- A river runs through it part one - 17th August 2026
- Nigel Farrago - 14th August 2026
- Struck out - 14th August 2026
During a 43 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, environmental stories were rarely central, but now they are key, with Climate Change a vital issue, and the heatwave exposing the extreme damage to our rivers.
This may sound as though it has nothing to do with you, but in fact this affects EVERYONE – the health of our rivers.
Ultimately they give us our drinking water (in Wales at least), and they offer sanctuary to wildlife, so providing nice places for us to go.
So we should all be concerned that our rivers are not doing too well, and that the present heatwave has exposed how they are not up to scratch.
In a lawsuit about the state of three rivers, it has been argued that their poor water quality in recent years has had a huge impact on local businesses, property values and people’s leisure activities, with campaigners seeking “substantial damages”, although the firms being sued all denied the claims.
The Wye in particular has become symbolic of widespread concerns over the worsening state of the UK’s waterways in recent years, and it passes through the Welsh border town of Monmouth [my home town] below Ross-on-Wye, among many other places in Wales.
It flows for 155 miles from its source in the Cambrian Mountains of Mid Wales along the border with England to the Severn Estuary.
Former Olympic swimmer Roland Lee moved to live near the Wye in order to have access to open water for swimming.
“But now I’d actually go as far as to warn people against going in”, he has declared.
Wildlife filmmaker Justine Evans has said she had noticed a “stark decline” in the Wye’s condition in recent years.
“It’s horrible to think what has happened to the wildlife it is home to”, she proclaimed.
Another river which is of concern is the Lugg, which is a major tributary of the Wye, flowing predominately through Herefordshire.
The River Usk (a THIRD one) runs through the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, also known as the Brecon Beacons, as well as the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape World Heritage Site, before reaching the Bristol Channel at Newport.
All three rivers are protected because of their importance to rare wildlife, including otters, freshwater pearl mussels and the Atlantic salmon.
But it isn’t simply in Wales that the situation is alarming, with the heatwave exposing how bad things have become.
The whole of Western Europe is facing its fifth heatwave this year, and the waters of the Rhine and Danube rivers are the lowest since official records began in 1880.
The gauge at Kaub, a Medieval town in Rhineland-Palatinate, serves as the benchmark for the 1,230 kilometre-long Rhine, because it is near the Middle Rhine’s shallowest section.
On August 12 it showed a maximum depth of just 12 centimetres!
The previous record, during a drought in 2018, was 25, and it could even fall to single digits in the next few days,.
The Danube, the second-longest river in Europe (after Russia’s Volga), is hardly doing better.
A gauge in Budapest shows 26 centimetres, well below the previous record low of 33 in 2018, which threatens the electricity supply. Paks, a nuclear plant near the city that produces 30 per cent of Hungary’s electricity, and Cernavoda, Romania’s state-owned nuclear plant, have been partly or completely switched off: they use the Danube’s water for cooling.
Both countries’ governments have asked industry and households to cut back electricity use as much as possible.
Car companies such as Audi in Hungary and Dacia in Romania have scaled back production.
Along both rivers the low waters have exposed ‘hunger stones’, which are boulders carved between the 15th and 19th centuries to mark low water levels and warn of crop failures or famine.
In Budapest the low river levels have laid bare a Wehrmacht motorcycle from World War 2, and near the village of Ryahovo in Bulgaria, the remains of a mammoth became visible.
In the Serbian stretch of the Danube a fleet of Nazi-era warships were revealed, among some 200 the Germans had scuttled in September 1944 to stop Soviet troops from using the river.
So the rivers are important.
They, er, keep things afloat…
Truths like these by Phil, who has been gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Soon ‘A river runs through it part two’ – and we look in more detail at the huge court case about the state of Welsh rivers.
Tomorrow – the backlash is growing even more today, following news that disgraced former BBC presenter Huw Edwards is on a media outlet after he admitted accessing sickening images of underage children, and his writing a poem for the National Eisteddfod. 
