Last night I had a late walk to get my 10k paces in. I went to the park, and took a torch to shine in the water to see what I could see.
There's a large (>1 foot in diameter) plastic pipe that takes excess water from the lakes, and they are fed by a natural spring that I've never known to run dry, even in the driest of weather. That leads into a pool about 3 metres wide, 8 metres long and, formerly, almost a metre deep. From there, the water tumbles over a small waterfall and about 300 yards later it joins the Prittle Brook for the last mile or so to the Roach estuary at Stambridge. 15 years ago there were quite a few fish in this pool and because of its restricted size, it was quite easy to see them. There were 3 pike, quite a few tench, and a shoal of roach. Over the years, it has become badly silted up and there have been fewer and fewer fish. To my utter surprise, in January, despite the pool's small size, I photographed what I think is the only surviving pike. It's about 2' long and probably weighs between 4 and 5lb.
Since the spring, the vegetation litter of the trees has landed on the lake, and because the big plastic pipe drains the water at surface level, much of the floating detritus ends up in this pool, and I think that is one of the main reason that it has silted up so badly. I though it unlikely that the pike would have survived, but last evening I shone the torch into the water, and there it was! It tolerated the light on it for a few seconds, but then drifted away somewhere. There's only a limited amount of water that's deep enough for it to swim in, I think, but the current rom the pipe clearly has sufficient flow on it to give the pike a small stretch of water up to about 2' deep.
I've suggested to the council that I get a party together to dig that, and the next couple of pools out so that they have a bit of deeper water, and we have pencilled in some time in the autumn for this. I haven't got my party together yet though.
