Chichester Harbour
As we switch off the engine of our inflatable boat, leaving it to bob unchecked on the gentle swell, I hold my breath so as not to disturb the animals stretched out on the shore. Basking in the early afternoon sunshine, not more than a metre or so in front of me, lie six common harbour seals, apparently unconcerned by our presence. With their pale golden fur and huge liquid eyes, they seem anything but common. Two of the five females lying scattered around the big black bull seal, slide off into the water and head for the opposite shore, while the male snores gently, only raising his head slightly in warning when the boat bobs a little too close to the shore.
I’ve come to Chichester Harbour to explore one of southeast England’s smallest Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). Given that 34 of the area’s 74 square kilometres are underwater, I was told that the best way to do so was by boat, hence my current proximity to the area’s resident seal population. ‘We’re looking into understanding a little bit more about the seals and what they do in the harbour,’ conservation officer Ed Rowsell tells me. ‘Whether it’s the same group of seals or a rotating population, or even whether there’s breeding in the harbour. There always seems to be around 10–14 animals, 12 months of the year. The population stabilised at that number about ten years ago. Before that, you would just get the occasional seal.’
Later, as we head back towards the harbourmaster’s office, we pass a huge shoal of mackerel. The water’s surface is a broiling mass of silver, and Rowsell tells me that the harbour’s abundance of fish is one of the main reasons that the seals have managed to thrive here. ‘The harbour is absolutely jam packed full of bass,’ he says. ‘It’s quite amazing – at high tide, if you walk out to the jetty, the water is absolutely full of bass and mullet. And it’s designated as a nursery site too, so there’s no boat-based fishing of sea bass.’
Recent studies suggest that, in total, the harbour is home to 44 fish species, and each year, more than 70,000 birds visit the area to take advantage of this abundant food source. Of these, five species visit in internationally important numbers, and the AONB boasts the UK’s second largest little egret population. It also provides a vital habitat for the water vole, a species that’s in rapid decline throughout Great Britain.
‘One of our biggest jobs,’ says publicity and information officer Alison Beckett, ‘is to balance the needs of the wildlife with the people coming here for their leisure.’ Considering the fact that the 8,000-strong local population is annually bolstered by more than 1.5 million visitors, it can be no easy task maintaining that balance. But it seems that the management team is succeeding, for although it’s high season and there are several groups of children sailing by in little white boats, their brightly coloured spinnakers puffed out by the wind, it’s still incredibly peaceful out on the water. The only constant sound is the gentle hum of our engine and the distant hammering of a man tinkering with his boat. ‘It’s precisely this kind of tranquillity,’ says Beckett, ‘that makes the AONB so special.’
Where’s Chichester Harbour?
As we drift past strips of ancient woodland, Beckett explains that Chichester Harbour is actually something of a misnomer. The AONB isn’t in Chichester and, broken down as it is into four different channels, she says it’s ‘not really a harbour, but something more like a sprawling estuary. We don’t have a main town, so it’s as if there is no common entry point to the harbour. It’s down all these little country lanes instead.
‘In a way, that’s really good, because it keeps us a bit hidden,’ she says. ‘Although it can make my job of interpreting the area quite difficult because people say, “Where’s Chichester Harbour?” And they often expect a main town.’
While this lack of a focal point could be part of the reason why the area has remained so undeveloped, the local people’s active involvement in preserving the area’s tranquillity should also be given credit. ‘The fact that the landscape is so undeveloped really has a lot to do with the residents. Take West Wittering beach, for example,’ says Beckett. ‘When Butlin’s tried to buy it, to develop it as a huge leisure complex, all of the local people got together, pooled their money and bought the land, because they didn’t want that sort of development here.’
Public spirit aside, the main body responsible for the region’s upkeep is the Chichester Harbour Conservancy, an organisation that’s almost as unusual as the
area it was established to protect. ‘The conservancy is the overall management body. It was set up by an act of parliament,’ explains Beckett. ‘Previously, the management of the harbour was split between two local councils – with the Hampshire and Sussex boundary between us – and that wasn’t working terribly well, so it needed to be reorganised. Earlier, in 1964, the area had been given AONB status, so they needed to work out a management team for that too. By some miracle of good sense, they decided that the only way to do it was to create a new organisation – the conservancy – which would manage both. We’re really a unique organisation,’ she concludes, ‘but I don’t think you could manage the two separately.’
