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How humans have refashioned riverbanks
2025-06-26
By Professor Mark Williams, Dr Juan Carlos Berrio, and PhD researchers Amy Wrisdale, Molly Desorgher and Hannah Sellers, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, and Institute for Environmental Futures, University of Leicester
The River Soar in Leicester reveals how humans have refashioned riverbanks over centuries
The River Soar in Leicestershire has sensed its landscape over centuries. It is often a story of environmental loss, but also one of survival that provides hope for a better future relationship between humans and the other species we share this Earth with.
Rivers are historical archives of past landscapes
Rivers are often thought of as living and conscious entities. We give them names and celebrate their passage through our landscape. But as you walk along a river’s banks did you ever think that the waters passing below may have been sensing you? And that the river might have been recording changes in its landscape for centuries and millennia. The River Soar in Leicester is such a river. It has been winding its way through the city for some 2000 years and later, during the Industrial Revolution, became embedded in the UK’s canal system. In recent years its waterways have been a conduit for restoration of wildlife in the city, and along its banks commercial and residential buildings now sit cheek by jowl with woodlands.
At the river’s surface there is evidence of very considerable change. Long ago the river flowed through a landscape of oak, ash, hawthorn and blackthorn, woodlands that were home to bears, wolves and even lynx. These animals have now gone, but in their place are non-native clams, American mink and terrapins, and plants like Himalayan Balsam that speak of far-off places. How did they find their way into this river? Dig a little below its surface and you begin to find evidence of even more changes. A few tens of centimetres below the river’s bed and there is evidence for atmospheric fallout from the atomic bomb tests of the mid-20th century. The fallout is in tiny amounts, and not at all dangerous, but it is a tell-tale sign of wider changes to our planet. Still deeper and you begin to find fossilised remains of some of the non-native species that arrived in this landscape several decades ago, and still deeper there are signs of metal contamination from the Industrial Revolution. All of these signals point to a heavy human impact on the landscape around the river.
But the River Soar is not the only natural recording device in the Leicestershire landscape and the same signals can be found in sediment cores taken from Groby Pool to the northwest of Leicester. Sometimes the sediment records stretch back thousands of years, as at Narborough Bog. Using these we can piece together a story over millennia – beyond any written records, that show how the Leicestershire landscape, and more broadly lowland England, has changed as a result of human actions. It is a story of environmental loss for sure, of once extensive woodlands reduced to tiny remnants. But it is also a story of resilience. Of how some plants and animals have survived, of how humans have worked side-by-side to preserve these ecologies, and how the information recorded by the river and wider landscape can be used to help forge a better future relationship between humans and the other species we share this Earth with.
Himalayan Balsam growing on the River Soar’s bank just downstream from the medieval Packhorse Bridge. Picture credit Amy Wrisdale.
Non-native clams recovered from the River Soar as it flows through Watermead Park in Leicester. Picture credit Amy Wrisdale.
A terrapin in the watershed of the River Soar at Watermead Park in Leicester. Picture Credit Amy Wrisdale.