The reservoir has been low for three summers. Nobody agrees whose problem it is.
Ridgeline Water says the drawdown is within licence. The parish council says the licence was written for a different climate. Between them sit four hundred households on a hosepipe ban.
There is a line of pale stone around the northern arm of the reservoir that everyone in the valley can now point to. It marks where the water used to be in August, and it has not been under water since 2023.
What has changed, and who is supposed to do something about it, depends entirely on which of the two meetings you attended last month. Both were held in the same hall, eleven days apart, and they described what appears to be two different reservoirs.
The licence
Ridgeline Water abstracts under a licence granted in 1994 and last varied in 2008. It permits a maximum daily take and sets a floor level below which abstraction must stop. The company's position is straightforward: it has never breached either.
"We are operating inside the licence we were given. If the licence is wrong for the conditions, that is a question for the regulator, not for us."
The parish council does not dispute the first sentence. It disputes whether the second one is a reasonable place to stop. The licence floor was set using inflow data from 1971 to 1993 — a period that, on the company's own published figures, was wetter than any three-year window since.
What the farmers say
Four holdings draw from the brook below the dam. All four have had their own abstraction cut in each of the last three summers, and all four point out that their cuts happened automatically while the reservoir's did not.
"We get told in May what we can take, and it has gone down every year," said one, who asked not to be named because of an ongoing application. "Nobody has told them anything."
What happens next
The regulator has confirmed it will begin a licence review in the autumn. It has also confirmed that a review typically takes eighteen months and that no interim restriction is planned. That puts any change, at the earliest, after two more summers.
The parish council has asked for a meeting with all three parties in the same room. At the time of writing, the water company has not replied.