Pickering Beck
It is a meandering river that is fed by numerous named and unnamed becks and streams which flow over sandstone and limestone beds and an alluvia of sand, clay silt and gravel.Elsewhere, 187 heather bale check dams were constructed on the various smaller streams that feed into Pickering Beck to hold more water back.This floodplain and bund storage allows for 4,200,000 cubic feet (120,000 m3) of floodwater to be retained when the beck is in peak flow or under heavy rain conditions.[15] In January 2016, Geoffrey Lean, an environmental journalist, wrote an article for The Independent stating that after significant rainfall, the bund had held the waters away from Pickering and saved the town from flooding, unlike York (a bare 40 miles (64 km) away).[16] This prompted a response from Jeremy Biggs (director of the Freshwater Habitats Trust) who claimed that the catchment for Pickering was the driest place in Yorkshire over the Christmas and New Year Period for 2015 and 2016.[21] However, one of the chairmen of the Slowing the Flow partnership cautioned that the defences would not be enough to prevent flooding on the scale that affected Pickering in 2007,[22] and that an additional 23,000,000 cubic feet (650,000 m3) of floodplain would be needed.[24][25] The beck begins at Fen Bog (just west of the A169 road) but quite low in the narrow valley where the North Yorkshire Moors railway runs.[47][48] The upper reaches of the beck (above Pickering) are part of an SSSI site[4] and additionally it flows through the North York Moors National Park.[50] The bedrock of the beck flows mainly over the sandstone and limestone calcareous rocks (of the southern hills of the North York Moors)[51] with loose accumulations of clay, silt, gravel and sand.[53] The beck has wild trout and Grayling and whilst it is maintained and cared for by the Pickering Fisheries Association, there is no supplementary stocking of fish.[55] Newtondale has many access points,[6] Newton Dale Halt railway station and Fen Bog[56] being notable examples in the very upper reaches of the beck.