River Catchments
Avoca Catchent
Dargle Catchment
Vartry Catchment
North Wicklow Coastal Streams
South Wicklow Coastal Streams
East Wicklow
catchments overview
The East Wicklow Rivers Trust takes in the rivers, streams and lakes which drain into the Irish Sea within County Wicklow.
Click on each catchment to learn more about East Wicklow’s rivers:
Rivers draining a catchment are influenced by the events and processes, natural or otherwise, that occur in the catchment.
Floods, droughts, fires and landslides are abrupt ‘natural’ events that dramatically affect rivers, but slower-acting processes such as climate change can have more severe effects that are less immediately perceptible to human observers because of the longer time scale involved. When human activities such as agriculture, forest clearance, afforestation, settlement and mining take place, changes to rivers and lakes are amplified and accelerated.
Ecologists speak of ‘pristine rivers’; however, if they mean rivers unaffected by human activity, then none probably remain in Ireland. Even the small number (20) currently classified by the EPA as such are likely in some way affected by human activity.