Speyside’s Floodwater Plan Depends on Land and Hydro

SSE is preparing to put water back into a Spey tributary dry since 1938, after Speyside stills spent summer 2025 under scarcity bans. The public fix is a set of leaky wooden dams on the hills above Glenlivet. The volume that actually moves still sits with landowners, farmers, SEPA licences and a hydro dam built for aluminium.

Josie Geris, a reader in hydrology at the University of Aberdeen, and Megan Klaar have argued that winter floodwater can be held in soil and groundwater for the next dry summer. The measured lift at the trial site is real, and it is small. Who hosts the work, who already takes the river, and who pays for decades of upkeep decide whether that rain is still in the hills when the stills need it.

Speyside’s Stills Stopped When the Spey Ran Out

Speyside holds about half of Scotland’s malt whisky distilleries. In 2025, the UK’s warmest and sunniest year on record, the Lower Spey recorded its earliest low-flow countdown in 70 years of data. SEPA, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, moved the catchment to Significant Scarcity, its top alert, and restricted licensed taking of water from the river.

At its peak that year SEPA put limits on around 270 licences, hitting distillers and irrigators together. Eight catchments sat at the top tier. The Lower Spey notices were lifted at the end of October 2025. May 2025 brought 27 low-flow days on that stretch, against two such days in 1960 and three each in 2017 and 2018.

Glenfarclas, on Speyside, cut production in half from the end of April 2025. Callum Fraser, the distillery manager, said it was the driest spell in his 13 years in the job, and that water trouble usually arrives at the end of May into June. The plant had already stopped from mid-June through mid-October 2018 for lack of water. SEPA said a number of Speyside operators shut earlier than planned. Temporary closures cost the industry millions of pounds. No public audit has put a single total on that bill.

THE 2025 SPEY SQUEEZE

1. End of April 2025: Glenfarclas halves production as hill water runs short earlier than the usual late-May squeeze.
2. July 2025: SEPA says several Speyside operators have shut sooner than planned, with the Spey then at Moderate Scarcity.
3. 1 September 2025: Lower Spey and Berwickshire move to Significant Scarcity, taking the national total at that level to eight.
4. End of October 2025: Lower Spey abstraction limits are lifted after months of critically low flows.
5. 15 December 2025: SEPA warns that the east has just had its driest hydrological year since 1976 and that average winter rain would not rebuild stocks for 2026.

David Harley, then SEPA’s head of water and planning, said 2025 had seen the earliest onset of scarcity in decades, and that rivers like the Spey had spent more days at low flow than ever before. Distilleries already living with a Scotch glut putting distilleries up for sale now had a second reason to sit idle: the river itself.

What the Glenlivet Trial Measured

The Glenlivet, owned by Chivas Brothers, takes process water from springs on the hills above the stills. Ronald Daalmans, sustainability director at Chivas, has put numbers on that supply.

Most of our process water comes from the springs above us on the hills. On average, these produce about a million and a half litres a day. But in drier spells, that could reduce to 900,000 litres a day so we’ve been looking at our landscape to see if we can do something so the distillery can keep operating for longer in drier spells.

Ronald Daalmans, sustainability director, Chivas Brothers

After the 2018 drought, groundwater feeding the distillery fell and did not refill until the following spring. Researchers from the University of Aberdeen and the James Hutton Institute, funded by NERC and Chivas, surveyed the ground and put in small dams in the landscape supplying Glenlivet. Forty runoff attenuation features, leaky barriers that hold water for a time and let it soak away, went in during 2020.

SEFARI’s write-up of the living laboratory on the Livet headwater, by Dr Mark Wilkinson of the James Hutton Institute and Dr Geris, says those features boosted groundwater’s share of streamflow by about 4 percent, raised low flows by about 1 percent, and cut high flows by about 5 percent. The effect varies with how wet the ground already is and with changes in the soil. Jessica Fennell, the PhD student who led the first build, called it a small but positive impact that could help keep the distillery open in a dry spell. The Glenlivet later bottled a Fennell Reserve in her name.

HOW THE WATER MOVES

A cost-benefit pass by Fennell and colleagues found the leaky dams improved low flows and paid their way. Tree planting did not, because extra evapotranspiration reduced the very low flows the stills need. Chivas has since paid for a wider Speyside study covering Glenlivet, Glenburgie and Aberlour, looking at soil and plants as well as timber in the burns. Geris has said the same methods could help the around 3 percent of people in Scotland who rely on private water supplies.

The Glenlivet Estate Has to Host the Work

The dams do not sit on distillery concrete. They sit on Glenlivet Estate, an upland holding run by Crown Estate Scotland, where whisky is one use among many. On 20 November 2025 the estate published a long-term vision for Glenlivet Estate and a five-year action plan, after two years of asking people who live and work there what should change by 2050.

Crown Estate Scotland describes the place as home to farming and forestry, shooting, fishing, mountain biking, skiing and whisky distilling. The 2050 text talks about viable tenant farms, more housing, tourism that does not crowd out the rest, and cuts in carbon. It does not read as a single-purpose water store for Chivas.