In fact, the conservancy itself is actually still split into two – the harbour team dealing with everything on the water and the environment team handling everything else to do with the AONB – but both teams work closely with one another. ‘The two interact because the water itself is within the AONB,’ Beckett says. ‘So things such as the use of leisure craft have to be monitored to reduce the erosion of the banks, and we also work with all the boat owners so that they recognise why it’s such a special place and worthy of protection.’
Bad oyster
In terms of land coverage, the harbour’s jurisdiction spans from the church spire of West Wittering across to Eastoke Point on the southeast corner of Hayling Island, and the conservancy maintains about a kilometre and a half out to sea as well, repairing navigational markers and patrolling the water. The RIB (rigid inflatable boat) taking me out on my tour is one of two maintained by the harbour team that are used to deal with marine emergencies, from aiding boats stuck in the mudflats to helping out the ambulance services if someone has an accident on the water. Each year, the harbour patrol deals with around 350 incidents, the majority of which occur in the summer.
In total, there are roughly 10,000 boats and 6,000 moorings in the harbour, almost 600 of which are found within the channels, and the marine industry is the area’s main source of income. ‘There’s a lot of pressure from sailing,’ Beckett confirms. ‘We’re one of the busiest leisure harbours on the south coast, and when it’s a racing weekend, there can be thousands of boats in the harbour, so we have to try to make sure that they work with us and aren’t just out there doing whatever they want to.’
The speed limit within the harbour is eight knots, partly to reduce the impact of the boats’ wake on the channel banks and partly to ensure the safety of everyone using the water. ‘They’re fairly narrow channels, really,’ says Beckett, ‘and in areas such as this with lots of moorings, if you have boats flying down here, there just isn’t enough room for everybody.’
The region’s other main economic industry is farming, but before the rise of sailing as a leisure pursuit in the 1930s, the area was heavily dependent on the local oyster fishing industry. In 1900, at the industry’s peak, there were up to 2,000 people living in the Emsworth area who were involved in processing oysters. ‘Emsworth was once the paramount place in Britain for the landing of oysters,’ Robert Perry, Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) project officer for the AONB, explains. ‘There was a big fleet of smacks [boats used for oyster dredging] that would go right out across the channel into the North Sea, bring the oysters back and process them. They would send the largest ones, those considered ready for the market, off to be sold, but the smaller ones would be put in pens within the harbour.’
Unfortunately, the industry’s reputation suffered a near-fatal battering when the Dean of Winchester died in 1902, having eaten a bad Emsworth oyster at a public banquet. ‘That was before there was any sewage drainage at Emsworth,’ explains Beckett, ‘so the raw sewage was coming straight out into the harbour, and the oyster beds were right next to the outflow. It made the oysters really big and juicy, but unsafe to eat.’ The dean’s death marked the virtual end of the industry. ‘There is still some dredging in the harbour during the autumn time,’ says Perry, ‘but it’s only a fraction of what it used to be.’
However, one significant piece of the area’s oyster fishing heritage remains today – the Terror, an open sailing boat that tended to the Emsworth oyster beds during the late 1800s. ‘Terror was part of the fleet that would bring the sacks of oysters in to the shore,’ says Beckett. ‘It was derelict until five years ago, when the conservancy bought it for about a pound. With money from the HLF, we were able to restore it to its former glory. It’s a beautiful boat, and we now use it to take passengers out into the harbour.’
Looming dangers
Lovingly restored by local craftsmen, the Terror is just one of 39 projects that Perry has overseen since 2003, all funded by a £1.2million grant from the HLF. The money was also used to restore an education centre for school and university field trips, to buy a solar-powered boat for low-impact birdwatching and to fund a series of palaeo-environmental studies. This last project is proving particularly useful in predicting potential dangers facing the area from a rise in sea level.
