National Trust river project at Holnicote in Somerset, wins prestigious UK River Prize 2025 - National Trust
An ambitious project aimed at restoring natural processes and ecological function in Somerset’s River Aller and Horner Water catchments has triumphed at the prestigious 2025 UK River Prize awarded by the River Restoration Centre (RRC), winning the Catchment Restoration Award.
The Holnicote Estate Project, one of three finalists, led by the National Trust, is supported by the Environment Agency with significant funding from Interreg 2 Seas Co-Adapt programme, Defra’s Green Recovery & Species Survival Funds and others.
Runners up were the Eddleston Water Project, led by Tweed Forum, and the Howgill Beck Naturalisation Project, led by the RSPB.
For centuries, the rivers in this area of Somerset have been simplified and straightened disconnecting them from the landscapes surrounding them, providing little resilience against flooding or in times of drought.
Since 2018, the Riverlands team at the National Trust’s 12,500-acre Holnicote estate have been delivering pioneering and innovative approaches to both river restoration and land management, by taking a catchment-based, landscape scale approach. This has resulted in the area being both resilient in times of flood and drought, while also being rich in nature, while remaining agriculturally productive.
Key areas of work have included the reintroduction of beavers into two enclosed sites and the UK’s first large-scale main river restoration using the “Stage Zero” technique.
This method, the ‘ctrl-alt-delete’ of a river reset, has transformed an historically straightened 1.2km section of the River Aller, allowing the river to find its own course, resetting it to a more natural state with multiple, cross-connected channels flowing freely, slowly and fully connected to the floodplain. The result has been the creation of seven hectares of waterscapes and wetlands (equivalent to more than ten football pitches[2]).
Dead wood, once a common natural feature in our rivers’, was also used to help create the new wetlands by helping to slow and spreading the flow of water. The land now remains wetter for longer periods of time, boosting biodiversity and water storage capacity, helping the river become more resilient to extremes of weather.
Posted On: 02/04/2025
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