Red Rise Brook

Where the surface of the forest is still so dry any rain that does fall, quickly drains off the land through a myriad of bogs and rivulets into the forests arterial streams. One of the reasons behind the restoration of the forest streams meanders is to slow their flow and encourage the forest's retention of water. Naturally much of the New Forest environment is an expansive sponge, the Victorian forestry drains and stream straightening changed all that to the detriment of the forest's habitat diversity, and the increased frequency of flooding down stream. The restoration's working and the forest is getting year round generally wetter, and wetland diversity again blossoms. Now, in a really wet season the streams fill their surrounding environs for weeks at a time, to the point where you often can't make out their course. Then when the rain stops, within days you're back to near exposed beds (although the forest itself remaining soggy and spongy), as is shown here with the gravel bed of Red Rise Brook beginning to show again in more and more places. Of course, here we're only a couple of miles from the streams head waters, so the gravels show more frequently, whereas further down stream less and less gravel is ever on show as the streams become small rivers and finally the Lymington River and then off into the Solent. We sat for a while today by the burbling brook, autumn sun dancing through the canopy, it was lovely, tranquillity personified.