The recent dry spell in summer 2018 has caused the water levels in Haweswater Reservoir to fall. An aerial filming piece which we filmed yesterday for a news channel., here is the drone video which we filmed on July 12th 2018 showing the low water levels.
Contrast this with a drone film we made on exactly the same date 12 months earlier on 12th July 2017, when we were there filming an advert.
Haweswater is a reservoir in the English Lake District, built in the valley of Mardale in the county of Cumbria. The controversial construction of the Haweswater dam started in 1929, after Parliament passed an Act giving the Manchester Corporation permission to build the reservoir to supply water for Manchester. The decision caused public outcry, since the farming villages of Measand and Mardale Green would be flooded, with their inhabitants needing to be relocated. Also, many desired to maintain the picturesque valley in its existing state.
Originally, Haweswater was a natural lake about four kilometres long, nearly divided by a tongue of land at Measand; the two reaches of the lake were known as High Water and Low Water. The building of the dam raised the water level by 29 metres (95 feet) and created a reservoir six kilometres (four miles) long and around 600 metres (almost half a mile) wide. The dam wall measures 470 metres long and 27.5 metres high; at the time of construction it was considered to be cutting-edge technology as it was the world’s first hollow buttress dam, using 44 separate buttressed units joined by flexible joints. A parapet, 1.4 metres (56 inches) wide, runs the length of the dam and from this, tunnelled supplies can be seen entering the reservoir from the adjoining valleys of Heltondale and Swindale. When the reservoir is full, it holds 84 billion litres (18.6 billion gallons) of water. The reservoir is now owned by United Utilities PLC. It supplies about 25% of the North West’s water supply.
Before the valley was flooded in 1935, all the farms and dwellings of the villages of Mardale Green and Measand were demolished, as well as the centuries-old Dun Bull Inn at Mardale Green. The village church was dismantled and the stone used in constructing the dam; all the bodies in the churchyard were exhumed and re-buried at Shap. Today, when the water in the reservoir is low, the remains of the submerged village of Mardale Green can still be seen, including stone walls and the village bridge.
Manchester Corporation built a new road along the eastern side of the lake to replace the flooded highway lower in the valley, and the Haweswater Hotel was constructed midway down the length of the reservoir as a replacement for the Dun Bull. The road continues to the western end of Haweswater, to a car park, a popular starting point for a path to the surrounding fells of Harter Fell, Branstree and High Street.
Lake District writer and fell walker Alfred Wainwright had this to say on the construction of the Haweswater Dam in A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells:
“If we can accept as absolutely necessary the conversion of Haweswater [to a reservoir], then it must be conceded that Manchester have done the job as unobtrusively as possible. Mardale is still a noble valley. But man works with such clumsy hands! Gone for ever are the quiet wooded bays and shingly shores that nature had fashioned so sweetly in the Haweswater of old; how aggressively ugly is the tidemark of the new Haweswater
