If the early works here share a fault, it is one they share with most non-electronic composition of the time: over-abstraction.

In Australia, over-abstraction of fresh water for intensive irrigation activities has caused 33% of the land area to be at risk of salination.

But besides the danger of over-abstraction which she so triumphantly avoids, there are endless difficulties in the path of the ghost-story writer.

The Pang, Ver and Misbourne rivers, already suffering from over-abstraction, are badly affected.

But in the late 1960s, the Anglian Water Authority took control of the river, and thereafter it became rapidly degraded, due mostly to over-abstraction of water for use in farming.

Other speakers at the conference pointed out that over-abstraction from rivers leads to a falling rate of flow which critically affects the rivers' ecology, and they warned the situation may deteriorate as water continues to increase in the 1990s.

According to the society, water voles, otters, redshank, snipe and lapwing and wetland plants such as marsh orchid and bog pimpernel had declined as a result of over-abstraction and drainage over many years.

A combination of drought, over-abstraction and pollution are threatening the wildlife which depends on Britain's rivers, according to the launch report of a new organization, Water for Wildlife, headed by conservationist Sir David Attenborough.

The group pointed to particular examples of "sick rivers" such as the Kennet in Wiltshire, whose source, once a spring, is now a sewage pond, and which has been particularly badly affected by over-abstraction, with the river running dry in some places.