Before being taken down by COVID, I headed to Penrith Cinema for their screening of ‘Riverwoods’ to find a queue down the street, with even some people being turned away! I already had a ticket, so was able to watch the film which was followed by the Cumbrian author and naturalist Lee Schofield reading from his book ‘Wild Fell’. Lee was a lively speaker and it was a great chance to connect with others and learn something relevant to the Eden Valley.
Riverwoods is a documentary about Scotland’s Atlantic salmon and the relationship between fish and forest. Bringing it home Lee, an ecologist and senior site manager at the RSPB in Haweswater, talked about his first-hand experience of restoring natural processes to Swindale Beck (a tributary of the River Eden). The river traditionally hosted one of the largest salmon populations in the north of England, but since the 1970s the numbers returning to the river and its tributaries to spawn have fallen by half. Within about three months of Lee’s project which involved bringing back about 60 miles of the river to as close as possible to its natural state by slowing the flow and creating still pools and shallows, salmon began spawning again in the gravel beds.
Of course, salmon are special, they can travel up to 4000 miles in a lifetime and unlike most fish, they survive in both freshwater and sea. Before setting off from Eden’s rivers and streams to feed in the north Atlantic they will have made a home in the river for up to 3 years. Then off they go, leaping high up waterfalls (fifteen feet high at times); ‘Salar’ from the Latin ‘Salio’, means ‘to leap’, and on reaching the ocean they can swim over 60 miles a day. Perhaps more impressive though, is the fact that after travelling such a distance, they manage to navigate their way back (it’s thought they use the earth’s magnetic field like a compass). On finding the Eden, they will start using smell to locate their birthplace having built their ‘smell memory-bank’ when young.
Everything is connected – the forest needs the bodies of the spawning salmon to enrich habitats through the cycling of nutrients from the sea to freshwater streams and the salmon need the forest for shelter and protection – yet often these connections are invisible. Beautiful snapshots of beautiful Cumbrian places, can fail to show the intricacy and fragility of the ecosystems or biodiversity within them and it’s easy to overlook what we cannot see. Neither do we see the stories which connect us to the spirit of the landscape and the people whose activities have shaped current ecosystems through agriculture and mining etc. With my focus on the Eden Valley I am often thinking about these ghosts from the past. Dot has been my recent inspiration; born not so far from the source of the Eden which is up on the fells above Hell Gill force near Kirkby Stephen in the late in the nineteenth century, she left the Eden Valley when her mother sent her away to learn the Milliner’s trade, but over the years she and her family have returned, drawn back like the salmon to the landscape and memories it holds.
Finally, I’m doing a couple of workshops with Highlights Rural Touring and would love to meet anyone who is able to join me. We will be making colourful 3D faux taxidermy beetles from cardboard covered with layered tissue paper collage. Please book here: https://highlightsnorth.co.uk/event/creative-highlights-beetle-mania/
Follow Dawn on Instagram – @dawnhurtonartist