WHO ALREADY USES THE SAME HILLS

• Tenant farms: The estate’s own plan puts viable tenant farming at the centre of the next 30 years, so any wet scrape, fence or planted gully has to work as a farm as well as a sponge.
• Sport and access: Shooting, fishing, biking and skiing sit on the same ground the hydrologists want slower and wetter.
• The distillery: Glenlivet is listed by the James Hutton Institute at 21 million litres of pure alcohol a year, the largest capacity in the upper Spey, which holds 29 active distilleries.
• The burns themselves: Groundwater kept the Livet flowing in 2018, then took a full wet year to refill, which is why the trial aimed at recharge rather than a new reservoir.

Geris and Klaar say these schemes only scale if they stack benefits, water, wildlife, carbon, soil, and if money lasts long enough for peat and soil to recover. Short pilot grants build 40 dams. They do not keep a ranger, a fence and a monitoring kit running for 20 years. The estate, not the stillhouse, is the party that has to live with that kit in the burn.

Spey Dam Still Takes Most of the River

Leaky dams slow a headwater. They do not decide where the Spey itself goes. An Envirocentre report for the Spey Fishery Board found Spey Dam accounts for about 66 percent of total licensed water taken from the river. That water leaves the catchment to drive hydro power used at the Fort William aluminium smelter. Charlie Whelan, a board member, has said the dam also blocks endangered Atlantic salmon, and that the “Release the Spey” campaign wants the Scottish government to take it out.

In summer 2025, SEPA’s scarcity notices fell on distillers and farmers on the lower river. The dam at the top of the system is a separate, older take. The Scotch Whisky Association’s water target is 12.5 to 25 litres of water per litre of alcohol by 2025 for process use, a range that already varies by site. Cooling water is a different, larger demand, which is why a spring that drops from 1.5 million litres a day to 900,000 can stop a mash even when the stillhouse is trying to be careful.

A 1 percent lift in low flow at Glenlivet is a measured gain on one estate. It is not a reply to a dam that, on the fishery board’s figures, holds most of the licensed take. That is the part of the Spey story the dam photographs do not carry.

Farmers Share the Scarcity Notices

When SEPA moves a catchment to Significant Scarcity, the same letters go to farms that irrigate and to distilleries that mash and cool. In 2025 those letters went out together on the Lower Spey and in Berwickshire. In July 2026, when the Lower Tweed, Lower Don and Lunan Water hit the 30-day Q95 test, the extra 35 licences SEPA restricted were mainly agricultural.

Q95 is the flow that, on a long record, sits in the lowest 5 percent of days, on average about 18 days a year. Thirty days below that line can trigger a ban on taking water from the river, to protect fish and the channel. Farmers cannot bank a leaky dam on someone else’s hill. They need either stored water of their own or a winter that actually refills the soil.

The Spey Catchment Initiative’s restoration options on a 15 km reach between Spey Dam and the Truim already score a loss of farmland against flood storage and recharge. That trade sits on the same table as whisky. A stacked-benefit scheme that ignores the field next to the burn will not get the gate opened.

Eastern Scotland’s Rivers Ran Low Again

The winter rain that Geris and Klaar wanted the hills to hold did not reset the east. On 24 September 2026 SEPA reported seven eastern catchments at Significant Scarcity. The Spey itself sat at Early Warning, not at the top tier, with the Tay, Cree, Findhorn and Earn.

SEPA MAP ON 24 SEPTEMBER 2026

• Significant Scarcity: Stonehaven, North Esk, Fife (East Neuk), North Fife, Tay Estuary (North), Whiteadder Water, Berwickshire coastal.
• Days below the line: 46 consecutive days in North Fife and East Neuk; 45 days of very low flows at Stonehaven and North Esk.
• Rest of the scale: five areas at Moderate Scarcity, five at Alert, five at Early Warning including the Spey, 32 at Normal Conditions.
• Ground: groundwater low to very low across much of the east; lochs generally normal or above; west mostly normal to high flows.

Eilidh Johnston, SEPA’s senior leader in compliance, said some eastern catchments had seen very low flows for around six weeks, and that full recovery of soils and groundwater takes longer than a burst of rain. SEPA also notes that flood and scarcity can sit in the same week: a short storm can fill a road while a river that has been below Q95 for a month still needs a ban. The Glenlivet dams were built for that split. They have not been shown, at 40 structures, to move the Spey as a whole.

Water Returns to a Dry Bed Near Dalwhinnie

The larger water story on the Spey in autumn 2026 is not another leaky log. It is a tributary. On 1 October 2026 the Spey Catchment Initiative set out the River Cuaich Restoration Project, returning flow to a channel that has been a bed of stone since 1938, when the Tummel hydro scheme sent the water into the Tay. About 4.5 km of channel has sat dry. About 2.5 km of salmon spawning ground is due to reopen once the water comes back, planned for 2027.

SSE is funding and doing the engineering. The Cairngorms National Park Authority and the Scotch Whisky Association are funding the Initiative to design and help deliver it, with support from Phoines Estate. Roger Knight of the Initiative said the entire flow of that upper Spey tributary has been diverted out of the catchment to make electricity, and that putting it back should boost supplies in the lower Spey and help distillers avoid the scarcity they have already faced. In winter 2026 SSE’s operations team is due to start moving gravel trapped behind the intakes back into the channel, the material a living riverbed needs.

That is hydro giving water back, on a scale no cluster of leaky dams has yet matched. The stills will still need the hills above Glenlivet to soak, and the estate and the farms to agree to keep them wet. The Spey will still have a dam that, on the fishery board’s figures, takes most of the licensed water. Winter rain can be banked. Someone has to own the bank, and someone else already owns the tap.