‘The actual palaeo-environmental work we’ve been doing has involved drilling and producing cores of sediments, which we then analyse for pollen and molluscs, in order to find some material we can date,’ says Perry. ‘The best continuous record that we have of the sedimentary history is from over on Thorney Island, fairly close to the top end of Emsworth channel, where we found a continuous seven metres of sediment, from which we’ve been able to show the type of environment found there, stretching back for the last 10,000 years.’
The team has dated several of the cores they extracted, and the data they’ve produced are surprising. ‘It isn’t matching the regional context,’ Perry continues. ‘We’ve found significant marine molluscs that underlie the peat and we’ve dated those to about 8000 BC. At that time, the sea was supposed to be 40 kilometres away and the sea level was 100 metres lower – the Solent itself was a river, and the channels were just tributaries flowing down into it. So how do you get marine deposits 40 kilometres away from the nearest shore?’
How indeed? The current theory is that there were deeply incised valleys in the region that fostered marine incursions. As Perry concludes, ‘It’s just one core, but it’s raised a question – and while I don’t think we can overthrow the history of the development of the Solent River on the basis of one core, it’s often these anomalies that make you question the theories already in place.’
Looking back to see ahead
The main reason these findings are proving significant for the AONB is because by examining the past, it may prove possible to determine what the future holds for the harbour. ‘These old palaeo-channels and old baselines form points of weakness in what is now the shoreline,’ says Perry. ‘You have the Victorian walls that were built across and the reclaimed land behind them. If we allow them to decay, creating a sort of managed realignment, it will follow the lines of these former channels. So if we know where some of these channels are, we might be able to predict where will be affected in the future.’
Because the surrounding land is so flat, any changes in sea level look set to pose a significant threat. ‘We need to help communities and visitors to the area understand that the AONB as it looks at the moment is going to change over time,’ says AONB manager Alison Fowler, ‘and probably within most people’s lifetimes. The level of predicted change – 27 centimetres in 50 years – doesn’t sound like much, but on such a flat landscape, water really travels, so I see our biggest role as helping people to understand the potential changes and to come to terms with them and decide what action they’re going to take personally, particularly if they’re a house owner.’
The AONB’s other main concern is a set of proposals regarding coastal access. ‘The new proposals from Natural England, who want to create a continuous coastal corridor, are exercising our brains at the moment,’ says Fowler. ‘They want a corridor along the whole coast of England, because the devolved governments are all tackling the coast’s management in a different way. Here, we have a very good level of access, around 85–90 per cent, which is great. But the areas around the end of the Bosham peninsula, for example, aren’t accessible, and over time, the ecological value of the intertidal areas and the high-tide wader roosts has developed. That’s happened purely because there isn’t any public access to this privately owned woodland. And yet, that’s one of the prime areas that they would be looking at to link up.’
Fowler readily acknowledges that change is unavoidable, but she’s adamant that the impact of any such scheme should be minimal. ‘We must allow the AONB to evolve,’ she says. ‘But it’s vital to get the balance right and allow the area’s special qualities to persist.’ As she points out, these ‘special qualities’ are also very likely to change in the coming years. ‘Due to climate change, we may start seeing sunflowers in all the fields. We may also see farmers starting to give up because it’s too warm to grow crops.
‘There are certainly going to be natural changes taking place,’ she concludes, ‘but it’s our job to try to influence the human-induced changes, which happen on a different time scale to the natural ones. We have to strive to limit their impact on this very special and highly pressured area.’
Exploring the harbour
Due to increasing people pressure on Chichester Harbour’s landscape, the conservancy is eager to encourage visitors to be aware of their impact on
the environment. AONB manager Alison Fowler offers her recommendations for the best low-impact ways to enjoy the area
1 The conservancy’s solar boat is a unique experience. The 50-seater Swiss-built catamaran produces virtually no pollution and is almost silent, making
it perfect for birdwatching, particularly during winter when the migratory population swells
2 The Salterns Way is a cycle route that allows visitors to ride from Chichester to the coast. It’s also the perfect way to get to the sand dunes at East Head car-free, so you not only miss out on the traffic jams, you also reduce your carbon footprint
3 Built around 1880 at Emsworth, and owned by local oyster merchant Jack Kennet, the Terror is a restored open sailboat that was once used in the region’s oyster industry. The boat is now available to take groups of up to six visitors on a tour of the harbour’s oyster fishing heritage
4 There are more than 80 kilometres of footpath within the AONB. A series of guided walks, led by the conservancy’s environment staff, offer visitors the perfect opportunity to enjoy the harbour’s beautiful scenery, while learning more about the area
October 2007
I’ve come to Chichester Harbour to explore one of southeast England’s smallest Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). Given that 34 of the area’s 74 square kilometres are underwater, I was told that the best way to do so was by boat, hence my current proximity to the area’s resident seal population. ‘We’re looking into understanding a little bit more about the seals and what they do in the harbour,’ conservation officer Ed Rowsell tells me. ‘Whether it’s the same group of seals or a rotating population, or even whether there’s breeding in the harbour. There always seems to be around 10–14 animals, 12 months of the year. The population stabilised at that number about ten years ago. Before that, you would just get the occasional seal.’
