On a crisp May morning, James Whewell, 52, is giving me a video tour of recent water stewardship efforts at Wyresdale Park, his 800-acre Lancashire estate. As two Greylag geese fly in to join half a dozen others on one of two upland ponds dug last year, he points to a small tufted mound in the middle of the water where oystercatchers have nested this spring, in the thick long-grassed sedges.
Beside a nearby stream, where sheep and cattle once eroded the banks and dirtied the water, a thick 10-metre verge of grassland now separates it from a new fence; its thick tufts, speckled with white and pale pink flowering dog roses, house a growing population of insects and birds. The dense root structures absorb the run-off water from the fields, pulling it into the ground or slowing its passage into the stream during heavy rainfall, reducing the flood risk to the River Wyre, and absorbing any harmful phosphates or nitrates it might carry. Nearby, a line of saplings is spaced behind a shallow ditch on a steep upland slope, absorbing and slowing rainwater in a similar way.
Two years of pioneering water stewardship across his estate, where Whewell lives with his wife, fashion designer Savannah Miller, has meant taking on the voices of the past. “You have to be brave about how much land you give over. I know the widest verges work best but the ghosts of my father and grandfather wag their fingers asking what am I doing giving up even an inch of farming land,” he says with a knowing smile.
Wyresdale Park, an 800-acre estate in Lancashire where James Whewell is improving water quality, flood management and biodiversity
Whewell, who financed this work with £100,000 from the local Wyre Rivers Trust, agreed in 2023, is among a growing number of English landowners tapping government and private sector funding to improve the water quality, flood management and biodiversity of the water courses, ponds and lakes on their land. They form the vanguard of a new movement of river custodians — conservationists ushering in an era in which water management lies at the heart of efforts to promote biodiversity and more sustainable farming.
Their efforts are driven by a mix of ecological, social and financial concerns — and benefit from a range of incentives. Grants from the UK Environment Agency and other government bodies are often distributed by local charities, such as river trusts. The government’s Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) scheme is another source. Landowners get BNG credits when better water management improves biodiversity. These can be sold to developers, who count them towards the net biodiversity gain they must evidence for a housing or other project. Nutrient credits, accumulated by measures like creating new wetlands, provides a similar offsetting scheme around nitrates and phosphates in water supplies.
Local authorities and water or biodiversity charities will help suggest measures to improve water stewardship and connect landowners to those who can fund it. Working with them to create an improvement plan now means you will be ready when a suitable funding source becomes available, according to Tom Myerscough from the Wyre Rivers Trust.
At Wyresdale tall grasses slow water run off
“[These groups] are dying to get on the land and assess it. Use them to draw up a plan, then you won’t miss your chance when a funder comes calling,” he says. The charity provided Whewell’s money as part of £1.5mn it has dispersed to local landowners within the Wyre’s catchment area to improve natural flood management (NFM) since 2022; it has another £1mn to give out. Other beneficiaries have included Whewell’s neighbour and one of his tenant farmers. “Between us we’re covering more than 1,200 acres,” says Whewell.
The NFM moniker masks the fact that flood reduction measures can be just as valuable in improving water cleanliness and biodiversity. Increasing water absorption improves water quality by limiting the capacity for run-off water to wash fertilisers and other slurry into rivers, ditches and streams. Rough pasture, buffer strips and hedges provide new habitats, increase biodiversity (which thrives in wetlands) and improve soil health, which further benefits the local ecology.
New hedgerows at Wyresdale are planted, and ditches dug beside them, to help slow the flow of water . . . 
. . . the ‘brash swale’ made from birch branches also help with this
Earlier this summer, Rupert Arnold really started noticing the curlews. Ever since his university days, when he had returned to tend the garden of a cottage in North Yorkshire, the birds had soared high over the fields, their plaintive whistle-like call ingraining itself in his memory and cementing his sense of place. Now, more than a decade after he and his wife moved from Newbury to take over this 140-acre Yorkshire estate, and a year after he dug a series of ponds as part of a new water management scheme, the birds are becoming more numerous. Not only this, but: “They are nesting for the first time in my memory. We had created the right conditions: there was a sense of things coming together, of returning the land to its original character,” he says.
