The winter of 2023 brought record rainfall to mid-Wales and the Welsh borders. The upper River Wye, already stressed by decades of agricultural intensification and the nutrient-loading issues that have made it a cause for national concern, experienced severe flooding events in November and December. The flood waters scoured eroding banks, deposited fine sediment over spawning gravels, and in several places cut new channels through flood meadows that had been separated from the river by drainage works carried out in the 1970s and 1980s.
For most riparian landowners, the floods were a disaster requiring repair. For our River Restoration team, they were also an opportunity.
Working with two landowners on a six-kilometre stretch of the upper Wye near Rhayader, our team identified three locations where the flood had begun to re-establish connections between the river and its historic floodplain. In each case, the natural process had done in a week what would have taken us months of engineering to achieve. Our job was to work with it — to protect and extend what the river had started, rather than repair it back to a degraded baseline.
Over the spring and summer of 2024, we remeandered 1.1 kilometres of artificially straightened channel, reconnected 0.8 hectares of floodplain, and planted 3,400 native riparian trees and shrubs. The work was carried out by our field staff with the support of 47 trained volunteers over eleven working days.
The restoration will not solve the Wye’s nutrient problems. Those require action at a catchment scale, involving planning policy, agricultural regulation, and enforcement — the work of our Advocate for Rivers programme. But the physical restoration provides the habitat structure that fish and invertebrates need to persist through the pressures that remain. The two things are not alternatives. Both are necessary.