A UNIQUE habitat beside a River Wye tributary is being damaged by prolonged flooding that official bodies are failing to prevent, it has been claimed.

For the past ten years Dr Bob Dowling has been the hay warden of Lugg Meadow, the traditional “Lammas meadow” between the river Lugg and its tributary the Rhea Ditch east of Hereford.

“When the ground is under water for a long time, the soil loses its structure, which has meant the hay harvest was down 50 per cent this year,” he said, adding that this was also “partly also due to the drought” in summer.

He said the River Lugg Internal Drainage Board (IDB), the public authority responsible for managing the river levels, hasn’t maintained the Rhea “for many years”, and that this is compounded by obstructions to the river Lugg itself, where the Environment Agency (EA) has the power to intervene.

“I have called the EA about trees which fallen across the river,” he said. “I don’t expect anything will happen. So it will be flooded again.”

A former consultant anaesthetist at the county hospital who has lived near the river for over half a century, Dr Dowling said wildlife “used to thrive in the meadows” including snipe, which are now gone, and curlews, which have almost gone.

The IDB said in a statement that it “has to work within very tight environmental constraints, which makes the maintenance of the watercourse very challenging”.

De-silting watercourses “can only be undertaken between the end of July and end of September to protect lamprey and spawning fish”, and this had not been possible this season “due to contractor issues”, it said.

Coun Elissa Swinglehurst (Con, Llangarron), Herefordshire Council’s Cabinet member for environment, added that the IDB’s obligations “do not remove the riparian rights and duties of the landowners” who can maintain watercourses themselves, “subject to the correct permissions”.

The EA declined to comment on the record.

A spokesperson for Herefordshire Wildlife Trust, which manages much of the area, said that while it was “completely natural” and indeed essential, for it to flood seasonally, climate change “is leading to the meadows being under more water, for longer, each winter”.

Debris in the river is “also part of the natural dynamic and, in many cases, helpful in slowing its flow” – though the trust is “fully supportive” of work planned by the IDB and EA to the manage trees along the river this autumn.