The River Brett Group

The river is one of the best bits of living in Hadleigh. So if you’d like to help look after it, then this is the place. Join one of our regular river dipping sessions and learn to use all the little bugs to measure the quality of the water (we load the results onto the national database of water quality).

Here is a very interesting article on the state of rivers and the way forward to mitigate flood risk. Click on the link below:

Planting trees, creating floodplains and rewilding rivers are among the new techniques being used to adapt to a heating climate

River Brett Update:

‘Could the Brett be Bretter?’ On the 27th April, Paul Hogger summarised the results from the HEAT volunteers’ river monitoring and the group’s work with local and national partners and Steve Farthing from the Hadleigh & District Angling Society talked about the restoration of Polstead Pond.

HEAT instigated and chairs a stakeholder partnership which includes the Environment Agency, water companies, anglers and other community groups in the River Brett catchment area. The aim is to improve the quality of the river. We met with the local MP who set up a meeting with the Minister with responsibility for rivers and we subsequently met with senior officials at DEFRA to share how they might promote citizen science around river quality. We were successful in getting the support of all landowners along the river thereby gaining access to test the river. On 10th April 2022, 10 Hadleigh HEAT volunteers were trained and certified in the techniques of River Fly Larvae/invertebrate monitoring, as defined by the River Fly Partnership. https://www.riverflies.org/. This training was funded by a local Hadleigh Town Council grant. The technique allows these citizen scientists to use a systematic approach to monitoring the river’s quality on month by month basis and feeding results into a national database that is recognised by the Environmental Agency. Now with 11 people trained (in total) the sample points can be expanded from 2 to around 6, and will extend from Chelsworth to Shelly.

Chemical and E.Coli measurements are also collected for baseline data linking with Hadleigh Treatment sewage works.