I CAN’T EXPLAIN why, but I have this tradition that I have to catch a fish on the opening day of the season. To just go fishing is not enough; a fish must be caught, and only a trout will do. Yesterday, the first of April was that day, and by the end of it I can truly say that never before had I held a fish in my hand and thought, ‘Goodness, that feels warm.’
It would be a pleasure to report that the opening day at Gavelwood was one of those rare bright sunny early April days, with just a light breeze and a scatter of clouds. The sort of day where you can shed your outer clothing and enjoy the spring sun warming your back, whilst a regular hatch of insects brings the river alive for a few hours either side of noon. Heaven. Sadly not. It was a wicked day, with a cold north wind whipping down the valley registering a chill factor of −4C. It was a ridiculous notion to go fishing at all. That old adage ‘When the wind is from the north only the foolish angler sallies forth’ rang in my ears as I pulled on thermals and so many layers that it was like casting while wearing a plaster cast.
Naturally the opening day’s fish has to be on a dry fly. To the non-fisher this might seem a ridiculous notion – what does it matter on what you catch the fish, just so long as you catch? But matter it does. Once you have a notion in your head, however illogical, doing anything else seems as pointless as cheating at patience. So I dutifully tied on a Large Dark Olive; there were no olives around to imitate, but for that time of year it is the most likely insect you will see fish feeding on.
I could pretend that I waited for a fish to rise, cast the fly that landed like thistledown, drifted serenely on the surface and bang, there was my first trout of the year, but that was not to be. I could say I logically cast left, right and middle in turn, covering every inch of water, but the weather put paid to that as I slogged away into the teeth of the wind up the main river. After half a mile I blamed the fly and changed to a Parachute Adams, one of my ‘go to’ dry flies that rarely fails, that looks like all sorts of flies fish like to eat. Not that I didn’t see plenty of fish as I waded up, but they were all ones that fled as I spooked them from the cover of the river weed. Things were getting desperate as I reached the top of the river, with my score sheet still blank.
In the lee of the Drowners House I considered my options as the prospect of being skunked, going home fishless, looked a likely but shameful outcome. I was really too cold to be past caring – the water and wind soon suck the heat out of your body – but pride is a wicked taskmaster. I am sure there have been opening days in the past where the fish have won out, though today, unaccountably (maybe it was the cold?), I could not recall any. So as a little feeling came back into my hands and legs I decided to give it one last shot on the North Stream.
The current in the North Stream is appreciably slower than the main river at this time of year, so with less depth and turbulence the fish are easier to spot, and sure enough there were a few good-size ones sitting just off the tail of the shallow gravel runs. I fished at each one I saw in turn, but none showed a flicker of interest in the fly bobbing on the surface, way above their heads. So on the principle of if the mountain will not come to Mohammed, it was time to abandon my purist principles and fish a nymph that would sink down to where the fish were feeding close to the riverbed. With my first cast, before the Pheasant Tail Nymph even had a chance to sink very deep, a tiny fish grabbed for it. Mercifully in my frozen state I failed to react, and he vanished before I could hook him. A few yards further up I spied a much bigger fish, definitely worthy of being the first of the year. Still lithe from a sparse winter, with not an ounce of extra fat, his red spots glowed against his pale silver-brown skin as he let the current gently sway his body with the flow. He was definitely ready to feed, so I started to work on him, drifting the nymph close to his lie.
A few times he finned across to take a look at my offering, almost poking at it with his nose, but his mouth he kept resolutely closed. After a few passes I was about to give up, but as a last resort I tried a trick as old as fly-fishing itself – the induced take. That is to say, as the nymph enters the trout’s field of vision you move it in the water to imitate the prey fleeing from danger. It makes no sense really; after all the trout had already ignored the same fly half a dozen times. But work it does. Maybe the sudden movement fires up some latent aggression or perhaps it trumps the natural caution of the trout to weigh up all the options, but whatever the reason the fish turned back to chase the fly. He grabbed it with such force I barely needed to strike, and from that moment my opening day duck was broken. A minute later as I clutched him in my frozen fingers to remove the hook he felt warm to the touch, a positive hand warmer. As he swam off I’m sure he was as glad to be away from my cold embrace as I was to be heading home.
Around this time of year it is the nesting birds of Gavelwood that are the most active of all the residents on the river itself. The largest are the swans; we just have a single pair that has been here for years. Next in line are the geese, but really they are more occasional visitors, coming then going but always at war with the swans. Mallards are the resident ducks, and at the bottom of the pile, constantly beleaguered and put upon by all the others, are the moorhens.
