Discover Brightwater
Discover Brightwater was a National Lottery Heritage Fund supported landscape partnership project, with 19 different project streams including river habitat improvements, wetland creation, heritage and archaeology. The project involved local communities around the River Skerne catchment from the Trimdons to Darlington in the south and Shildon in the west.
The Discover Brightwater project ran from 2019 to 2024. The conservation element continues through the ongoing work to restore the Durham Carrs and develop a Great North Fen: a connected, functioning wetland landscape that supports a diverse range of wildlife and helps combat climate change by sequestering carbon. Learn more here.
A legacy from the Discover Brightwater project was the development of an ‘eco-museum’.
Discover Brightwater and the Great North Fen ‘Eco-Museum’
An ‘Eco-Museum’ is a French idea and is basically a museum without walls. Ours is designed to help people ‘curate’, for themselves, the area around The River Skerne, in County Durham. Much of the material has been funded by those nice people who play the National Lottery and distributed as part of the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Our mission is to ‘reveal, restore and celebrate life around The River Skerne”.
The walks, cycle routes, heritage trails and archives were created as part of Discover Brightwater. This was a Landscape Partnership between Local Authorities, Government Agencies environmental trusts and local businesses, led by Durham Wildlife Trust and has been our biggest programme of projects to date, and costing over £4.5 million - most of which has been spent in the North East of England, supporting the local economy and helping to improve our environment and our tourist offer.
We hope you’ll enjoy ‘roaming around’ our Museum and find the history, heritage and interactive maps and trails you can download both enjoyable and inspirational as you Discover Brightwater and The Great North Fen.
Begin your journey...
Enter the Discover Brightwater and Great North Fen Eco-Museum
The official cutting of the willow to open Bishop's Fen
Aerial view over Bishop's Fen with work ongoing
