The Reservoir Keeper
IN days gone by when I looked after Dove Stone and Chew Reservoirs for North West Water, and I’m talking over 30 years ago, it was a wonderful place to spend the day working, and I use the word ‘work’ loosely.
Every third weekend I was on duty on the other side of the hill to Woodhead, and before setting off I’d first stroll out from Bleak House at the head of the Woodhead Reservoir to check rain and water levels, and wind direction, before jumping into the trusty Landrover and taking the Holme Moss, Diggly Dam and Saddleworth Moor Roads to the high ground of Chew and just chill out with a flask and bacon butties.
Early morning there was almost always a short eared owl sitting on a fence post to say hello to; it’s funny but I actually did speak to the animals.
To be fair, the ‘Reservoir Keeper,’ or the ‘Waterman’ at Woodhead had a cushy number, and it’s turns out I became the last of them in a very long line stretching back to the 1860s when the chain of reservoirs was constructed.
My book ‘The Waterman’s Tale’ published by LB-Ink chronicles these early days in great detail, which I will come back to in the weeks ahead.
I was lucky enough to have Dame Vivienne Westwood write the introduction.
As a Tintwistle girl she has great admiration for the hills, the history and the people I write about, and her words amounted to a small biography with real insights into the person she became, for example she remembers looking towards Woodhead in winter and waiting for the ‘Snow Queen’ to arrive, and listening to the ‘Skylarks whilst running bare foot in Cooper’s fields.’
The job was never lonely, not least because of my wonderful short haired pointer Scarba, and of course my constant companions included red grouse, curlew, ring ouzels, peregrines, merlin, meadow pipits, golden plover, red-legged partridge and many more, and in no particular order.
These were the days when ‘people’ were not encouraged in the so-called water catchment areas.
There were also daily sightings of blue hares, and fairly often I’d get the double take from a passing fox or badger, both wondering what on earth I was doing on their patch so early.
Chew Reservoir situated at 1,600 feet above sea-level, was completed in 1912, and at the time was the highest in the British Isles.
In the summer of 1989 Chew was drained for important remedial works on the embankment, which gave me the opportunity to inspect the bed of silt for signs of life, of any description, and although my early find of an ancient pilchard-can left behind by some miscreant hiker, was interesting, nothing could be better than the discovery of a collection of small branches which stuck from the base of the peat layer five feet down.
Their provenance meant that they were many thousands of years old and growing before the peat layer was deposited by successive millennia of dead and decaying plant matter.
I think they were rowan, in perfect nick, and once dried out, could have been mistaken for fresh kindling.
I made the mistake of displaying them on the mantle- piece, and a few years after I found them, my young twin sons thought they were helping by throwing them on the fire.
Thank goodness I had taken some photographs of the ‘fossils’ before the boys ‘helped’ out.
In those far-off days I often thought, what a great nature reserve that Chew and Dovestone area would make, and advised the North West Water bosses to cut back the rhododendron, plant native species and generally manage the area for wildlife.
It was a good spot already, but the potential was obvious, unfortunately not for the Bosses at the time.
I was therefore delighted when the RSPB took it over a few years ago.
As part of a Natural England-funded project, volunteers with the RPSB/
United Utilities partnership at Dove Stone have been at work spreading sphagnum mosses and helping to blocking gullies on moorland above the Saddleworth reservoir.
Most people think of sphagnum moss being used in hanging baskets but, in its natural state, it helps create wetland bog habitats on the moorland.
Over many thousands of years, the sphagnum has formed peat, an incredibly important natural store of carbon.
Years of pollution, fires and over-grazing had left the bog in a sorry state, which is bad for water quality and wildlife.