Featuring on the agenda of May's Annual Parish Meeting was a presentation by Ousewem, an initiative, working in conjunction with the Yorkshire Dales Rivers Trust and Natural England, to drive innovation in flood and coastal resilience and adapt to a changing climate. It is part of a £200 million programme led and managed by the Environment Agency, as announced in the budget of 2020.

To learn more about Ousewem click here.

This was probably the first time that most attendees (and certainly this website editor) had heard about Ousewem. This article, therefore, delves deeper, with the assistance of the village's Flood Action Group, into its remit, ethos and valuable contribution to the future of sustainable land management practices, seeking to benefit the environment by maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

Using Natural Flood Management (NFM) Ousewem brings pioneering solutions to flood and water environment management to the North Yorkshire rivers of Swale, Ure, Nidd and Ouse. It must be stressed that this scheme will not prevent flooding, but can help reduce its impact and will make a significant contribution to the future of management of flooding within the U.K. By working with natural processes and features within the landscape, this strategy will bring additional benefits to communities, including improved connectivity, enhanced biodiversity and habitats to develop greater resilience and adaptability in the catchment areas.

The village's Flood Action Group is currently working with Ousewem, which has identified Bishop Monkton as one of villages where properties are at risk from flooding. The Group is enthused about what Ousewem can offer and, while it is still early days and could be three or four years before results are seen, there is positive evidence from other parts of the country that similar innovations have been successful, making a significant difference.

Ousewem has identified the upstream catchment area of Bishop Monkton's beck as an area that offers great potential for reducing flood risk through NFM. Techniques employed are essentially any mitigation that can help store, absorb or slow down surface water, diverting it away from sensitive areas. These include planting trees and hedges, creating ponds and temporary shallow ponds, installing leaky dams and establishing earth bunds, embankments of mounds or earth, used to manage water flow preventing flooding or erosion.

A map has been drawn which marks out the springs within the catchment area of the village's beck, a small area extending to not much more than two miles. Local landowners are being consulted, all of whom have been receptive to Ousewem's proposals suggestion.

Ousewem is providing advice and all funding for schemes such as establishing margins around fields and planting with vegetation and hedges, as well as installing leaky dams. These dams are a natural flood management method that utilises locally sourced materials (e.g. logs), which are tethered and then tied to a bank. This acts as a barrier in a water channel, slowing down water, allowing it to be temporarily stored and then released gradually. These dams have proved to be effective in reducing the flood risk downstream.

Bishop Monkton's Flood Action Group is a vital group within the community of the village. It is completely separate to Bishop Monkton Action Group (BMAG) and an official working party of the Parish Council, which is represented at the Group's meetings.

The Group was formed in late 2000 after three days of severe flooding that caused the beck to overspill. Having seen the devastation that had been caused, its members wanted to do as much as they could to mitigate future problems, helping those villagers whose properties had been under threat. So began beck clearing.

Beck maintenance, undertaken following advice from the Environment Agency, is routinely carried out all year round, with the annual tidy being part of that programme. Regular work is proving to be a worthwhile task as the beck is kept tidy and neat. Clearing it on a regular basis helps with flood prevention removing leaves, roots, branches and weed from the water, as well as vegetation from under the bridges.