I spent many happy hours crouched on the bank of a river as a child, peering into the shallows with a net in my hand, heart pounding at what I might find beneath the water’s surface? For me, it began there. Aged five, scooping minnows with the occasional flash of a small trout. Turning over stones to find caddisfly cases, tiny homes built from woody fragments and grit, each one a miracle of engineering. That early fascination grew into a lifetime passion: fishing, fly-tying (because a shop bought fly felt like cheating), and endless hours simply watching and waiting.
The flash of a kingfisher’s blue rump, gone in an instant with a piercing peep. The bubbles rising in a pool before an Otter surfaced, jet-black eyes catching mine for a heartbeat before sliding away. These moments shaped me. They live deep in my soul, and I hope to pass that same magic on to my children.
But recently, returning to those same rivers that I once enjoyed in my youth, I found something that shook me.
A Childhood Lost
Where once there was life in every riffle, I found silence. Plastic snagged in branches after high water. Algal blooms thick from nitrates leaching off intensively farmed land. Stones turned over with barely a trace of insect life, where once they teemed.
It was heartbreaking. And it left me asking: what have we done? These rivers are not just watercourses, they are the lifeblood of our landscapes, our culture, our future. They are our children’s inheritance, and yet we are treating them as drains.
I realised with a jolt that I, too, was guilty. A river runs less than 100 metres from my back door, and still I hadn’t seen how far it had declined.
Something had to change.
Meeting Passion With Knowledge
That’s when I met Dan Johnson, our Head of Environment at Oxygen Conservation. Dan doesn’t just care about rivers; he lives and breathes them. Within minutes of speaking with him, I realised that the knowledge I thought I had about rivers – knowledge I’d built over a lifetime – could fit on the back of a postage stamp compared to his. He took my questions, my frustrations, and gave me clarity: the how, the why, and most importantly, the what we can do about it.
And then came the most powerful part: action. Across Oxygen Conservation’s portfolio, at Mornacott Estate in North Devon, Manor Farm in Norfolk, and Swineley in the Yorkshire Dales, Dan and our incredible team are restoring rivers in ways that are as bold as they are beautiful.
Letting Rivers Be Rivers Again
The restoration intervention of choice at the moment is large woody debris. So often overlooked, but so fundamental to how natural rivers function and tell us they are thriving!
Once cleared away in the name of neatness and control, they are in fact the very architecture of river life. Fallen branches and trunks create shelter, slow flows, and build complexity. They trap drifting leaves, which become food for leaf-cutting invertebrates such as caddisfly and stonefly larvae. These in turn fuel the diets of fish like the ever-hungry Miller’s Thumb, better known as the bullhead, a small but voracious predator that thrives in cool, well-oxygenated streams. By supporting these intricate food webs, large woody debris doesn’t just structure the channel, it breathes life back into it.
But that’s just the beginning:
- We’re allowing rivers to reconnect with old paleo-channels they once used, giving them space to flood naturally and create vibrant wetland habitat where juvenile salmonids can shelter and grow.
- We’re reopening floodplains that farming once drained, turning back the clock on lost richness and providing nursery areas for coarse fish such as dace and roach.
- We’re creating refuges for critically endangered species like the European eel found at Mornacott, a small miracle in itself, and ensuring safe passage for their epic migrations.
- We’re working towards reintroducing lost native species like burbot, once a nocturnal hunter of invertebrates and fish fry in cool English streams.
- We’re removing invasive non-native species to give our waters a fighting chance, protecting white-clawed crayfish and safeguarding spawning beds for trout.
- And we’re reinstating riffles to add roughness and oxygenate the water, boosting dissolved oxygen levels that trout, grayling, and bullhead depend on for survival.
Each step feels like watching life return to a place that was holding its breath for far too long.
Hope Rising
Standing on the bank today, I see more than a river. I see possibility. I see a landscape being healed in real time. Where plastic and silence once haunted me, I now see surveys, designs, planning consents turned into reality and rivers starting to sing again.
This is the work we are doing at Oxygen Conservation. Not talk, not just dreams, but action on the ground. We are restoring rivers as living, thriving systems that will outlast all of us.
Why It Matters
River restoration isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about legacy.
It’s about whether our children will grow up with the same joy I knew: the thrill of catching a trout, the astonishment in an otter’s eyes when it first notices you, or – if you are fortunate enough – to witness the electric flash of a kingfisher turning on a sixpence, the king of all fishermen.
It’s about whether they inherit rivers that inspire, rivers you can hear long before you see — alive with energy and life — or whether they are left with silent channels, stripped of their song. For me, the choice is clear. We hold this privilege, this responsibility, for only a short time. And in that time, we must give everything we can to heal these arteries of life.
Because when the first burbot emerges from its floodplain home again, or when the catadromous eel returns in greater numbers, and when a river runs clear, teeming with life – we’ll know it was worth it. Every moment. Every ounce of effort.
Author: Charles Owen, Head of Estates