From Saturday 2nd to Saturday 9th September 2017 Friends of the Lake District are inviting you to visit our great Cumbrian landscapes, to immerse yourself and to share your thoughts, ideas and comments about why landscapes are important to you. A packed programme of events offers a whole range of ways to get involved and experience the landscape. As an introduction to Great Landscapes Week, Friends of the Lake District will be launching ‘Why Landscape Matters, a Landscape Charter for…

Celebrating the River Kent with the Kent Catchment Partnership The Kent Catchment Partnership, a local community group supported under the umbrella of South Cumbria Rivers Trust, held a successful evening at Sprint Mill, where they discussed options for developing a project to celebrate this beautiful catchment. The Kent catchment is the last stronghold in the UK and probably Europe for  our native white clawed crayfish which are present throughout the catchment. Across their European range white clawed crayfish have declined…

Conserving Coniston & Crake – Healthy water for wildlife and communities The Coniston and Crake Catchment Partnership under the umbrella of South Cumbria Rivers Trust have been awarded a grant of £763,300 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to manage the Conserving Coniston & Crake project for the local community’s Coniston and Crake Catchment Partnership. This is a great example of communities and partnerships working together to achieve large scale success; delivering improvements to the catchments’ water quality, habitats and…

This week is volunteers week and as usual the partnership is busy, with numerous events occurring across South Cumbria. As a volunteer and a member of the Becks to Bay partnership you make a huge contribution to the area of South Cumbria. The knowledge and love of the catchments you hold is vital to identifying new opportunities and new ways to improve the area for future generations. We can achieve more when we all come together as a community. The opportunities to volunteer…

Wildlife Sightings Whilst we are working hard to improve habitat for our native wildlife and there is still a way to go, it can’t be forgotten that we live in a beautiful part of the world which already supports a wide variety of wildlife. Just this weekend I had my first sighting of an otter playing down near the rocks at K Village in Kendal. Have you seen an otter recently? Or maybe a kingfisher? If  so we would love…

For a number of years now we have been part of the Cumbria River Restoration Strategy partnership, progressing the re-naturalisation of our local rivers. In South Cumbria we recently completed a project at Staveley to remove an embankment along the River Kent. This project was a partnership between the farmer, John Nichol, South Cumbria Rivers Trust, the Environment Agency, Natural England, CaBA, Biffa Award and the EU LIFE IP ‘Natural Course’ project. Nearly 800 metres of man-made embankment and river…

Welcome to Becks to Bay! We are your local catchment partnership for South Cumbria. Since summer 2015 we have been working together to build a partnership which functions to conserve and protect the catchments of South Cumbria. This website shows some of the information we have gathered to date, including the current status of our catchments, the main issues and the actions we are putting in place to improve the environment for all: please visit the ‘catchment plan’ tabs to…