Later, as we head back towards the harbourmaster’s office, we pass a huge shoal of mackerel. The water’s surface is a broiling mass of silver, and Rowsell tells me that the harbour’s abundance of fish is one of the main reasons that the seals have managed to thrive here. ‘The harbour is absolutely jam packed full of bass,’ he says. ‘It’s quite amazing – at high tide, if you walk out to the jetty, the water is absolutely full of bass and mullet. And it’s designated as a nursery site too, so there’s no boat-based fishing of sea bass.’
Recent studies suggest that, in total, the harbour is home to 44 fish species, and each year, more than 70,000 birds visit the area to take advantage of this abundant food source. Of these, five species visit in internationally important numbers, and the AONB boasts the UK’s second largest little egret population. It also provides a vital habitat for the water vole, a species that’s in rapid decline throughout Great Britain.
‘One of our biggest jobs,’ says publicity and information officer Alison Beckett, ‘is to balance the needs of the wildlife with the people coming here for their leisure.’ Considering the fact that the 8,000-strong local population is annually bolstered by more than 1.5 million visitors, it can be no easy task maintaining that balance. But it seems that the management team is succeeding, for although it’s high season and there are several groups of children sailing by in little white boats, their brightly coloured spinnakers puffed out by the wind, it’s still incredibly peaceful out on the water. The only constant sound is the gentle hum of our engine and the distant hammering of a man tinkering with his boat. ‘It’s precisely this kind of tranquillity,’ says Beckett, ‘that makes the AONB so special.’
Where’s Chichester Harbour?
As we drift past strips of ancient woodland, Beckett explains that Chichester Harbour is actually something of a misnomer. The AONB isn’t in Chichester and, broken down as it is into four different channels, she says it’s ‘not really a harbour, but something more like a sprawling estuary. We don’t have a main town, so it’s as if there is no common entry point to the harbour. It’s down all these little country lanes instead.
‘In a way, that’s really good, because it keeps us a bit hidden,’ she says. ‘Although it can make my job of interpreting the area quite difficult because people say, “Where’s Chichester Harbour?” And they often expect a main town.’
While this lack of a focal point could be part of the reason why the area has remained so undeveloped, the local people’s active involvement in preserving the area’s tranquillity should also be given credit. ‘The fact that the landscape is so undeveloped really has a lot to do with the residents. Take West Wittering beach, for example,’ says Beckett. ‘When Butlin’s tried to buy it, to develop it as a huge leisure complex, all of the local people got together, pooled their money and bought the land, because they didn’t want that sort of development here.’
Public spirit aside, the main body responsible for the region’s upkeep is the Chichester Harbour Conservancy, an organisation that’s almost as unusual as the
area it was established to protect. ‘The conservancy is the overall management body. It was set up by an act of parliament,’ explains Beckett. ‘Previously, the management of the harbour was split between two local councils – with the Hampshire and Sussex boundary between us – and that wasn’t working terribly well, so it needed to be reorganised. Earlier, in 1964, the area had been given AONB status, so they needed to work out a management team for that too. By some miracle of good sense, they decided that the only way to do it was to create a new organisation – the conservancy – which would manage both. We’re really a unique organisation,’ she concludes, ‘but I don’t think you could manage the two separately.’
