The Weaver and Gowy management catchment stretches from Ellesmere Port on the Mersey estuary down to the outskirts of Stoke‑on‑Trent, covering much of Cheshire East and Cheshire West and Chester. The landscape is mostly low‑lying and shaped by rivers, wetlands and farmland. While the area is largely rural, there is significant industrial activity around Runcorn and Ellesmere Port, and the catchment is well known for its historic and active salt mining operations.

The Rivers Weaver and Gowy, along with others such as the Dane and Wheelock, form the backbone of the catchment. These waterways support important habitats for coarse fish and some of the region’s largest eel populations, making the area highly valued by conservation groups and anglers. The catchment includes numerous surface water bodies, and a rich collection of designated nature sites, including SSSIs (Sites of Special Scientific Interest), SACs (Special Areas of Conservation) and SPAs (Special Protected Areas) and Ramsar wetlands.

For our Environmental Destination (ED) programme, we are focusing on a specific “area of interest” within the catchment, relevant to our abstractions. Our focus is those surface water bodies where the public water supply companies actively abstract water and their groundwater abstraction impacts on flow to surface waterbodies. Severn Trent’s investigation will be focussing on the operational catchments of the Weaver Upper and the Gowy and  United Utilities will be focussing on the Dane operational catchment.

Please note when looking for data on this catchment in the Environment Agency resources the catchment is often listed as the Weaver and Dane, the Weaver and Dane covers a similar but slightly different geographic extent, we will note any differences that this makes to data where this is applicable.

You can find out some more information on this catchment in Water Means Business: water resources, sustainability and growth in the Weaver-Gowy catchment.