Try as I might I can’t feel any great affection for the swans, even though they are a fixture and know me every bit as well as I know them. It is ridiculous to say it out loud (they are after all just birds), but they don’t seem to have any humanity. During the nesting season they bristle with aggression and for the rest of the year they are simply defiant, pushing up and down the river defending their patch. I should be grateful of course; without the nesting pair our river would become a refuge for dozens and dozens of displaced adolescent swans for the entire summer as they fight, defecate and generally create mayhem before flying off to find a mate.
It is often said that swans mate for life. I don’t know if it is absolutely true in every case, but it does seem that way with the pairs I see. Of the creatures at Gavelwood it makes them pretty well unique; fish have no such loyalty. The female mayfly will struggle to stay aloft gripped by two males, and as for the mallards, well it is on the wrong side of necessary, with as many as six drakes mounting one hen in rapid succession. I am not sure the hen always survives, such is the violence of the pursuit and consummation, but the result is huge clutches of eggs, anywhere up to fourteen.
It is tempting to think that the mallard lays so many eggs on the basis that only a few will hatch, and sure enough during April, May and June the riverbank will be strewn with the empty blue shells, stolen and licked clean by stoats. But assuming the eggs don’t get eaten it is very possible for every one to hatch, and I regularly see the mother leading a brood of a dozen or more day-old chicks up and down the river, who are able to swim from the moment of their birth. However, it is at this point the real attrition sets in.
I can almost tick the brood size down a chick and a day at a time. Twelve on day one, eleven on day two and so on, until after about a week it will stabilize at around three or four once the predators have taken their toll. The chicks are assailed from above and below. From high above the barn owl will swoop down if the brood crosses open ground. A heron hidden in the reeds will pluck one from the gaggle swimming by, and the pike is never averse to grabbing one from below. Occasionally the mother will sense the danger and flip into a sacrificial defence strategy I only see in ducks. She’ll abandon the chicks, swimming away across the river surface clumsily beating her wings against the water, creating as much commotion as she can. It seems to me she is pretending to be injured, saying to the predator, ‘Take me, I’m easy pickings’, and all the while drawing attention away from the chicks.
The mother always tries her best to protect the chicks, herding them into a tight group amongst the reeds if danger threatens, but it is pretty clear a big brood will rarely stay big. As much as anything else there is always the chick that gets separated. In the world of the mallard 10 yards is as good as 10 miles as the plaintive squeaks of the lost chick are ignored by the mother who concentrates on the needs of the many rather than the few. Sometimes the little chick will get his bearings and summon enough strength to make it back to the brood, the relief in his little body palpable as he swims into the safety of his siblings. But more often than not he will pointlessly swim hither and thither, racked with panic, checking out first the reeds then the open water. But it will be a fruitless search for his brothers and sisters that gradually depletes his strength. Without the warmth and guidance of his mother he will be dead the following morning. The swans on the other hand have no such survival problems; if they have five cygnets it is a fair bet that all five will make it through the end of the summer.
Swans are not only loyal but they are birds of habit, returning to the same nest year after year, which at Gavelwood is in a thick section of reeds just below Pike Corner. Most months of the year you would walk past it and not give it much thought: a large mound of desiccated reeds with a slight indentation in the middle. But come April you’ll know it is there before you see it, as the swans will hiss with aggressive intent at your approach.
Being the good partners that they are, swans build the nest together. The cob, the male, tears up reeds that he passes to the pen, who layers them in a circle. Over the years it gets taller and taller as they add to the nest, the annual gradations discernible by the darkening of the reeds like the rings of a tree. Swans choose their material well; this is the same reed that was used by man for thatch in ancient times. Our pair starts the rebuild in March, which is ahead of other swans across the country. They can do this because living as they do at water level on a chalkstream they are protected from the worst of the cold, as the relative heat of the water creates a warm greenhouse layer from which they rarely stray.
By the time I venture out to break my fishing hoodoo there is a good chance that the pen will have laid her eggs. Swan eggs are big. One will make you the equivalent of a six-egg hen omelette and the Gavelwood pair lay four or five eggs in the nest most years. I am pretty sure swans are meant to share the nest-sitting duties, but it rarely seems that way, as the cob will camp out either on the bank or on the river within eyeshot of the nest. I’d like to say there was an easy way to distinguish the sexes, but there is not; they are in plumage identical. From a distance I am hard pushed to tell one from another, but when they are side by side it is easy to see that the female is slighter than the male. Her body tapers like a sailing yacht, whereas the male is more of a tugboat, and the pen neck is much thinner and more delicate. But it is in their demeanour that you can really tell the difference.
