Qualla: Kielder Water

Kielder Water: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian King, CC BY-SA 2.0. When the Kielder Water scheme was approved by Parliament in 1974, the planners were trying to solve a problem that would not exist by the time their solution was finished. They expected the heavy industries of the North East - steel, chemicals, shipbuilding - to keep demanding more and more water through the 1980s and 1990s. They were preparing for an industrial future. They got a deindustrial one. By the time the dam was complete in 1981 and Queen Elizabeth opened the project in 1982, the steel mills had shut, the shipyards had closed, and the predicted water demand had vanished. The lake now holds two hundred billion litres of water that the region does not really need, in a valley that once held farms, a school, and ninety-five people.

Read more: Kielder Water on Qualla

Image: Adrian King | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kielder Water: What Was Drowned

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter McDermott, CC BY-SA 2.0. Building Kielder Water meant flooding the upper valley of the North Tyne, a remote stretch of Northumberland upland that had been farmed in a thin, hard way for centuries. The reservoir absorbed numerous farms, a school, and most of the valley's tiny population - about ninety-fiv...

Read more: Kielder Water on Qualla

Image: Peter McDermott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kielder Water: The Forest That Came With It

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter McDermott, CC BY-SA 2.0. Kielder Water sits inside Kielder Forest, one of the largest man-made woodlands in Europe. The forest was planted by the Forestry Commission from the 1920s onward, mostly with non-native conifers - Sitka spruce, Norway spruce, Scots pine - that would grow on poor upland soils tha...

Read more: Kielder Water on Qualla

Image: Peter McDermott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kielder Water: The White Elephant Question

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RHaworth, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kielder has been called a white elephant since before it was finished. The scheme was justified by projected industrial water demand that never materialised, and the reservoir's primary water-supply function - transferring water through pipelines and rivers to Teesside, Tyneside,...

Read more: Kielder Water on Qualla

Image: RHaworth | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kielder Water: Brittonic Roots

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mick Garratt, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name Kielder was first recorded in 1309 as Keldre, and it began life as a river name. Linguists trace it to Brittonic caleto-, the same root that gives Welsh caled meaning hard, suggesting either a hard rocky river bed or a tough piece of country to live in - probably both, g...

Read more: Kielder Water on Qualla

Image: Mick Garratt | CC BY-SA 2.0