire, which occasional flurries of wind sparked into life, I was trying to remember all the birds and animals that have visited since we have been living here, and I hope that what we have been doing – in the wood, the pond, the fields and hedges and the garden itself – has helped to make them feel welcome and at home. Hedgehogs have bred; an otter visited when the frogs were mating (betrayed only by its pawmarks); bank voles burrow everywhere and a red squirrel visited (but we must have been found wanting because it left after three days). There are pipistrelles, on whom I eaves-drop with the bat-detector, and frogs and toads.
As for birds: 3 species of tit live here and long-tailed tits visit; chaffinches, greenfinches (fewer these days), goldfinches, and recently a pair of bullfinches; the usuals like robins, (lots of) blackbirds; dunnocks; goldcrested wrens and (never-ordinary) wrens; a pair of song-thrushes, and a pair of mistles; the tree-creeper(s), nuthatches, house- and tree-sparrows; the corvids; the Great-Spot… A sparrowhawk hunts frequently through the garden, sometimes sitting on the sandstone gatepost by the kitchen window, glaring around with glittering yellow eyes; a collared dove provides the occasional good meal, but the wood-pigeons are too heavy for him to take on. Last year a buzzard learnt to snatch rooklings from their nests and, dropping down through the trees, tore at their flesh and feathers on the floor of the wood. In the cold spells, siskins and bramblings cluster round the feeders.
And then
there is the song of the chiffchaff and the blackcap, and the twittering of the
swallows and house-martins, the night- and dawn-calling of the tawny owls …
Except there
isn’t. This year, as last, a chiffchaff returned and made me briefly, almost
deliriously happy; but he left despite my daily exhortations to stay –
presumably no mate came to keep him company. The barn owl hasn’t been seen for
at least two years; the work on the water-pipeline seems to have scared the
hares away; the local tawnies haven’t been heard for at least 8 months; only 4
swallows have (finally – 3 weeks late) returned, of which only one pair is
probably ‘ours’ and will nest in the hayloft; so far I have seen only one
house-martin. The heron that used to visit hasn’t been seen since last summer.
The hedgehogs began to shuffle around in day-time last year, and were later
found dead – a sure sign they had succumbed to some infection. Spotted
fly-catchers nested in the Clematis
montana for a few years when we first arrived, but they didn’t return one
summer and I have never seen one again.
It is so easy to become upset and depressed at what we have lost and are losing, and some days it is very hard to be positive, especially in the face of such global losses and anthropocene-induced extinctions. But then I make myself stop and watch and listen, and make a tally of what we do have; think what we – perhaps – have managed to accomplish, in looking after our ‘neighbours’ and making them feel that our land is, actually, theirs too. And I have to hold on to those thoughts, and rejoice in the sound of even that single pair of swallows, chattering to each other excitedly as they swoop around the barn and yard, as they come back home for the summer.
Update, May 29th 2019.
Success!
Yesterday a female mallard and nine ducklings swam and scuttled down what remains of the beck. That male mallard flying in after dark must have been coming ‘home’ to visit her – somewhere near the pond she had, after all, had a nest. What a brave little female – and what a triumph to have kept that nest and eggs so well hidden.
When I first blogged about this topic, back in October 2015, I explained why the Solway Firth is being considered as a suitable estuary for the construction of tidal power schemes, and the basic ideas and technology behind the schemes. Please do read that post first, if you have time, as the background of the companies – and the people involved – also provide good stories.
This post is a short, factual update – two of the original
players have (probably) departed, and one (or two?) new players have entered
the pool. The B-word has, of course, played havoc with decision-making, and as
a result, with financial backing.
Barrages
and weirs
North-West Energy Squared.
A system of barrages (sorry – ‘gateways’) across estuaries in
the NW of England, including across the Solway Firth from Workington to
Kirkcudbright; read the earlier blogpost for details of the plan, and the CEO’s
comments.
NWE2’s uninformative website no longer exists, though the
company is still listed and took on 2 new directors in September 2018.
Note: ‘barrage’ is now a dirty word in the context of estuarine power generation – it’s considered an outdated and disruptive technology, very expensive to construct, with too many problems relating to environmental changes and remediation.
The idea of an ‘electric bridge’, proposed by Nigel
Catterson, across the Firth between Bowness and Annan, along what has been
called a ‘brownfield site’ (Arup) – the line of former Solway viaduct.
This would be a ‘weir’, fixed to the sea-bed and with 6m vanes which can be raised or lowered, creating a difference in head (see my earlier post for an explanation); the vanes could be dropped flat at slack tide. Power would be generated via Venturi turbines.
SEG also plans also to construct a foot- and/or cycle-bridge
across the Firth – this idea has met with considerable enthusiasm in public
consultations on the Scottish side. Nigel Catterson is working with Scottish
councils. It has also been suggested that the scheme could contribute to flood
defences of Carlisle.