In fact, the conservancy itself is actually still split into two – the harbour team dealing with everything on the water and the environment team handling everything else to do with the AONB – but both teams work closely with one another. ‘The two interact because the water itself is within the AONB,’ Beckett says. ‘So things such as the use of leisure craft have to be monitored to reduce the erosion of the banks, and we also work with all the boat owners so that they recognise why it’s such a special place and worthy of protection.’
Bad oyster
In terms of land coverage, the harbour’s jurisdiction spans from the church spire of West Wittering across to Eastoke Point on the southeast corner of Hayling Island, and the conservancy maintains about a kilometre and a half out to sea as well, repairing navigational markers and patrolling the water. The RIB (rigid inflatable boat) taking me out on my tour is one of two maintained by the harbour team that are used to deal with marine emergencies, from aiding boats stuck in the mudflats to helping out the ambulance services if someone has an accident on the water. Each year, the harbour patrol deals with around 350 incidents, the majority of which occur in the summer.
In total, there are roughly 10,000 boats and 6,000 moorings in the harbour, almost 600 of which are found within the channels, and the marine industry is the area’s main source of income. ‘There’s a lot of pressure from sailing,’ Beckett confirms. ‘We’re one of the busiest leisure harbours on the south coast, and when it’s a racing weekend, there can be thousands of boats in the harbour, so we have to try to make sure that they work with us and aren’t just out there doing whatever they want to.’
The speed limit within the harbour is eight knots, partly to reduce the impact of the boats’ wake on the channel banks and partly to ensure the safety of everyone using the water. ‘They’re fairly narrow channels, really,’ says Beckett, ‘and in areas such as this with lots of moorings, if you have boats flying down here, there just isn’t enough room for everybody.’
The region’s other main economic industry is farming, but before the rise of sailing as a leisure pursuit in the 1930s, the area was heavily dependent on the local oyster fishing industry. In 1900, at the industry’s peak, there were up to 2,000 people living in the Emsworth area who were involved in processing oysters. ‘Emsworth was once the paramount place in Britain for the landing of oysters,’ Robert Perry, Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) project officer for the AONB, explains. ‘There was a big fleet of smacks [boats used for oyster dredging] that would go right out across the channel into the North Sea, bring the oysters back and process them. They would send the largest ones, those considered ready for the market, off to be sold, but the smaller ones would be put in pens within the harbour.’
Unfortunately, the industry’s reputation suffered a near-fatal battering when the Dean of Winchester died in 1902, having eaten a bad Emsworth oyster at a public banquet. ‘That was before there was any sewage drainage at Emsworth,’ explains Beckett, ‘so the raw sewage was coming straight out into the harbour, and the oyster beds were right next to the outflow. It made the oysters really big and juicy, but unsafe to eat.’ The dean’s death marked the virtual end of the industry. ‘There is still some dredging in the harbour during the autumn time,’ says Perry, ‘but it’s only a fraction of what it used to be.’
However, one significant piece of the area’s oyster fishing heritage remains today – the Terror, an open sailing boat that tended to the Emsworth oyster beds during the late 1800s. ‘Terror was part of the fleet that would bring the sacks of oysters in to the shore,’ says Beckett. ‘It was derelict until five years ago, when the conservancy bought it for about a pound. With money from the HLF, we were able to restore it to its former glory. It’s a beautiful boat, and we now use it to take passengers out into the harbour.’
Looming dangers
Lovingly restored by local craftsmen, the Terror is just one of 39 projects that Perry has overseen since 2003, all funded by a £1.2million grant from the HLF. The money was also used to restore an education centre for school and university field trips, to buy a solar-powered boat for low-impact birdwatching and to fund a series of palaeo-environmental studies. This last project is proving particularly useful in predicting potential dangers facing the area from a rise in sea level.
‘The actual palaeo-environmental work we’ve been doing has involved drilling and producing cores of sediments, which we then analyse for pollen and molluscs, in order to find some material we can date,’ says Perry. ‘The best continuous record that we have of the sedimentary history is from over on Thorney Island, fairly close to the top end of Emsworth channel, where we found a continuous seven metres of sediment, from which we’ve been able to show the type of environment found there, stretching back for the last 10,000 years.’
