This data is the analysis of the river water of the paper: Wilson et al. (20 "Compartmentalisation and groundwater–surface water interactions in a prospective shale gas basin: Assessment using variance analysis and multivariate statistics on water quality data" Hydrological Processes 34:3271–3294 (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hyp.13795) The data is from two sampling campaigns sampling the rivers of the Wyre and Ribble catchments in north west England. The river water samples were collected to test whether groundwater compartmentalisation observed in the underlying aquifers impacted the surface water quality. The compartmentalisation of the aquifer is important because this has been shown to control the vulnerability of water resources to pollution from facking fluids injected at depths of 1000's m.