The eastern edge of the fourteen or so acres that makes up the Willow Garth, lies along the county border line that separates West Yorkshire from North Yorkshire. The garth itself is in West Yorkshire and as the crow flies is about a mile east of Knottingley. It is about 300 yards north of the A645 and a similar distance from the River Aire to the north, and lies on a dedicated floodplain. Its grid reference is Ordnance Survey sheet 105, 515 241. During the early years of the twentieth century the garth was owned by a Knottingley man named Taylor, but was leased to a basket maker by the name of Barstow. The Barstow family lived in a cottage, demolished some years ago, but which stood beside the A645.

My late father, Albert Edward Burden, who was born in 1907, could remember as a lad, baskets being made in the meadow adjacent to the garth. Many of these baskets were of the type used by farmers when harvesting their potato crop. My father gave me a very rudimentary description, by crossing his forefingers, of the implement used to strip the bark of the willow wands, as they were pulled through it.

In those days, the garth was criss-crossed by ditches filled with clear, clean water, used for drainage or irrigation, the precise purpose of which I have been unable to ascertain. By the time we lads discovered the Willow Garth in about the mid-1940s, the place was in a terribly run down state. All the ditches, save one, had become blocked by fallen vegetation, many of the willow trees were dead or dying, and hawthorn trees had become well established. However, many of these hawthorns, much beloved by the local magpies for building their nests in, were later chopped down and dragged away by a striking miner and his family.

The garth and the surrounding farmland had at some time passed into the hands of the nearby Tar Distillers, and the only running stream ran from there directly to the river Aire via the Willow Garth. Such was the amount of oily effluent floating on the surface of this stream that in several places along its course through the garth, simple oil traps had been installed. These traps were just a plank of wood, the ends of which were let into opposite banks, with the lower edge just below the surface of the water. These devices allowed water to flow unimpeded beneath them but held back anything that floated on the surface.

Such was the amount of substances trapped in this way, that an employee of the Tar Distillers, Mr. George Morley of Beal, was employed full-time to clean them off. Beside each oil trap, George had built up a circular bank of earth, only a few inches high, to form a small reservoir into which he put the effluent, after he had ladled it off the stream’s surface with his large scoop. Any water scooped out quickly drained away, leaving only an oily film behind, which meant that the reservoir could be used for some considerable time. Such is the recuperative power of nature, that within a very short time after the mini lagoons ceased to be used for the purpose for which they were created, the rampant vegetation had overgrown them. George wasn't very friendly towards us lads, and if he came upon us in the garth he would chase us out. The mature hawthorn tree against which he propped his scoops and rakes is still standing.

As Maurice Haigh wrote in a previous issue of the Knottingley Digest magazine, the Willow Garth was indeed the main stamping ground for the lads who lived in the lower half of Aire Street, as well as for us lot living in Croft Avenue. The long straight willow wands were much prized for use as arrows, while a sturdier stick was used for a bow. We cut and chopped, not only for bows and arrows, but to make countless dens. With the approach of bonfire night, our chopping intensified with any manageable tree or branch being cut down and dragged up the lane to our bonfire site, which was located behind Christ Church in The Croft. There's little wonder youngsters of our generation were thin as we were never still, but usually very healthy!

We weren't to know at this time in our young lives, that all the cutting we did benefited the willow trees immensely, for now in the mid-forties there was not a young tree growing on the place. As trees go, willows are not long lived, but every one we cut off, the remaining stump or whatever, was given a new lease of life, for most trees respond to such treatment by sending out new shoots. Willows respond well to this treatment.

Any commercial timber producer wanting long, straight poles, would use either coppicing or pollarding to produce them. Some coppiced trees live to a very great age. Coppicing is when a tree is cut back to just above the earths surface. Pollarding has taken place when the trunk and branches are cut to about five feet above ground level.

And so our childhood years passed, with us walking miles to go bird nesting, while in the local streams and quarries we caught newts and sticklebacks. In the Greenhouse, (which we were robbed of), we threw our coats over grasshoppers to help us catch them. We were sometimes less than kind to frogs and butterflies, but it’s hard to imagine any bunch of youngsters who had a better time or who were happier than us in those days. As a teenager, with a pair of cheap binoculars and my Observers Book of British Birds, which, costing five shillings, was the first book I ever bought, I spent many hours in the garth watching birds, but I kept no detailed written records of what I saw.

Into adulthood and I still visited the area frequently but now I had a much better pair of binoculars and a good field guide, plus the fact that there was always a chance of my running dogs picking up a rabbit, although I still did not foresee the importance of keeping records.

