[8] Overall, European water voles are a uniform dark brown colour, with slightly paler coloration on the underside.

[1] In Britain, water voles live in burrows excavated within the banks of rivers, ditches, ponds, and streams.

[11] Water voles may be displaced by the introduction of riparian woodland and scrub as they prefer more open wetland habitats away from tree cover.

In the Massif Central area of France, however, farmers are campaigning for action to be taken against water voles, where plagues of these rodents are causing major damage to crops.

As a large and common microtine rodent, the range of predators faced by the European water vole is extensive.

However, many species of predator prefer other rodents, such as Microtus voles and wood mice, due to their greater numerical abundance.

Reportedly small Mustela weasels as well as European and introduced American mink may take the largest number of water voles of any predator due in part to aligning habitat preferences.

[7][16] The rarely checked invasive population of American mink has reportedly caused a decline of water voles in Britain.

[20] In September 2019, the Box Moor Trust re-introduced 177 water voles in to the River Bulbourne in Hemel Hempstead as part of a three-year plan.

[21] A water vole named "Ratty" is a leading character in the 1908 children's book The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame: the locality used in the book is believed to be Moor Copse in Berkshire, England, and the character's name "Ratty" has become widely associated with the species and their riverbank habitat, as well as the misconception that they are a species of rat.

[citation needed] In the comic novel and film Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, one of the characters, Urk, refers to the subject of his unrequited love, Elfine Starkadder, as his little water vole.

[citation needed] C. S. Calverley, a 19th-century writer of (among other things) light verse, in his poem "Shelter", beginning: By the wide lake's margin I mark'd her lie— The wide, weird lake where the alders sigh— Tells of an apparently shy, easily frightened young female by a lakeside, who in the last line of the poem, it is revealed that: For she was a water-rat.The Rolling Stones song "Live with Me" includes the line "My best friend he shoots water rats and feeds them to his geese", referring to Keith Richards's habit of shooting water voles in the moat of his Redlands, West Wittering home.