Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 25th August 2024
More river watching this week, the good, the bad and the binbags. And finally, the launch of the Nature Recovery Strategy public consultation.
Morning. We’ve been writing about nature recovery here for 175 posts now, and finally, after getting a fair few things right (but quite a lot wrong) in the natural world, South Yorkshire and its officials are asking for your views. There’s a survey for you to complete here, and a handy interactive map here.
This consultation will guide Mayor Oliver Coppard and team as they plan to turn the tide on biodiversity loss, and make at least 30% of the county ‘good for nature’ by 2030. I’ll have more on all this as it develops, but for now take a look at my feature (for full Sheffield Tribune members) from our big sister publication of a few weeks ago. Key point: are some of our officials playing fast and loose with that 30% figure?
Also: more river news, and the announcement of a special celebration of one of the nation’s greatest ancient woodland writers and researchers, the late Professor Melvyn Jones, at Ecclesall Woods in October.
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Industrial River Dumping
There is still a Sheffield industry using our rivers as a rubbish dump, the Sheaf and Porter Rivers Trust (S&PRT) told me last week.
Earlier this month, volunteers from the Trust along with staff from the River Stewardship Company waded into the River Sheaf and hauled out over a dozen bin bags full of rotting cannabis waste, along with cardboard boxes and equipment from the illegal industry. It’s a constant problem, Andy Buck from S&PRT told me, with at least four incidents so far this year of cannabis waste materials being dumped into the Sheaf from the Duchess Road bridge near Granville Square.
“This is really unpleasant stuff,” he said. “There are often steel drums and electrical equipment, growing materials and rotting vegetation. And our volunteers have to clear it out along with River Stewardship Company staff.”
Cannabis waste is also being dumped at other out-of-the-way places: Andy has encountered piles of bags and equipment in lay-bys off Ringinglow Road, and thrown down a bank into Redcar Brook in the countryside below Houndkirk Moor. He said contractors from Sheffield Council staff had a precarious task clearing the latter, from a small stream that eventually feeds into the Sheaf.
“That must be a pig of a job,” he said, adding that the clean ups of illegal waste must be costing the city a great deal of money.
Andy said S&PRT is in touch with South Yorkshire Police community officers monitoring the issue at Duchess Road, where the council have also installed a CCTV camera. But he believes the hooded criminals involved use vehicles with covered or cloned licence plates, so prosecution may be difficult.
After contacting South Yorkshire Police and the council, I was sent a statement from councillor Minesh Parekh, from the Waste and Street Scene Committee.
“We are incredibly proud of the remarkable green spaces and waterways we have here in Sheffield, and we make every effort to preserve and protect them so they can be enjoyed by everyone in the city - residents and visitors alike.
“We do not stand for misuse or mistreatment of these spaces. We are working with our partners at South Yorkshire Police and local community groups to tackle ongoing issues with fly-tipping.”
Since cannabis production is a huge (but illegal) industry in Sheffield, this issue is unlikely to go away, said Andy. “But why dump it into a river where it can cause so much harm, and cost so much to clear up? At least if it’s in a lay by away from houses somewhere it can be found and cleared away a lot easier?”
In some other cities, it appears house landlords have been dumping cannabis waste after the police had closed down growers at their properties. Here, as yet it’s not clear who’s dumping this kind of pollution in our rivers, but Andy observed that since the ownership of these materials is illegal, cannabis waste can’t just be taken to a recycling centre.
Meanwhile, our rivers (and those who clean them) are paying a high price for this growing Sheffield industry.
The Oliver Rackham of the North
The South Yorkshire Forest signs on our road network are some of the local memorials for Professor Melvyn Jones, says his former colleague and fellow Professor Ian Rotherham. The forest itself, growing all over the county now, is perhaps a more fitting reminder of a raconteur and academic who completely changed the way the world thought about English ancient woodlands, Ian says.
Not so long ago, tree managers would look at the age of particular trees before deciding if a woodland was ‘ancient’ (in existence since 1600 AD or earlier), or not. And since most of Sheffield’s woodlands had been worked for centuries, with old trees taken out for timber and new ones planted, you could easily imagine that most of them were only a few hundred years old.
Ian recalls; “But Mel would say something like: ‘Well I’ve got a document from 1576 that shows how many trees were harvested there, who did the cutting and how many barrels of beer were drunk in celebration.’ Which showed how old that wood really was.”
Mel’s archive and field work, and his many books and publications, led to the current appreciation of ancient woodlands, and he was often called the ‘Oliver Rackham of the North,’ Ian adds, referring to the learned author and fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, who actually worked closely with Mel over the years while publishing several famed books on the English countryside.
There’ll be a celebration of Mel Jones at Ecclesall Woods Discovery Centre on Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th October, with bookable talks (£8) and walks (£6) on the Saturday, and a book sale (including new books contains Mel’s work) on both days.
Now our many ancient woodlands are seen for what they are, the hope is to carry on Mel’s legacy, says Ian Rotherham.
I hope to have more on Mel and his works in future posts.
Invaders and Resistance
Inspired by last week’s discovery of an official new River Sheaf path by Little London Road, I took a wander by the Don this week with our regular botanical expert Gerry Firkins.
We’d been looking at the rich botany of brownfield sites on old steelworks (a post on this is coming soon) and found ourselves chatting to the owner of the wonderful and eccentric cafe on Weedon Street, Rag’n’Bone, about plants and rivers. The Rag’n’Bone man invited us to his own stretch of the Don, which neither of us had seen before, south of the river at Meadowhall Road.
Gerry alternatively gasped and sighed: here were ancient woodland indicators and wonderful old river plants, such as Yellow Loosestrife, Water Plantain, Water Starwort and Trifid Bur-marigold.
But here also were forests of invasive Himalayan Balsam, and across the river bank, Japanese Knotweed and two species of bamboo, presumably dumped over the wall near Meadowhall as garden waste.
The Don here is usually wide and slow flowing, Gerry told me, which makes it an important ecological site for the city, a fact now rubber stamped by the likes of Water Starwort and Trifid Bur-marigold.
But the balsam (and bamboo, and knotweed) is crowding out the native plants, and should be removed, urgently, Gerry says.
It is, nevertheless, a wonderful spot to admire a wide river plain, along with the city’s history: hidden behind the bamboo are old angling paths and figs trees (as we’ve covered before, grown from generations of fig rolls eaten higher up the valley, with seeds germinating in the warmth of the industrialised river of generations ago).
As the cars and lorries drone to the Meadowhall car parks, a petrol blue Kingfisher arrows past us along the shimmering river, searching for fish among the pink flowers from the mountains of Eastern Asia.
What’s On Out There (from Sunday 25th August)
A tiny selection from our regularly updated, What’s On Out There in August news and listings post. September post coming soon - please subscribe (below) to get it first!
Sun 25th - Wadsley Commoners muck in morning
Sun 25th - Sheffield Organic Growers open day (Booking reqd)
Sun 25th - Friends of Whirlow Brook Park Sounds of Summer concert (£5 donation)
Mon 26th - Thurs 29th - Summer at Manor Lodge - dinosaurs week (£4.50 / child)
Tues 27th - Free Mam Tor Hillfort Guided Walk & Litter Pick
Tues 27th, Weds 28th - Summer of Play at Longshaw - Hobby Horse Trials
Thurs 29th - Sat 31st - Longshaw Sheepdog Trials (£5)
Thanks for reading. The marvellous photo above, by reader and subscriber John Scholey, refers to last week’s wasp feature, depicting a wasp that unfortunately does a lot worse than just bother hawk moths.
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