James Whewell: ‘The ghosts of my father and grandfather wag their fingers asking what am I doing giving up farming land’
The farm had been intensively farmed for silage. Heavy machinery compacted the top soil, accelerating the run off of slurry and pesticides into the neighbouring brook, which turned from trickle to torrent under heavy rainfall, eroding the banks and carrying debris hundreds of metres downstream.
Arnold and his wife committed to ensuring the water running off their land was clean and posed minimal flooding risk to the villages downstream. They partnered with Environment Bank (EB), a company funded by UK asset manager Gresham House, signing a 30-year contract in 2023. EB pays Arnold to manage the land following the biodiversity plan they have agreed, which includes water improvement measures like the ponds. In exchange EB gets the resulting BNG credits to sell to developers.
Stewardship efforts like planting banks with trees, thickening scrub around streams and ditches, and excluding grazing from river banks, create the biodiversity benefits that EB needs. In general, the more water the land can retain, the richer the habitat, according to Emma Toovey, chief land and nature officer at EB. “The wetter the better, we like to say,” she says.
A once-silted duck pond at Wyresdale now acts as a water store during heavy rain. The island provides a habitat for curlews and oystercatchers
Arnold’s farm covers a relatively modest 140 acres, but the ethics and economics of water stewardship work at a much larger scale, too. Just look at the 9,000-acre Castle Howard Estate in North Yorkshire.
When the 18th-century architects John Vanbrugh, who also designed Blenheim Palace, and Nicholas Hawksmoor, who completed King’s College chapel in Cambridge, were commissioned by the Howard family, they located the main house on the site of Henderskelfe, a medieval settlement whose Norse name translates as a hundred springs.
Castle Howard Estate was built on the site of Henderskelfe, a medieval settlement whose Norse name translates as a hundred springs
The area’s distinctive sandy soil and limestone outcrops shaped its habitats for millions of years, and water was integral to the estate’s design. Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor lavished water features, most significantly the expansive great lake, across the site. The biodiversity populating its bogs, mires and wetland areas once attracted Victorian botanists from across England.
Beyond its ornamental features, however, standing water was seen as a nuisance, risking the aesthetics and impeding farming and recreation, explains Guy Thallon, Castle Howard’s head of natural environment. “The landscape was designed to get rid of water, most streams were canalised, with ditches dug to carry water through, so the land could be cropped,” he says. Drying the land and expanding farming shrunk its biodiversity: by 1990 an academic paper found that several major sites had lost the entire stock of rare flora that once entranced the Victorians.
Thallon tests water in the Bog Hall Habitat Bank . . . 
. . . where he hopes to introduce beavers next year
Recently, more extreme weather patterns have caused the estate’s fast drainage to weigh heavy on local villages including Crambeck, where flooding became more frequent and more extreme (further down the valley, York was suffering a similar fate). Extended dry spells, such as the current drought, were curbing irrigation in the estate’s walled gardens. Elevated phosphate levels in the great lake — probably a legacy of earlier intensive dairy farming — created algal blooms and blanket weed.
Thallon has worked to re-wet the land, in part by bringing arable land out of production, expanding biodiverse habitats, reducing the flood risk and improving the quality of run-off water. A 36-year deal with EB has created the Bog Hall Habitat Bank, which aims to return 440 acres to the condition that so enthused Victorian botanists, creating ponds, blocking drains, creating leaky dams and — early next year — introducing beavers.
Ponds have been created in Castle Howard’s gardens
After three seasons left fallow, the fields are still baked dry and hard, but in patches grasses, sedges and wetland plants such as bulrushes are sprouting from small springs and pools of water collecting in compacted tractor tracks. Along the fields, mature hedges grow unkempt, haphazard and vast — towering far overhead and up to six metres deep, dogwood and elder growing in all directions, Guelder-roses blooming tightly clustered flowers along the edges. Huge white and cream-coloured plumes of blackthorn and hawthorn spill out, their encroaching suckers springing up into the edges of the neighbouring field.
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“It’s like walking along the edge of a woodland,” says Thallon. “These are the reservoirs of our nature restoration — corridors for birds and mammals to move through the land and a home for insects. Our approach [to water] means we’re directly responding to the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis at the same time.”
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