CB 22/04/10

River Stour Trust

The River Stour Trust was set up in 1968 to protect and enhance the right of the public to navigate the River Stour, which is one of the longest and most beautiful rivers in East Anglia. Made famous by the painter John Constable, this beautiful river has a long history which we hope you will help us preserve. Because of the pressures to take away the right of navigation, the Trust has become a vigorous campaigning body, regularly fund-raising and organising many river-based activities and running regular working parties to maintain the locks and structure in our care.

Since its formation, we have undertaken many restoration projects including three locks at Flatford, Dedham and Great Cornard, Flatford Barge Dock (in association with the National Trust), the Quay Basin, Gasworks Cut and the Granary (Quay Lane, Sudbury) and rescued an original River Stour Lighter. We are currently restoring  Stratford St Mary Lock and hope to restore more structures along the length of the river,  to maintain the right of navigation for everybody to enjoy the river for all time.

Our registered office is the Granary in Sudbury and we own a Visitor and Education Centre in Great Cornard. We own two electric powered launches, Stour Trusty II and Rosette, as well as a disabled access pontoon boat, Francis J. Another electric launch, Elsie Mary, is kindly on loan as and when required. We organise annual river based events to raise funds and share our enjoyment of the river.

For generations the River Stour occupied a central position in the lives of people living on its banks, both in work and play. It is one of the most attractive rivers in the country, winding through a wide pastoral and wooded valley past towns and villages of great beauty and with many historical associations. The River Stour is one of the country’s earliest statutory navigations having been made navigable as a result of an Act of Parliament in 1705, although there is reason to believe some form of traffic was using the river for a considerable period before that (in Sudbury, at The Croft, is the site of a Roman dock). The passing of the 1705 Act and a subsequent amending one, led to the river being used for two hundred years by barges (known as lighters), which supplied the day-to-day commercial needs of the local people, whilst for pleasure, it was used for boating, swimming and fishing.

The River Stour Trust works with the Environment Agency (the Navigation Authority) to restore and maintain this historic waterway. Scenes of the Stour busy with all kinds of boats have been immortalised by the famous landscape painter John Constable (1776-1837), who spent much of his boyhood at Flatford Mill. He wrote: “the sound of water escaping from mill dams- willows, old rotten Banks, slimy posts and brickwork. I love such things”. Time and change have swept away the barges and most of the unique navigation structures, but the public right to pass along the part of the river from Brundon Mill, upstream of Sudbury in Suffolk, to the sea at Brantham, in Essex, still exists today.

Looking to the Future