BFER Project at Fullers Mill Garden, West Stow

Hi everyone, on Saturday 1st February, we kicked off our rather ambitious BFER project at Fullers Mill Garden, West Stow, well worth a visit when they reopen after the winter break.
The Lark here has been historically impounded not only by a weir but also the addition of weir boards.
On a super low gradient river like the Lark this really puts the brakes on any natural processes as the river cannot even erode anything around the man made steel and concrete impoundment to try and work around the problem.
The river can get virtually trapped.
Another huge downside of the sluggish flows is a massive growth of burr reed along the reach, as seen in the first image.

We have managed to get the boards removed, (many thanks to Fullers and the EA) lowering the river immediately upstream by nearly a metre and releasing an impounded river length of nearly 1 km.
The project now is centred around creating higher velocity channels within the lowered but still over wide river channel.
This project will run for a while and we will keep you updated on progress and
methods used.
Massive thanks to all at Fullers, the Environment Agency and especially our volunteers who turned up and put in a big shift to get the ball rolling.
So far so good……….