Note: The bidirectional turbine technology is as yet untried in sediment-laden fast-flowing tides. At lowest Spring tides, there small amount of water in the channel is mainly from Rivers Esk & Eden – though the ‘weir’ would hold back water (salt and fresh) to create a head of pressure.
Lagoons
Russell
lagoons are U-shaped, joined at each end to the coast
Ullman offshore lagoons are circular (‘doughnuts’), free-standing in the estuary
TLP’s original proposal was for 6 Russell lagoons – Wales (Swansea, Cardiff, Newport,
Colwyn), Bridgewater Bay, and the Solway (Workington-Dubmill Point).
All emphasis has been on Swansea, the smallest: Charles Hendry, in his January 2017 review of tidal power for the government, strongly recommended the Swansea project should be funded and
built as a ‘pathfinder’ – ie allowed to run for 5 years, with its financial
viability and its effect on the environment being monitored, before decisions
were made about further schemes.
Despite the Environmental Impact Assessment having been carried out, and the supply-chain companies being on board, the Westminster government continually dithered about granting approval or approving the Contract for Difference price. In June 2018, Minister Greg Clarke stated the project would be too expensive, and would not give value for money, and so the government would not back the scheme.
The Welsh government is still keen to support the Swansea scheme and other players – financial and constructual – have come forward (December 2018). And TLP announced this month (February 2019) that it plans to go ahead without government backing, by signing Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) with other companies. TLP also has a new plan, to float solar panels in the lagoon, increasing power output by an estimated one-third. As reported by the Guardian‘s energy correspondent Adam Vaughan, ‘The plan is to secure enough signed PPAs by the end of the year to enable a final investment decision in early 2020, with construction starting shortly afterwards. If that timetable were met, the project would be generating power in 2024 or 2025.’
But whether or not the Swansea lagoon will ever be built is still far from clear.
Tidal Electric (see below) submitted a response to the Hendry report, in favour of their own offshore lagoons
Note: Should Swansea ever go ahead, and be deemed successful as a ‘pathfinder’, Tidal Lagoon Power would then most probably focus attention on building another Welsh lagoon, eg Cardiff Bay.
TLP’s Solway project is now unlikely.
2. ARUP
A new
suggestion since my 2015 blogpost: a Russell Lagoon.
These notes are from my conversations with Michael Osborne, Director, ARUP, Whitehaven. October 2018 and February 2019.
The wall of the proposed coastal tidal lagoon could be 18km (12 miles) long from just North of Maryport to Mawbray, effectively around the outside of the Allonby Bay Marine Conservation Zone.
The emphasis would be on local sourcing of rock materials. Ideas include: the bund core of waste slate from a quarry near Askam in Furness; outer rock armour – slate blocks or granite blocks from Askam in Furness or Kirkmabreck quarry near Creetown; inner rock armour might be red sandstone possibly from a quarry near Maryport – sandstone is more easily colonised by algae and marine animals. The water off Allonby Bay is fairly shallow so the wall would not need to be too large, but the deeper channel just NW of Maryport could be where the bi-directional turbines are sited. The grid connection would be inshore of Maryport. .
Michael Osborne recognises the importance of the Allonby Bay Marine Conservation Zone. ‘It includes the sea-bed, and we must respect that – otherwise what would be the point of the designation?’
Note: this coastal lagoon option leaves Maryport harbour entrance and the mouth of the River Ellen open (unlike the Tidal Lagoon Power scheme); goes outside Allonby Bay MCZ; and the scheme could reduce the current rate of coastal erosion. This concept of a coastal tidal lagoon has been raised through the Maryport Delivery Plan.
This proposal currently has no financial backers. Michael Osborne thinks that the way forward for tidal power in general is for the government to support renewable energy schemes, including tidal, as a matter of policy. Regardless of policy tidal energy projects should be competitive with other energy sources.
The
Labour Party have indicated an interest in renewables including wind, tidal and
wave power.
A new
suggestion since my 2015 blogpost: an Ullman lagoon (CEO of Tidal
Electric is California-based Peter Ullman.)
Dr Amir Eilon (the sole Director of Ullman Offshore Lagoon; the rest of Tidal Electric’s Board are based in the US or Switzerland) has given two presentations to the Solway Firth Partnership in Dumfries, the most recent in association with syndicate members from Ecotricity and DEME (Dredging Environmental & Marine Engineering; Belgium)
Eilon has previously also discussed ideas for a Russell
lagoon in the Solway (see ARUP, above).
This second presentation in December 2018 focussed only on
the proposed Ullman lagoon – either off Hesten Island (D&G) or off Allonby
Bay MCZ; the power generated would be onshore-d to Cumbria, where the existing
grid has capacity.