The team has dated several of the cores they extracted, and the data they’ve produced are surprising. ‘It isn’t matching the regional context,’ Perry continues. ‘We’ve found significant marine molluscs that underlie the peat and we’ve dated those to about 8000 BC. At that time, the sea was supposed to be 40 kilometres away and the sea level was 100 metres lower – the Solent itself was a river, and the channels were just tributaries flowing down into it. So how do you get marine deposits 40 kilometres away from the nearest shore?’
How indeed? The current theory is that there were deeply incised valleys in the region that fostered marine incursions. As Perry concludes, ‘It’s just one core, but it’s raised a question – and while I don’t think we can overthrow the history of the development of the Solent River on the basis of one core, it’s often these anomalies that make you question the theories already in place.’
Looking back to see ahead
The main reason these findings are proving significant for the AONB is because by examining the past, it may prove possible to determine what the future holds for the harbour. ‘These old palaeo-channels and old baselines form points of weakness in what is now the shoreline,’ says Perry. ‘You have the Victorian walls that were built across and the reclaimed land behind them. If we allow them to decay, creating a sort of managed realignment, it will follow the lines of these former channels. So if we know where some of these channels are, we might be able to predict where will be affected in the future.’
Because the surrounding land is so flat, any changes in sea level look set to pose a significant threat. ‘We need to help communities and visitors to the area understand that the AONB as it looks at the moment is going to change over time,’ says AONB manager Alison Fowler, ‘and probably within most people’s lifetimes. The level of predicted change – 27 centimetres in 50 years – doesn’t sound like much, but on such a flat landscape, water really travels, so I see our biggest role as helping people to understand the potential changes and to come to terms with them and decide what action they’re going to take personally, particularly if they’re a house owner.’
The AONB’s other main concern is a set of proposals regarding coastal access. ‘The new proposals from Natural England, who want to create a continuous coastal corridor, are exercising our brains at the moment,’ says Fowler. ‘They want a corridor along the whole coast of England, because the devolved governments are all tackling the coast’s management in a different way. Here, we have a very good level of access, around 85–90 per cent, which is great. But the areas around the end of the Bosham peninsula, for example, aren’t accessible, and over time, the ecological value of the intertidal areas and the high-tide wader roosts has developed. That’s happened purely because there isn’t any public access to this privately owned woodland. And yet, that’s one of the prime areas that they would be looking at to link up.’
Fowler readily acknowledges that change is unavoidable, but she’s adamant that the impact of any such scheme should be minimal. ‘We must allow the AONB to evolve,’ she says. ‘But it’s vital to get the balance right and allow the area’s special qualities to persist.’ As she points out, these ‘special qualities’ are also very likely to change in the coming years. ‘Due to climate change, we may start seeing sunflowers in all the fields. We may also see farmers starting to give up because it’s too warm to grow crops.
‘There are certainly going to be natural changes taking place,’ she concludes, ‘but it’s our job to try to influence the human-induced changes, which happen on a different time scale to the natural ones. We have to strive to limit their impact on this very special and highly pressured area.’
Exploring the harbour
Due to increasing people pressure on Chichester Harbour’s landscape, the conservancy is eager to encourage visitors to be aware of their impact on
the environment. AONB manager Alison Fowler offers her recommendations for the best low-impact ways to enjoy the area
1 The conservancy’s solar boat is a unique experience. The 50-seater Swiss-built catamaran produces virtually no pollution and is almost silent, making
it perfect for birdwatching, particularly during winter when the migratory population swells
2 The Salterns Way is a cycle route that allows visitors to ride from Chichester to the coast. It’s also the perfect way to get to the sand dunes at East Head car-free, so you not only miss out on the traffic jams, you also reduce your carbon footprint
3 Built around 1880 at Emsworth, and owned by local oyster merchant Jack Kennet, the Terror is a restored open sailboat that was once used in the region’s oyster industry. The boat is now available to take groups of up to six visitors on a tour of the harbour’s oyster fishing heritage
4 There are more than 80 kilometres of footpath within the AONB. A series of guided walks, led by the conservancy’s environment staff, offer visitors the perfect opportunity to enjoy the harbour’s beautiful scenery, while learning more about the area
October 2007
