Ewelme Brook Community Project
A Ewelme Brook group formed, including local parish councillors and members of Benson Nature Group to develop a co-ordinated approach to the restoration and management of the brook. This group began to write a management plan and also arranged for the Wild Trout Trust to conduct a walkover survey and provide some general management recommendations.
Supporting Local Communities
To support this project the Chilterns Chalk Streams Project secured £5k from the Green Recovery Challenge Fund to:
- Complete small scale river restoration projects at publicly accessible sites. These are intended to be demonstration sites that may help to engage other landowners
- Produce a management advice leaflet for people who have the brook in their garden
- Run community events and work with local schools
Project Completed
We have completed our targets as set out above.
Twenty-five local volunteers got involved in river restoration activities on the Brook and we hope these volunteers will be able to deliver future small scale river restoration projects.
We produced a management advice leaflet which was delivered to all houses in Ewelme by volunteers. You can also download the leaflet here.
We ran three community events at Ewelme, including a family day, a community event and a guided watercress beds walk along with the launch of the leaflet. All events were well attended and we received some positive feedback!
Future work
We hope to restore an additional 150m of the channel with the assitance of local community members and volunteers. The project has also funded an independent expert to create restoration proposals for the former watercress beds at Ewelme. It is hoped that these will also form the basis for a future habitat enhancement project.
We hope to keep engaging with the Ewelme area, to encourage and inspire people to look after their chalk stream.