The circular wall, 16km in perimeter, would be constructed of
geotubes covered by locally-sourced external rock armour, with sluice gates and
turbines in a block. The plan is for 55 turbines, producing 388 MW; the
estimated cost of approximately £710m depends on rock source/price, turbine
price etc – in other words, on several currently known unknowns.
Ovals indicate possible lagoon sites in the Firth (from Tidal Electric’s presentation slide)
As for siting, if the lagoon is constructed in 10m depth of water, fewer and bigger turbines are required; if in shallower water, for example 5m, 100-150 smaller turbines might be necessary. From the geological point of view, the English side is better, because of the sandstone bedrock, but it is also more exposed (and next to the Allonby Bay MCZ); on the Scottish side near Heston Island, the sea-bed is more pitted but is more sheltered.
Since the lagoon is not connected to the coast, there is no
access other than by boat (‘We don’t do tourism’), so there would be no H&S
constraints with regard to visiting tourists. The wall would therefore be
cheaper to build, have a much lower profile and therefore much less visual
impact than the wall of a Russell lagoon.
Note: The syndicate will not commit to further work on the project unless they receive assurances that the government is willing to support tidal power generation. Eilon was supposedly meeting with the UK government’s Energy Minister in January 2019, but that meeting has now been postponed until March. Interestingly, Tidal Electric’s website now refers to this as a ‘Scotland’ project, (rather than a Solway project, as previously): make of that what you will!
A general point about timescales
Even if a lagoon, of either sort, should be given approval tomorrow – the time to power generation is in the region of about 7-8 years.
Scoping, modelling, working out risk mitigation, gaining the necessary permissions, public consultations, planning applications, agreeing Contract for Difference price with the government and so on would take 3-4 years.
The actual construction phase – requiring movements of large amounts of material by land, rail and sea; dredging; cable-laying; building the walls and turbine housing; building onshore works and offices; environmental remediation etc – would take a further 3-4 years.
And my
personal view
It is such a startlingly obvious idea, to capture the mighty energy of the seas that surround our islands – the waves, the predictable tidal flows – and to convert this into the electrical power that we will increasingly need (imagine all those electric cars). The technologies and designs are challenging – for unstartlingly obvious reasons – but are exciting and always advancing.
Until fairly recently I believed that nuclear power should also be part of the portfolio, partly because West Cumbria already has such a concentration of nuclear expertise, and the influx of jobs and the continuing necessary financial support would be vital for the area’s economy: but my opinion has changed (as has, it seems, the government’s, although for different reasons – the new nuclear build proposed for the Moorhouse site has been cancelled).
Wind, water and sunshine could together provide a smoothed-out supply of energy for our use. But we also need the technology to store the electricity and release at peak demand; we need large-scale technology to split water to release hydrogen, which can be burnt – cleanly – to generate power.
All this is possible, even though as a country we are coming to it much too tardily and with only a fragmentary long-term plan. We should be concentrating our research and resources on adding tidal and wave power to our portfolio. More than ever we need to stop using fossil fuels to provide energy. The current extremes in climate breakdown hint that we may already be too late.
So: power must be generated where there are ‘big tides’.
But in the Solway Firth?
I swither.
The Solway is so ‘unspoilt’ by humans, and most of the changes that occur are natural, the result of interactions between storms and tides and rivers.
So I hate the thought of the years’-long, major, disruptions to the Firth of constructing the lagoons: the noise, both air-borne and water-borne; the traffic on land and sea; the dumping of rocks; the hauling of cement; and around it all, the swirling sediment.
I swither again. I remember how the Solway’s margins – the mudflats and the saltmarshes – have changed over thousands of years, and I think that the Firth and its non-human inhabitants will, eventually, adapt.
And yet … This ‘intervention’ would be so dramatic, a mere
eye-blink in geological and evolutionary terms, that it would require the Solway’s
creatures – the salmonids that pass through to breed, the fish that browse on
the sea-bed, the micro-organisms and invertebrate animals that live on or in
the mud and sand and rocks, the algae and saltmarsh plants – to survive and
feed and breed despite ‘the storm’.
Already the numbers of so many of the creatures and plants with whom we share this space have plummeted. For many more, in this precious and protected finger of the sea, this disruption could be the final straw.
NIMBY-ism? No: it’s not my backyard, is it? It’s their’s.
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 24oC 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 Sillothfor more stories).
This afternoon, Sunday 13th 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 200o. 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.”
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
Looking towards the steamer pier
Wooden fender, steamer pier in the distance
Out on the wharf
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
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 20oC. 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
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 Storiesand elsewhere in this blog.
Some ‘fun facts’ about polychaetes (marine bristle worms).
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.
Saturday June 8th 2019, 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
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.
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.