One way or another I get to walk past them two or three times a day when they are on the nest, so by now you would think I was part of the landscape, worthy of being ignored. No chance. If he is on the river the moment the cob sees me he stops what he is doing, eyes me up, and if I continue in the direction of the nest, he pushes hard against the current to reach the nest first, where he proceeds to hiss at me even though we are separated by 10 yards of water, reed and bank. If I stop level with the nest the pen remains completely calm, not moving a muscle or uttering a sound, but for the cob this is a goad too far. He’ll stretch up in the water, raising his neck and head directly towards the sky to his full height, open his wings and flap them four or five times as hard as he can, then settle back to stare me out. If I head on along the bank he will keep parallel with me in the river until he feels we are a sufficient distance from the nest, at which point he will turn back and with a flourish shake his tail feathers in what I can only assume is the swan version of the V sign to send me on my way.
The eggs take about six weeks to hatch, so this standoff between the cob and me is a common tableau for all of April right through to the start of the mayfly hatch in mid-May, at which point the nest is abandoned. Sometimes a duck will adopt the nest for a late clutch of eggs, but the swans seem indifferent to this short-term tenant once they have taken to the water with the cygnets. The family group will spend the summer on the river, voraciously feeding on the weed that grows in the river, which is their staple diet. Sometimes they can be annoying parking themselves over a particularly good fishing spot or stripping shallow sections of the weed that would otherwise provide food and cover for the fish. But for the most part they keep their distance and the cob gets less aggressive as the cygnets grow up. By September the young have lost their downy grey plumage and instead have brown/white feathers. It is a tight family group that keeps no more than a few yards apart, the seven of them spending the days grazing together in the river or sometimes assembling on the bank to roost overnight. But the turning of the season, from summer to autumn, marks the end of the compact swan family unity as the father turns on the children.
I don’t often have compassion for the juvenile swans, but now it is hard not to as the cob decides it is time for them to leave the family river. For a while they have been learning to fly, practising the take-off up and down the river creating mayhem for the fishermen as they beat the surface with their feet and thrash the water with their wings. Occasionally one of the five will succeed and do a triumphant circle over the meadows, landing back on the water as the king of the river. It is this moment that seems to trigger in the cob a realization that they must go, so he starts corralling the five together, driving them to the far reaches of Gavelwood.
This would be fine except that the cob on the next stretch simply drives them back again. Caught in this pincer movement a couple of the juveniles twig that the game is up, take to the wing and fly off, but for the remainder it is now a relentless persecution that will last the weeks until they leave. The cob is as vicious to his children as he is, or would like to be, to me, swimming at them, flying at them, beating his wings, even mounting and biting them. I’d like to think that the young swans stay because of some misguided parental bond, but equally they may not have mastered flying. This sad discord goes on all day, every day. It’s sad because every time the cob drives them away the juveniles drift back to ingratiate themselves, only to be driven off again when they get unacceptably close. Bizarrely the pen seems to be completely indifferent to the whole process, never intervening to help or hinder, watching from a distance until she and the cob are once again the only pair at Gavelwood.
But all this is for the future; for now my obsession is with the amount of water flowing through the river and the amount of weed growing in it. On most rivers the two are accepted facts. Whatever hand nature has dealt you has to be accepted with equanimity. But on chalkstreams you have the chance to play the cards you are dealt to your advantage by managing the flows and nurturing the weed. Yes, at Gavelwood we care for the river weed every bit as much as an obsessive gardener does his lawn, and use the old water-meadow channels to redirect the flows to our advantage.
A bridge is the best place to truly appreciate how very different a chalkstream is to any other river. If you are seeing one for the first time three things will burn in your memory: the gin-clear water, the bright gravel riverbed and the lustrous beds of livid green weed that gently sway from side to side in the current. Pause for a while and your eyes will grow accustomed to the dappling movement of the surface, allowing you to pick out the brown trout that hold steady in the current. Most days you will be distracted by small clouds of insects that dance over the water. Occasionally one will break away from the group and dip down onto the surface, content to drift downstream with the current like a tiny sailboat. The trout you thought was doing nothing will suddenly twitch, swim up to just beneath the glassy surface, open his mouth and suck down the fly, leaving nothing more than a dimple of rings that fade away as he returns to his original spot. This is chalkstream heaven and everything we do is for these moments of perfection.
That weed that fills so much of the riverscape might sound unimportant, more nuisance than asset, but whichever way you cut it a chalkstream would not be a chalkstream without it. Maybe we river folk should find a better word than weed, so as to remove the invasive and insidious implications. In my finer moments I try to keep in mind A. A. Milne, who said, ‘Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them’, because get to know them I certainly do. From April to October I’ll trim, cosset and nurture the weed as I wade upriver with a hand scythe, cutting it to create that picture of perfection. All that said, not all weed is good weed; some I love, some I hate, and through the year it will be a constant battle to encourage the former and eliminate the latter.
