Two other important green corridors for local diversity are Barmston Drain and Holderness Drain. Both these large, man-made drainage channels have steep sides colonised by local flora and fauna, their steepness making them hostile to trampling by people and thus more eco-friendly. When first built neither impacted on the built-up area of the town but the town has expanded around them. Both Barmston and Holderness Drains were/are long distance drainage channels dug principally to carry excess water from the middle and upper R. Hull valley to the coast (Humber Estuary), this enabling the region between Woodmansey and North Frodingham to be farmed more productively.
Barmston Drain was excavated across 1799 and 1800, followed the course of the River Hull on its west side and was designed to aid the drainage of floodplain land in areas such as Watton Carrs, Arram Carrs, Leconfield ‘Low Grounds’, Figham and Cottingham Common. Initially the channel’s engineers wanted wanted an outlet directly to the Humber Estuary in the Dairycoates area west of Hull (then), but shipping interests in the town always wanted drainage channels to outlet into the River Hull so that more water would scour the ‘Old Harbour’ on ebb tides, thus the Beverley and Barmston Drain ends at at sluice under Wincolmlee which allows water to exit from the Drain to the River as ebb tides lower the River water level, but blocks the ingress to the Drain of saline water on the flow tides.
The issue I wish to raise with this blog is the summer mowing regime done on some sections of the Drain’s bank, usually wherever a tractor can access to power a mechanical flail. Thus sections of the current year’s growth is destroyed, this damaging the biodiversity of the ‘green corridor’ and possibly killing or maiming some of the wildlife of the ‘green corridor’.