October 2026 - Bintry Mill Fishery

Goff’s habitat improvement: Stage 1 complete

Stage one of the Goff’s improvement programme is now complete, with the installation of flow deflectors and large woody material throughout the beat to improve conditions for the wild trout population in the river.

The club was given a short three month window to complete work before October 1st, as the Environment Agency deemed this date to be the start of the trout spawning season, when all work in the river had to cease. It was a tall order for a small fishing club relying almost entirely on volunteer work party labour, but we got it done, and several sections of the beat have already begun to show clean gravel due to the increased flow. Environment Agency funding assistance and technical expertise from the Wild Trout Trust were significant factors in facilitating the successful implementation of the first stage of the project, and stage two will be in progress over the course of the winter.

The timber for the flow deflectors was harvested from a nearby wood and carefully placed into the river to create additional flow variation. The aim is to scour new spawning gravels for the winter trout spawning season.

The club has carried out a lot of work on the lower sections of the fishery over the past two years to improve the habitat value, and an important part of this was placing large woody material into the river to create shade and cover for immature fish.

Placing wooden flow deflectors in the channel is an extremely effective way of increasing flow to scour the river bed. This provides clean gravel for trout and other fish to spawn as well as increasing oxygen levels. This flow deflector was clearing the river bed within hours of being installed. Over time it will create more pools and shallows downstream to provide better living conditions for fry and mature fish of all species.

The lower stretches of the Goff’s beat are sorely in need of flow variation to provide better habitat for trout and coarse fish. The natural gradient of the surrounding land has been defeated by a combination of historic dredging and impoundment due to a large mill downstream. Nevertheless, well placed flow deflectors can help significantly.

Stage 2

As well as a uniform, over-dredged channel, the beat suffers from an almost total lack of tree cover on the banks to provide shade and additional insect life. In the context of increasingly hot and dry summers, this is becoming important as trout in particular do not fare well in hot water. Reduced flows due to increased abstraction resulting from local over-development and increasingly intensive arable farming are aggravating the problem, as the lower river levels are far more susceptible to over-heating in exceptional hot spells. The long-term solution to this is to plant more trees along the banks to provide the necessary shade.

An additional benefit of having mature trees along the river is that it helps to secure the banks from erosion and mitigate the effects of bank vole and signal crayfish excavation, but this requires the banks to be fenced off. However, few landowners seem willing to place fences more than a metre or so from the water’s edge, which in turn will accelerate erosion and eventually be self-defeating. Nevertheless, there are a number of areas along the beat where trees can be planted and be reasonably safe from grazing livestock, and the club has scheduled an extensive tree planting programme as stage 2 of the habitat improvement plan. Over the course of the coming winter BMTF will be planting over 300 trees along the banks of the river, with most going onto the Goff’s beat. This is very much a long-term initiative, but experience with previously planted willows and alders on the beat shows that in only a few seasons the young trees will be large enough to begin providing valuable shade and encouraging insect life.