Swindale

The river meanders where it was once forced straight, and the valley has been handed back to the water, the trees and the silence. Swindale is one of England's boldest rewilding projects — a river released in 2016 to wander again, in a landscape being allowed to remember what it was before drainage and grazing reshaped it.

In 2016 the RSPB and the catchment's water company restored Swindale Beck to its natural course, unpicking the nineteenth-century straightening imposed for agricultural drainage. The freed river built itself pools, riffles and gravel banks within seasons, and salmon spawned in the new meanders almost immediately — a recovery faster than anyone predicted. The valley sits between the eastern fells and Haweswater reservoir, itself hiding the drowned village of Mardale Green beneath its surface, and native birch, oak and alder now regenerate where intensive grazing once kept the floor bare. Red squirrels, curlews and ring ouzels have returned. Access is on foot along a quiet lane from Bampton, beneath Selside Pike and Harter Fell, with no visitor centre, no café and no interpretation boards — the landscape tells its own story to whoever walks in and listens.