The battle for control of Withins Reservoir
‘I have been terrorised and tormented’
Dear readers — Withins Reservoir and Elton Reservoir, two artificial lakes in Bury, have the proud accolade of inspiring a feisty battle that set the legal precedent for right of way in 1904, opening up swathes of the countryside for the public to access freely. Now, over 100 years later, Withins Reservoir faces another battle over control — which came to a head when dozens of dead fish started mysteriously cropping up on the banks of the reservoir…
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A story of love, political intrigue and revenge
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Your Mill briefing
🚝 The Transport for the North board, which includes Andy Burnham and other leaders from across the north of England, want Avanti West Coast to have its contract terminated. The rail operator has become infamous for its unreliability, which board members say is impacting the northern economy and the lives of their residents. The board was given the option to give Avanti until June to improve, or cancel its contract outright. Secretary for Transport Mark Harper is now being pressured to give Avanti the boot, because “a continuation of the current situation is unacceptable to the North.” However, a government spokesperson said bringing the west coast mainline back under public ownership “would just cause more upheaval for passengers rather than solving the challenges the operator is facing.”
📞 IX Wireless, a telecommunications company based in Blackburn, has just erected another phone mast, this time outside a restaurant in Prestwich. In the past, the company has been accused of bullying and intimidation in response to local residents complaining about the company erecting phone masts without public consultation or planning permission. Restaurant owner Johnny Gupta said: “What really upsets me is that we are losing democracy, my human rights to protect my bricks and mortar, they have taken away that right.” But because companies do not need permission from the council to erect a phone mast, there is nothing the local authority can do. Go deeper with Tortoise’s reporting on IX Wireless — and the group of Northern MPs who accepted £138,000 in donations from the company, with some admitting they didn’t know who ran the company or what it does.
🐔 Veteran Manchester City councillor Pat Karney wore a chicken mask at yesterday’s full council meeting to help illustrate his point that Rishi Sunak is a chicken for not setting a date for the next general election. The council voted unanimously on a motion criticising the government’s recent budget, bundled within which was a call to have a general election in May. Karney, you may recall, also wore a faceless mask in a meeting last March to raise concerns about requiring ID to vote.
The battle for control of Withins Reservoir
By Mollie Simpson
On a cool, sunny day in early March, a local filmmaker called Leslie Stott headed to Withins Reservoir with a camera and a drone. At the shore, a group of men were wrangling fishing nets, buckets and a small white boat.
The reservoir was built in the 1840s to supply water to the East Lancashire Paper Mill. It now exists as a fishing lodge, and has the proud accolade of being the tiny reservoir that inspired a massive battle. In the summer of 1904, the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company erected fencing around the area to block off access to the public. After seeking legal advice, eight men headed to the site to tear the fences down and were brought to court in retribution. The protestors ultimately won the battle, and set the legal precedent for ‘right of way’ — ensuring that landowners cannot block off parts of their land as they see fit.
Yet 100 years later, the battle over who controls Withins Reservoir is, in some ways, still ongoing. “I have been between the devil and deep blue sea on this, the local fishing community and the Environment Agency bearing down on me,” says Sally Whitter, a waterwell engineer and the secretary of Withins Reservoir Ltd.
The Environment Agency has been warning about the reservoir’s potential to flood a nearby neighbourhood in Radcliffe. Based on assessments of the dam and the water levels, the agency concluded that Withins’ spillway wasn’t large enough to contain the overflow if there was too much heavy rain. For the neighbourhood to be safe from flooding, the reservoir would need to be almost completely drained.
But Withins Reservoir, affectionately known as Little Raz by the local fishing community, was home to five different types of fish: carp, bream, skimmers, roach and pike. If the water levels were lowered without extracting those fish first, their lives would be at stake.
On that March day, contractors arrived in a van marked J.P. Whitter to rescue the fish with nets and buckets. Once they were out on the water, they transferred some fish into a tank to be transported elsewhere, and took the boat back to shore.
