Moving down through the village the river skirts the back of a few houses and follows a course carved by man, many years ago, away from the natural channel. We found a lot of invertebrate life without trying.
Just turning over a rock was enough to reveal loads of flat bodied nyphs including this green one which was new to me. They have all been black or dark brown so far. Plenty of cased caddis easily seen from the bank.
Then out into open fields again but then the streamer weed disappears apart from a few small and posibly recovering or newly arrived shoots of a couple of inches.(50mm) There is also an unusual very dark deposit on the stone. Something we haven't noticed before.
There is a sewage pumping station in the village upstream of here and we heard from a local man that there had been problems there but we have not yet asked Thames Water about that yet. They have told us that they did a lot of work to line the sewers and stop infiltration of ground water quite recently and, we believe, successfully.
A few hundred metres downstream of the village we arrived at Naunton Sewage Treatment Works where we saw a steady stream of effluent dropping into the tiny river. A shoal of minnows or sticklebacks skittered away.
Then the filamentous algae made a noticeable appearance, vivid green and flowing in the current like weed but we checked and it wasn't.
We decided to get the phosphate checker out for a look. More on this in the next blog, coming up..
