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Braithe Estuary Partnership

Briefing note BEP/BN/2026/04

# Sediment recharge at Kellow Sands: the 2025/26 placement

Prepared by the technical secretariat for the Partnership Board · 12 February 2026

## Background

The Partnership has placed dredged sand on the upper foreshore at Kellow Sands in each of the last three winters, under the standing consent granted in 2021 and the method agreed after the 2023 trial. The purpose is to slow the loss of intertidal in front of the saltmarsh, which the 2017 study put at rather more than a metre a year at the northern end.

The material is a by-product of maintenance dredging the Harbour Board carries out anyway. Placing it on the foreshore rather than at the licensed offshore site is cheaper for the Board and useful to the Partnership, and the arrangement has run without difficulty since 2021.

## The consent position

The standing consent granted in 2021 runs to March 2029 and covers placement of up to 25,000 cubic metres a winter at the two locations shown in the consent drawing. It carries eleven conditions, of which two bear on the operation: placement is not permitted between 1 March and 31 August, and the Partnership must notify the regulator seven days before a campaign begins.

Both conditions were met this winter. The notification for the November start was sent on 28 October and acknowledged, and the January loads fell within the same campaign and needed no further notice. The regulator inspected once, on 4 December, and raised nothing.

## The dredging programme

The material comes from the Harbour Board's maintenance dredging, which runs on a three-year cycle: the Vardenne Channel and the approach to the quay every year, the bar every second year, and the berths at Marnhead in the third. The volume available to the Partnership therefore varies with the cycle as well as with the winter, and the largest volumes fall in the years the bar is cut.

This was a channel-and-approach year, which is the smaller of the three. The Board's dredger worked twenty-two days in the estuary between October and January against thirty-one in the previous season, and the eight loads placed at Kellow Sands were what the programme could offer rather than what the Partnership asked for. The secretariat does not regard the difference as material at this stage of the trial.

## The winter's placement

The Partnership placed 18,400 cubic metres of dredged sand on the upper foreshore at Kellow Sands between 6 November 2025 and 22 January 2026. The material came from maintenance dredging of the Vardenne Channel and was placed in eight loads under the standing consent granted in 2021. This note records what was placed, what it cost, and what the winter surveys

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Braithe Estuary Partnership  
have shown so far.

Briefing note BEP/BN/2026/04

Placement followed the method agreed after the 2023 trial. Each load was discharged at high water on a rising spring tide, at a single point some forty metres seaward of the saltmarsh edge, and left to redistribute without machinery working on the flat. The intention is that the material moves landward under wave action over two or three winters rather than being spread mechanically, which the trial showed disturbs the buried peat horizon at Thrimby Point.

### **How the material is placed**

Each load is brought up on the flood and held off the placement point until high water. Discharge takes between forty minutes and an hour and a quarter depending on the load, and the vessel is off the flat and back in the channel within the hour after. The Partnership's own staff attend every discharge from the shore and record the time, the state of the tide, the wind and anything of note; the records are held with the placement file.