When I told my little boy that there was somewhere called the Idle Valley, he was very excited because he thought it must be somewhere near Lazy Town (if you have children of a certain age you’ll know what I’m talking about). For conservationists of a certain age the name has altogether different connotations.
The washlands of the river Idle in Nottinghamshire have been substantially altered over centuries but still retain fragments of important wildlife habitat. Four Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) are the last remnants of a once great wetland.
Timing is everything. The installation of new pumps three decades ago changed the Idle valley fundamentally. A few years later and the wetlands with their breeding waders and wintering wildfowl would have undoubtedly have been recognised as internationally important and given the protection that this special place would have warranted. The Idle washlands was one of the last great wildlife sites lost before more effective legal protection arrived in the 1980s on the back of the European Birds Directive.
But time moves on and 30 years after the open of the West Stockwith pumping station, there are choices to be made and opportunities to restore some of the valley to its former glory. At the RSPB we have never given up hope of helping to undo the consequences of past decisions in the Idle valley. And now should be the time. The need to renew pumps and the infrastructure of drainage in the area is driving the Environment Agency’s agenda and we will be working hard to ensure that, this time, the needs of wildlife are placed at the heart of today’s decisions.