When thinking of sport, not everyone will think of angling however, it is one of the most popular sports in the UK. The fishing industry is worth over £3 billion per year, with over 100,000 weekly participants and over 4,000,000 people having been fishing in the past 2 years. Coarse fishing is the most popular type of fishing, with participants fishing rivers, canals, lakes, or ponds, and returning caught fish to the water. There are Continue Reading...

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Hoghton Bottoms Weir is the largest of many on the River Darwen that create a barrier to fish movement. Structures like this are a problem for fish, like brown trout and salmon, that migrate downstream to find suitable food sources before returning to their spawning grounds in the smaller stretches upstream to mate. Fish use a large amount of energy attempting to get over barriers like this and this affects their success at breeding. Out Continue Reading...

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The River Darwen begins on the South Pennine Moors. It then flows through a valley of Carboniferous rocks, including limestone, Millstone Grit, shales and coal, to meet the River Ribble in Preston. The River Darwen has one of the most impressive gorges in Lancashire, known as Hoghton Bottoms. The bedrock is largely covered by glacial and post-glacial deposits of sands, gravels, clays and alluvium. Where the bedrock is exposed at the surface, there is a Continue Reading...

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Work experience By Dan McGibbon As a third year Geography student at university, gaining work experience has become a must for progressing from a student to someone who is in full time work. The Ribble Rivers Trust was kind enough to offer me some work experience and it’s somewhere I highly recommend if considering for a placement choice. Getting involved with the Ribble Rivers Trust offered a great opportunity to gain experience in catchment management Continue Reading...

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This festive season we’re asking people across the UK to help keep our rivers and beaches clean by making sure all their leftover cooking fats and oils are put in the bin rather than poured down the sink. If leftover fat from cooking the Christmas dinner goes down the sink, even with hot water and washing up liquid, it soon sets hard in the cold pipes. When it mixes with other unflushable items, such as wet Continue Reading...

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World Toilet Day is a UN initiative taking place on Sunday 19th November with the aim to improve global sanitation. Although the majority of the North West waste water is safely treated through the United Utilities network risks to local rivers and seas are still prevalent through privately maintained waste water treatment works. The Call of Nature campaign has been designed to inform occupants of septic tanks, cesspits & package sewage treatment plants about the risks Continue Reading...

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Hundreds of bags of dog poo have been found on the UK’s beaches according to the Marine Conservations Society’s 2016 research; with 792 bags recorded at 364 beaches by volunteers over the Great British Beach Clean weekend in September last year. However these numbers don’t show the full scale of the problem; beach clean volunteers do not record unbagged waste therefore the total amount of dog poo left by some owners on our beautiful beaches Continue Reading...

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Throughout this summer’s electrofishing season, we’ve been giving people the chance to come along and help us with our surveys. Like many of the activities that the Trust take part in electrofishing captures the attention of all our audiences, from fishermen to conservationists to students. Naturally the opportunity to take part in this exciting task receives high demand and so throughout the summer we’ve been running Fish Fridays (and Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays!). The Continue Reading...

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If you’re planning on visiting one of the UK’s hundreds of designated bathing water beaches this year you might be shocked to find a wet wipe buried in the sand next to your picnic spot. It’s unlikely that these wipes have been left here as litter; millions of wipes are discarded or wrongly flushed down the toilet each year which means some of them reach our much loved, rivers, beaches and seas after sewers are Continue Reading...

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By Kat Rowland: GIS Intern As a Geography student who loves rivers and GIS (and is doing her dissertation on both), the Rivers Trust was the perfect place for me to do a summer internship! Staying at the Slaidburn Youth Hostel, I worked in the Clitheroe office for three weeks. I immediately realised that the Trust does a lot more than simply monitor rivers; their work also covers surveying fish populations, eradicating invasive species, planting woodlands Continue Reading...

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