Rutland Water

Rutland Water

Rutland Water

Tim Appleton recalls the early beginnings of Rutland Water in the 1970s.

East Midland Oral History Archive

EMOHA

EMOHA

2007

Photograph courtesy of Kate Jewell. To use seek permission from https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4724377

You may use item in accordance with the licence http://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/

.mp3

Oral history

1min 34sec

I was managing this reserve here at Rutland Water as a wetland reserve for probably three years before I saw even any water entering the western end of it, and they were still completing the dam. So what I did in those early years was very much building up what is now a very successful volunteer base…probably planted maybe 80,000 trees or so in those first couple of years- a lot by myself. Virtually everything you can see apart from on the hill would have been planted in those first three years. There was very much designing how it was all going to look, where all the trails were going to be…One of the problems, and there are still some people, I think, all these years later, that think I work for the water company…but I act as a consultant, or the Trust does, and we get paid by Anglian Water for our work that we do here. One of the things they provide us with, or did in those days, was a Land Rover and of course on the side of it is ‘[] River Division’ as it was in those early days, so you could almost feel the sort of dagger being thrust between your shoulder blades as you drove past. I mean you could understand it, I mean it was a major impact on, particularly the farmers…there was all this land being flooded for Tim Appleton’s ‘dickie birds’…spent a lot of time trying to convince people that what we’d be doing here would in fact eventually be of benefit to the communities for all sorts of reasons, just a nicer experience to see wildlife and birds flying around but also have financial benefits and of course that has been very much the case.

C. Hyde

Tim Appleton

Oakham