Cirencester’s Waterways: Environment and People
The Friends of the Gumstool Brook is a group of concerned citizens who started meeting in 2013 in response to deteriorating conditions in the River Churn and its associated streams. Extremes of the Gumstool Brook and Daglingworth Stream drying up along the Riverside Walk in summer and episodes of flooding in the town during winter have driven our concerns and actions.
We continue to hold regular meetings with the Environment Agency, the District and Town Councils, the local MP as well as representatives of local community organisations. This helps to raise awareness of the issues and concerns but also the need for improved understanding of the underlying causes and potential solutions. We have played an important role in amending the Memorandum of Understanding that defines sluice operation in the town, so that the various agencies and landowners are monitoring and taking action to reduce the risk of flooding; this appears to have worked much better in the past twelve months. We have also identified a number of additional flood mitigation actions we would like the EA to undertake, i.e.to inspect the various culverts under the town and to install a CCTV camera on the trash screen at Powell’s School to ensure that the need for it to be cleared can be monitored.
Some years ago, I wrote an article for Ciren Scene about the history of the waterways around Cirencester, reminding readers that the Romans started altering the course of the two rivers with the medieval mill owners adding culverts and millponds to serve their needs. We know that there was a huge flood in 1929, and more recently in 2007 and 2020, but there is a lack of firm data available on which to base proposals for Nature-based solutions to mitigate the impact from high river flows and groundwater levels in winter as well as the low flows and dry streams during summer and droughts.
The Friends of the Gumstool already have a programme of citizen science monitoring in place, with volunteers maintaining a photographic record of stream flows and measuring groundwater levels. However, we need to gather more information and we are in the process of setting up more measuring points along the river and streams to facilitate this. We also want to gather information from local people in the Cirencester area about rainfall and groundwater levels. Perhaps you have a rain gauge in your garden recording rainfall, or you have a well or borehole that could be used to measure groundwater depths.
Thanks to a grant from the Kate Winstone Trust, we are able to expand our data collection and, jointly with the Town Council, we are working on a conference to be held in June this year. This conference will provide a forum to promote discussion of the flooding and low flow issues in the River Churn and its tributary streams, and crucially, encourage sharing of ideas for solutions to mitigate these current issues and provide resilience to future climate change.
If anyone reading this is able to offer help, by providing rainfall or groundwater level records or by joining us as citizen scientists to help gather data, I would be delighted to hear from you via email:- johntiffney@icloud.com.
John Tiffney
On behalf of The Friends of Gumstool Brook
Website: https://gumstool.org.uk/
Friends of the Gumstool Brook – Caring for Cirencester’s local Waterways
Email: friendsofgumstoolbrook@gmail.com
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