Brockholes Nature Reserve just outside Preston is a remarkable initiative of the Lancashire Wildlife Trust. I am old enough to remember the building of Britain’s first motorway. And it wasn’t the M1; it was the M6 Preston bypass. For almost forty years I would regularly drive the seven or eight miles from home to join the motorway at Junction 31, very often turning north over the Ribble bridge and passing the gravel pits below. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that there would one day be a wildlife haven down beneath that busy road. But today this is the reality.

The whole area is being transformed, and earlier this year the Trust opened its innovative floating visitor centre. Yes, even the restaurant and shops float on the water. This is not the kind of nature reserve on which green-clad middle-aged adults, toting long-lensed cameras and field glasses, move slowly around the paths like Trappist monks under vow of silence. There is a place for that kind of reserve, but this one is different. It describes itself as an “unreserved reserve” and welcomes the chatter of children.

There are family events of many kinds including recently a food festival and something called “Pumpkin Mania” which I’m sure you had to see to believe. The events calendar has recently included an evening on “Exotic wildlife photography”. There are organised walks, including Sunday afternoon (two and a half hours) guided tours of the reserve, and Wednesday afternoon one-hour “meanders”. Yes this reserve is for wildlife; but it is also for people.

Even the business world is catered for. There’s no anti-business greenery here. A well-appointed meetings centre is available for hire and, unlike so many cafes and restaurants with their “no meetings” notices, people are actively encouraged to leave the M6 and stop off to meet colleagues and customers around a table while floating on the lake.

But don’t be deceived. There’s also a serious conservation agenda here. There’s woodland, wet grassland, hay meadow, and of course the water. These are all being managed with a view to developing Brockholes as a wonderful place for birds, mammals and other wildlife as well as their human observers.

Now for an admission. I’ve written that entirely from what I’ve been told. No longer living in the area I haven’t yet visited Brockholes for myself (hence no picture here) – but it’s very definitely on the agenda. Congratulations to the Lancashire Wildlife Trust for a splendid initiative.

Read more at Brockholes.org.

See also: “Nature in the North”

I have written several times recently about the River Ribble and its tributaries, especially the Hodder.   Now, here is a new book to enjoy.

The Ribble is substantially a Lancashire river, but in fact rises in the heights above the Yorkshire Dales. These are outstanding landscapes, walking-country par excellence, from the bleakness of the river’s origins to the lushness of the mid and lower stretches of the Ribble Valley, and out past the old Preston Docks to the estuary at Lytham.

This new volume, Landscapes of the Ribble, by photographer Andy Latham (it is his first book) will be a welcome addition to the library of any lover of the region and its rivers.

Book Details:
ISBN-10: 0711230285  -  ISBN-13: 978-0711230286
Publisher: Frances Lincoln (2010)
112 pages; hardcover; 26.8 x 25.4 x 2.4 cm
Cover price: £16.99

As of 15th January Landscapes of the Ribble was priced on Amazon.co.uk at only £9.54.

“Lancashire” – to many outside the Northwest of England the county name conjures up mental images of congested  towns full of blackened mills and street upon street of grubby ‘back-to-back’ houses.  Having grown up in Burnley then lived for several decades in Darwen and Blackburn I can confirm that there is a degree of reality in such an image.  But there’s more, much more. Lancashire is a county of many rivers.  Today it’s the Hodder on my mind.

“Cromwell’s Bridge” – from Lower Hodder Bridge on a rainy day

Historically the county of Lancashire stretched from the Mersey to the Duddon.  Between these lay the valleys of the Irwell, the Ribble and the Lune with their various tributaries, not to mention the collection of smaller shorter rivers spilling into Morecambe Bay from the southern lakes of what is now Cumbria.

The Ribble flows into the sea at Preston, having in the previous ten miles or so taken in the waters of the Darwen, the Calder and the Hodder.  The last of these, the River Hodder, is the only one of the Ribble’s major tributories that never flows through a town.  The Hodder is a totally rural river.

The Darwen, leaving its own town valley flows through Blackburn where it collects the Blakewater.  The Calder, having emerged from the Cliviger Gorge and passed through the beautiful Towneley lands twists its way in 19th-century cobblestone channels between the old mills of Burnley and hidden away near the town centre absorbs the Brun. 

The Hodder, in contrast, never sees anything larger than the scattered villages and hamlets to the south of the Forest of Bowland.  Its upper reaches have long been dammed, creating the Stocks Reservoir above Slaidburn.  From here it flows in twists and turns from east to west past Newton and Dunsop Bridge where it picks up the waters of the River Dunsop and Langden Brook and goes on south past Whitewell, at the back of its famous Inn.

The water then has to turn again, and counterintuitively it now flows from west to east, away from the sea as it searches for a way around Longridge Fell.  Meandering south again between rises in the land it flows under the Higher and Lower Hodder Bridges until near Mitton reaching the Ribble, a river which at this point is in no way its superior.  The Hodder gives up its name, the waters merge and together they flow to the sea.

The Hodder flowing (from the left) into the Ribble near Mitton.
(I must sometime get a shot up the Hodder from the other bank)

This is magnificent walking country, ranging from leisurely strolls by the river bank and higher paths along wooded hillsides to steeper hauls up and over the surrounding moorland,  Centuries-old stone-built houses, ancient bridges, quaint villages, and nearby is splendid Stoneyhurst; these all complement the beauty of the river itself. 

I’ve walked this Bowland (or “Bolland”) country in all kinds of weather: up by the Langden Brook deep in January snow, down from High Hodder Bridge slithering through muddy woodland in July rain, and tramping over the tops from the Trough to the Brennand Valley in September sunshine.  With a friend or walking alone this is Lancashire at its best.