Then in the early to mid 1960s, the management of Croda, who now owned the Willow Garth, went ahead with work that would alter the place drastically. An effluent treatment plant had been built on the works from which a pipeline was laid down to the Willow Garth, to a point were a red shale dam, for want of a better word, had been installed about one third down its length from its western end, effectively cutting off about two acres of the garth. My younger brother, Albert, was to be operative of the new effluent cleansing plant, which, when it went into operation, sent many thousands of gallons of the treated effluent down to the garth to settle behind the red shale barrier. The idea behind this scheme was that the water would drain away through the shale, leaving behind any sediment etc.. However, the shale made an excellent dam, for nothing drained through it, and instead the effluent, a deep red in colour, formed a large pond. Fortunately it was not toxic, for after some Mallards discovered it they were quickly followed by other water fowl. The invasive common reed, phragmites, introduced itself into the shallow end and once it was well established it began its insiduous march across the pond. Over the years the pipe line rusted away, but undeterred Croda management allowed the effluent to find its own way down to the garth. By doing so it ran over a public footpath, but of the handful of people that used the path, no-one, including myself, ever complained.

The first week of October 1973 was a bit of a red letter time for the Willow Garth, for during that week a glossy ibis dropped in. The ditch cleaner, George Morley, saw it first, my brother Albert saw it a day or two later. I myself saw it on the 6th, however, as no birdwatcher of note had witnessed the event it was not accepted as a Yorkshire record. But with a glossy ibis seen at a nature reserve in South Yorkshire shortly after, it was grudgingly agreed that the Willow Garth bird was a possibility.

By now I was in touch with people who convinced me of the importance of keeping records, and I was mammal recorder for the Castleford and District Naturalists Society. Through holding this post, I learnt that Dr. Stephen Harris of the Mammal Society, was coming to Gate Helmsley near York on the 19th Jannuary 1975, to show interested people where and how to search in winter, for the abandoned summer breeding nests of the harvest mouse. At the time it was thought that this, the smallest British rodent, which builds its tennis ball sized nest in the stalk zone of tallish grasses, reeds and cereal plants, was on the verge of extinction in Yorkshire.

Along with three friends I attended this field meeting and after a prolonged search, the group manged to find two old nests. The tall grasses in which they had been built had been flattened by winter wind and rain, but the nests are so strongly built that they survive on the ground until destroyed by new spring growth growing up through them. When Dr. Harris told us of the most likely places and the most favoured vegetation in which to search for nests, it was as if he was painting a word picture of parts of the Willow Garth and some areas around it. Two days after the meeting, on the the 21st January, a friend and I found 32 abandoned nests in and around the Willow Garth. The question now posed was how had we, as lads, missed these nests?

We had found other difficult things, for instance the well hidden nests of willow warblers. A much favoured grass, we now know is phalaris, but which we knew then as elephant grass, we walked through on many occasions but never searched, perhaps we thought it would be unproductive as far as birds nests were concerned. When the nest of a harvest mouse is being used in which to rear a litter of young, the dying blades of grass wrapped around it are constantly covered by fresh blades by the parent mouse to help camouflage it. Searchers may find them difficult to find at this time until they get their eye in.

When word spread, via the bush telegraph, about the Willow Garth harvest mouse population, mammalogists came from far and wide to see the abandoned nests and to see the type of terrain in which they could be found. We were to cause a bigger stir, when in the summer of 1976 we found current year nests with litters of baby mice in them. A friend and I did quite a lot of work on these litters of baby mice at the request of Dr. Harris, who you will remember instigated the searches for the mice. He persuaded us to break into the nests, count the number of young, and using information supplied by him, check their coat (hair) development, which by its various stages one can estimate the baby mouse’s age. We were reluctant to break into the nests fearing that the amount of damage we would do would cause the nest desertion by the parent mouse, and told Dr. Harris so. He asked us to go ahead saying that the information we could provide would be most valuable and the worst that the parent mouse would do would be to remove the young to another nearby nest.

His advice proved to be very sound, for on the 23rd August 1975, two friends visited a nest which we already knew held a litter of young mice. They had with them a cine camera with which they hoped to get some footage of the baby mice should they venture out of the nest. What they saw surpassed their wildest dreams and has possibly never been seen before or since. With the camera running they watched as a mother mouse removed from the nest and carried away one by one, six baby mice from the disturbed nest and left them somewhere close by, for each trip she made did not take long. Unfortunately, what should surely have been unique footage came back from the developer’s completely blank.

The next major development in the Willow Garth's history came when two prominent members of the Castleford and District Naturalists Society, due to records handed in by myself, suggested to the Yorkshire Naturalists Trust (now the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust) that they might like to have a look at the place, with a view to doing something with it. Things moved slowly, then when out for a walk one day, I chanced to meet Croda Management and the YNT's Field Officer, Mr. Stephen Warburton, walking around the Willow Garth. Management were surprised and pleased when I told them about the variety of birds and mammals that we had recorded on this much maligned (due to their firm) bit of land. Yes, the YNT were interested in the place, if some part of it could be returned into some semblance of a working willow garth.

Talks dragged on and on, but finally they entered the final stages and the YNT's Field Officer asked me to form and chair the first management committee. The Willow Garth was leased to the YNT on the 1st November 1979 on a 21 year lease.

