The Tay at Kenmore

Nobody tests this water

This is a river gauge, not a bathing water. No one samples it for E. coli or intestinal enterococci, no one issues a pollution forecast for it, and there is no annual classification. The level above says how much water is coming down — nothing at all about what is in it.

Rivers downstream of a storm overflow can carry sewage after heavy rain, and most rivers in these islands have one somewhere upstream. If you want water somebody actually tests, the nearest bathing water is below.

Where it is

That is the gauge, which is a piece of flood monitoring equipment rather than a place to get in. It tells you about this stretch of river, not about a spot on the bank.

Along the same river

Other gauged stretches of the Tay, nearest first.

Nearby on this site

Where this reading comes from

SEPA, from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s own hydrology service under the Open Government Licence, updated every fifteen minutes. The range shown is built from SEPA’s long-term figures for THIS CALENDAR MONTH rather than for the year, so it moves with the seasons: the bottom of it is the lowest level ever recorded here this month. Levels are measured against a datum set for this gauge, so a reading here cannot be compared with a reading at another gauge — only with this one’s own range.

River levels on this site come from four regulators: the Environment Agency in England, SEPA in Scotland, Natural Resources Wales, and waterlevel.ie in the Republic. They do not publish the same kind of range as each other — and NRW publish none at all, so Welsh pages use a range worked out here instead. Each page says which it is using.