The following morning, local residents claimed that the contractors had not, in fact, managed to rescue all of the fish from Little Raz. Several people noticed dead fish lying in the long grass near their gardens. More dead fish had already flowed into the River Irwell, where their bodies would certainly rot. A local farmer, who has a brook running through his garden, was said to have told Eric Owen that it looked like “flashes of big silver and small silver fish, which are dead, going through the water at speed”.
Fishermen assume that many of the fish died from being sucked down the valve that pulled the water out of the reservoir. Even if they survived this, some were found with thick lumps of sediment and mud in their gills, meaning they would have suffocated to death. Eric Owen from the Little Britain Anglers Society estimates that “thousands upon thousands of fish died”, although there is no public record of the fish population of the reservoir at the time of the draining, and we have only seen photos of around a dozen dead fish.
Soon, local councillors started fielding complaints from residents. “What happened was appalling,” Mary Walsh, a councillor for Radcliffe East, tells me. “People’s gardens were flooded, inundated with dead fish, children were traumatised by it.” Leslie Stott also received a dozen text messages from his friends telling him to take a look. “The fish are all dead,” one said. He wrapped up in a warm coat and hat and grabbed his camera. The next day, on Wednesday 6th March, Leslie posted a new video on YouTube titled “RE-CAP THE DAY AFTER”, which showed dead fish lying on the side of the brook, dead fish floating just above the surface, their bodies slick and silvery in the mud.
The Environment Agency issued a statement damning the owners of the reservoir for approving a contractor who displayed such “poor standards of care”, but didn’t specify precisely what went wrong. Then the rumours started to spread.
In local Facebook groups, people began to unspool elaborate theories about how Withins Reservoir Ltd drained the reservoir so they could build a massive block of flats on top of it. I read the phrase “the dark hand of Peel lurks in the background” multiple times, which seems to be a fan-favourite. It refers to a theory that Peel Holdings, the reclusive landowners who own around 38,000 acres of the North West, have some part to play in this. Peel Holdings pointed out to the Bolton News that while they have plans to develop land beside the nearby Elton Reservoir, they don’t own Withins Reservoir — yet still, this theory has persisted with residents. Adrian Stewart, a local resident, says Withins Reservoir was drained for “health and safety” and because people were going for dips in the reservoir, but admitted he’s never seen anyone swimming there. Eric Owen claims he offered to complete the fish rescue for the company for free, but was rejected.
“You could talk to 10 different people and get 10 different stories,” Leslie Stott warned me when I started reporting this story. It had become clear that the local community felt fiercely protective of the reservoir, which has made the facts difficult to ascertain. I reached out to Sally Ann Whitter, director of the waterwell engineer firm J.P Whitter and secretary of Withins Reservoir Ltd, for answers. After some chasing, she finally tells me that she has been “reluctant to respond to anything or anyone surrounding the reservoir” but has decided to reply to me in order to clear up some of the speculation to halt “the blame and intimidation which I continue to receive”.
She says the company didn’t want to drain the Withins Reservoir, but at the end of October last year, were issued a court enforcement notice by the Environment Agency that demanded it. The Environment Agency then provided a list of contractors to rescue the fish from the reservoir and suggested a preferred option. When Sally asked this contractor for a quote, they delayed sending her final costs, and then finally, after seven weeks of waiting, it was too expensive. They were now tight for time, but eventually managed to choose a local contractor to complete the job, on budget and on time.
In the run-up to the fish rescue, Sally says she received a number of anonymous phone calls, the last of which contained “threats about what would happen if we went ahead with the fish removal and what they would do to paint a poor picture of the process”. She adds that she knows that the reservoir looks in a “horrendous state” now that it has been drained, and that “removing the fish and emptying the water is the last thing we wanted to do”. It’s at this point that she also reveals exactly why the rescue went wrong.
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