The Observer
News 25.08.19 13
water in, those streams would be dry
already. They are very special, frag-
ile habitats which are quite unique
to England, and they’re currently at
the mercy of a pump and possibly a
power cut.”
She worries that this precious water
supply for the river Cam will eventu-
ally be lost. “That’s what Cambridge
is drinking. At some point, the river
is going to pay the price.”
At risk are aquatic plants and inver-
tebrates such as mayfl ies, caddisfl ies,
damselflies and stoneflies, which
provide food for fi sh such as trout,
which in turn are eaten by otters.
“We’re losing a lot of the plants,
invertebrates and fi sh we should have
on the Cam. It is not the healthy river
it should be,” she says.
But in the historic centre of
Cambridge, the river is canalised, with
tightly controlled locks, dams and
weirs – so there, despite the deple-
tion of the chalk streams that feed
the river out in the countryside, the
water levels can appear to be normal.
The only clue to the problem is that
the water is not clear and its quality
is poorer than it should be. “It’s a big
pond, basically,” Tomkins says.
A short walk from Jesus lock, oppo-
site Magdalene College, Cambridge
Punt Company guide Theo Land
is preparing to take his next group
of tourists punting along the river.
“There’s nowhere I’d rather be now
it’s summertime in Cambridge,” he
says. “There’s nowhere else like this
in the world. It’s special.”
The heart of Cambridge is the river,
he says, and the revelation that it is
drying up upsets him. “I wouldn’t feel
the same attachment to Cambridge
without the river. It would be a dif-
ferent place.”
Feargal Sharkey, former frontman
of the Undertones, has campaigned to
raise the profi le of threatened chalk
streams across the south of England.
“The water companies have been
allowed by the Environment Agency
to over-abstract and deprive rivers of
the very basic resource they need to
survive: water,” he says
Chalk streams are the north-
ern hemisphere’s version of the
Amazonian rainforest. “What hypoc-
risy that, as this country is chastis-
ing Brazil over fi res in the Amazonian
rainforest and criticising Indonesia
about deforestation, we are destroy-
ing a globally rare resource in our
own backyard,” Sharkey says.
An Environment Agency spokes-
person said: “The River Cam catch-
ment received only 70% of the
long-term average rainfall between
May 2018 and May 2019, which has
largely contributed to the current low
fl ow levels.
“We are working with water com-
panies to protect water levels by lim-
iting abstraction quantities.
“We will continue to monitor con-
ditions in the Cam catchment along-
side carrying out a number of river
restoration projects, and we are ready
to respond to incidents caused by
low water levels, including by rescu-
ing fi sh in distress or oxygenating the
water to help them.”
LEFT
Punting on the
Cam at St John’s
College.
Photograph by
Joe Giddens/PA
ABOVE
Singer Feargal
Sharkey
campaigns
to save chalk
streams, home of
damselfl ies.
