{"id":604332,"date":"2026-05-26T07:06:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T07:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/604332\/"},"modified":"2026-05-26T07:06:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T07:06:08","slug":"herefordshire-river-will-take-decades-to-recover-from-vandalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/604332\/","title":{"rendered":"Herefordshire river will take decades to recover from ‘vandalism’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The River Lugg is home to six protected and endangered species, including common otter, Atlantic salmon, white clawed crayfish, brook lamprey, shad and bullhead.<\/p>\n

It flows into the River Wye, and in 1995 it was made a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). <\/p>\n

District Judge Ian Strongman described John Price’s actions as “ecological vandalism on an industrial scale” when he sent him to prison in May 2023. <\/a><\/p>\n

The farmer admitted using bulldozers and diggers to remove gravel from a mile-long stretch of the river by his farm in 2020 and 2021. <\/p>\n

At the trial, Natural England described the damage as the “worst case of riverside destruction” seen by the organisation.<\/p>\n

As part of his sentence, Price was ordered to re-plant trees and restore the riverbed and banks, with the Environment Agency and Natural England overseeing his work.<\/p>\n

We visited the site with Herefordshire ecologist Richard Fishbourne, to see how the restoration project was going. <\/p>\n

Fishbourne is an environmental designer who helps communities to restore natural spaces and work with wildlife. <\/p>\n

“There’s no sign of life, there’s nothing in the water here now,” he said. <\/p>\n

“It takes tens of years, decades, to build up this wonderful community of species and habitat and it can all be destroyed in a moment.<\/p>\n

“It’s going to take 20 or 30 years to come back to anywhere near the extent that it was.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The River Lugg is home to six protected and endangered species, including common otter, Atlantic salmon, white clawed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":604333,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-604332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}