After this development I was asked by the Field Officer, if I thought that Willow Garth should be made a site of Special Scientific Interest or a full blown Nature Reserve. I opted for a Nature Reserve without hesitation and was delighted when the YNT agreed with me.

Now the work started to turn a sizeable piece of the Willow Garth into something like a working willow garth. For the next four winters, working mainly on Sunday mornings, we cut from on site, hundreds of slender willow wands which we planted at three foot centres, leaving about three feet protruding from the ground. The word planting is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, what we actually did was walk along a line with a bundle of willow wands, sticking the thick end of each wand about six inches into the ground. We had an almost 100% success rate. A commercial willow grower would have more than likely planted at eighteen inches centres, but we did not want to grow as many wands as they did.

When not planting willows, the management committee had plenty of other tasks to keep them busy. Sometimes, with help from the British Trust of Conservation Volunteers, we tried to control the handsome, but invasive, Himalayan Balsam, planted hedgerow trees along the edges of the reserve, a one off job of stringing a barbed wire fence along the reserve’s quarter mile long northern boundary and removing tree stumps which were sticking out of the standing water. These stumps were the legacy of the striking miner, who with his son had cut down many of the mature hawthorns and carted them away.

The then warden of Fairburn Ings had given us an old rowing boat, without which the removal of these stumps would have been well nigh impossible. It was very hard work pulling these stumps out by hand to say they had been immersed in water a good many years. From a cosmetic point of view the pond looked better without them and it would be safer surely, for wildfowl flighting in after dark, as we now had a good number of ducks using the pond.

Some time after it became a reserve, the effluent stopped being run down and we were faced with the prospect of losing the pond, unpleasant as the water looked when seen close up. I never thought that I would think along these lines but as far as I was concerned the pond had become an important feature of the reserve, and without it our bird list would be reduced drastically. It was to attract more birds, for as the level dropped revealing muddy margins, wading birds began to drop in to feed. It was just a pity that we couldn't raise the water level at will for this would have meant we could have kept the margins suitably wet at all times.

My brother Albert was also a member of the management committee and you may remember worked on the effluent plant. He was asked by me if he would approach management and ask if some of the firm’s cooling water, which was drawn from the nearby canal, could be diverted and sent down to the reserve. This the management agreed to do, provided the firm was not inconvenienced in any way. So, in the firm’s time, Albert laid hoses almost to the edge of the reserve to fill up the pond. This was a job that he had to do at least once a summer each year. This was a god send, for with the rivers and canals being much cleaner now than in the past, regular injections of their waters down onto the reserve slowly diluted that which once made up the pond.

Our thoughts then turned to viewing hides, two of which we decided would be raised, stood on stilts as it were. This we achieved by inserting into the ground at each corner, a telegraph pole, putting in a floor about four feet from the ground and building up from there. Two such hides were built and a smaller one at ground level overlooking a small pond that was visited often by a Kingfisher. Then the major building, a visitor centre, to be used also by the committee and any visiting naturalist doing field work on the reserve. A bird ringer from Leeds was working on the reserve and it was important that he had a place to measure, weigh and ring his birds.

As a member of the Yorkshire Mammal Group, I invited them to run a small mammal trap on the reserve using their catch em alive Longworth traps. We thought it important to try and get to know something about our small mammals population. After several trapping sessions when the one hundred and fifty traps we used, each with food and nesting material in them, were checked every morning at 08:00 hrs and again in the evening at 20:00hrs, the results suggested that the common shrew was the reserve’s most abundant small mammal. They also showed that the woodmouse was scarce and bank and meadow vole did not fare much better. Nothing can be read into the results of the traps, other than species present. Trapping would have to be carried out for several years before any useful patterns began to emerge.

Alas, I was not to see the impact that a working willow garth would have on local wildlife. The passing years brought the inevitable changes to the members of the Management Committee, and it did not take long for the last two replacement members and so called friends, to make my position as chairman untenable. But the less said about that the better. Suffice to say that after a period of ten years I took the easy option and resigned in 1989 and turned my back on large conservation projects. I turned to a great love of mine, the inland waterways, bought a narrow boat and along with my wife Doreen, set off to discover England and Wales by canal.

During my involvement with the Willow Garth it had always suffered from occasional petty acts of vandalism, but what happened after my departure was dreadful. I am not sure what had been said, if anything, to the local bad lads, but retribution was probably swift in coming. The two most wanton acts were the burning down of the visitor’s centre and the stripping off of the timber cladding of at least one of the hides, leaving the bare supports pointing to the sky. I hope that all the written records that I left did not go up in smoke along with the centre. I am told that the management committee resigned en bloc in the face of such vandalism.

I spoke to a representative of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust on 30th January 2007, and was told that the garth is still a reserve, but with no management committee, and that no practical work had been done for a number of years. However, the trust is in talks with several groups who may be able to supply voluntary labour so with a bit of luck perhaps all is still not lost for the Willow Garth.

Kenneth Burden.