A Bolton fishing club is spearheading an effort to rid the natural environment of an invasive species. John Frazer is the secretary of the Bradshaw Brook Fly Fishing Club, which has fishing rights on a mile-and-a-half section of Bradshaw Brook. In 2022, John started to notice that the area was becoming overrun with Japanese Knotweed – an invasive plant which is fast-growing and can cause chaos in homes and gardens by shattering concrete, foundations, and patios.
Sign up to our newsletters to get the latest stories sent straight to your inbox. While it’s not illegal to have Japanese Knotweed on your property, it is against the law to allow the plant to spread in the wild – and you can be prosecuted for allowing it to spread on to someone else’s property. The plant has to be disposed of at designated landfill sites.
John – who started to fish aged 25 when he was working in Scotland – retired 20 years ago. Now, he enjoys fishing in isolated places around Bolton – with fly-fishing appealing as it allows him to be ‘on the move all the time’. Now aged 73, John decided he wasn’t going to take the knotweed’s increasing spread sitting down.
With a team of volunteers and contractors, the Bradshaw Brook Fly Fishing Club is helping to eradicate the plant from the area – and they’ve even received funding to do it, starting upstream to prevent it from flowing downstream and spreading. John said: “Everywhere I go on the Irwell catchment, it’s full of Knotweed �.