Weed is good for a whole raft of reasons: cover for the fish, a home for the nymphs, food for all sorts of creatures, and just by its sheer bulk in the river the presence that manages and redirects the flow. Like its neighbours on the banks, river weed has plenty of fantastical names: water crowfoot, water dropwort, fool’s watercress, water parsnip and mare’s tail are just five of the many more than twenty weeds that grow in the river. Inevitably there is a pecking order, and the king of the river weeds is the water crowfoot Ranunculus.
The combination of the rather odd name and the Latin equivalent doesn’t help anyone unfamiliar with a chalkstream have an idea what this weed looks like, but think of it as a thick clump of buttercups and you are going in the right direction. It really is just the water equivalent of the same yellow flowers that grow in the meadows, sharing the same Latin prefix as Ranunculus acris. The immediate difference in appearance is that the flowers are white instead of yellow and that the fronds grow much, much longer. A meadow buttercup will measure at most 18 inches from root to tip but the river equivalent will stretch out as long as 10 feet in the current.
Just looking at water crowfoot doesn’t do justice to its importance; run your finger through the fronds and a whole new world opens up. The first thing you will be struck by is that the fronds are sticky to the touch. Maybe it feels a little unpleasant, and that’s because you are touching microscopic algae. Before you recoil in horror, this algae is the essential food for the tiny nymphs who crawl all over the weed. Open your hand and sure enough there they will be, from nymphs so tiny you will have to squint to make them out to others you will actually feel as they squirm on your palm. And it won’t just be nymphs you sieve out; snails and shrimps will be equally populous, all of which use the same weed for food and shelter. Very occasionally a tiny, translucent crayfish will rear up to angrily shake his pincers at you.
Nearly the entire length of the crowfoot is actually floating in the river, secured by a root ball in the gravel at its head. Gently move the long fronds to one side and you’ll discover another world that lives in the slack water beneath. There darting around will be a host of tiny fish, nymphs, shrimps and even crayfish who are graduating from the life in the weed itself. This is their little universe, a layer of water maybe 6 inches deep sandwiched between the weed and the riverbed, out of the fast flow that would otherwise sweep them away. Here they can feed on the detritus that gathers around the base or any food that gets washed in. If predators appear it is a short dash to the safety of the weed above. All in all it is no bad place to grow up in.
Water crowfoot thrives because this is a river that gives it what it needs, with fast-flowing, well-oxygenated water. Add to that all the minerals a chalkstream carries and the fact that the sunlight penetrates through the clear water and you have the perfect aquarium. My job as the river keeper, brandishing my scythe and tweaking the sluices, is to maximize all those things to make the crowfoot grow. The more the weed grows (up to a point; more about that in a moment) the greater the amount of habitat for all the creatures to thrive in. In its own way each floating tussock of weed is like the human lung: just a few feet square around the outside, but when the total surface area of the inside is calculated with the thousands of little finger-like alveoli it covers the surface area of a tennis court.
Weed-cutting in some form or another is as old as man’s use of the chalkstreams first for power, then irrigation and now fishing. Put simply, the rivers are too healthy for the weed, which if left unchecked will grow and grow until it clogs the watercourse. At this point it deprives itself of the one thing it needs – fast-flowing, well-oxygenated water – so it dies back. The winter floods will clear the dead or dying fronds away and the whole process will resume the following spring. However, if you are a miller who needs to turn his waterwheel in the height of summer, waiting till next year is not an option, so the practice of weed-cutting to keep the main channel open began. It would have been a fairly crude affair, using what we call today a chain scythe, a series of scythe blades bolted together in a row, with a length of chain attached to either end for weight plus a length of rope. One man would stand on one bank, one man on the other, and between them drag the submerged blades slowly upstream, moving the entire thing back and forth between them with a slow sawing motion. Slicing through everything in its path, it was, and is, a crude but effective way of cutting the weed, but no good for delicate trimming or easy discrimination between good and bad weed. However it’s a method still used today when the need demands it. On a few sections of Gavelwood, where it is too deep to wade with the hand scythe, it is sometimes the only option.
The advent of the water meadows brought a new level of sophistication to weed-cutting as the drowners took charge. No longer was it crude channel-opening. Now the drowners deployed their acquired skill for water control into the way the weed was cut, to redirect, speed up or slow down the flows. But for all their skills, by the late 1800s it became something of a dogfight as three groups, millers, farmers and anglers, all relied on the chalkstreams for different things. The Victorian newspapers, magazines and books of the time are littered with disputes, sometimes ending up in court. Millers complain that farmers are stealing the water needed to drive the grinding wheels. Farmers complain that the millers are impounding the flows to deprive them of irrigation for the meadows. And the anglers? Well, they rail against both, for either the sudden changes in the water flow or rafts of cut weed creating havoc with their sport. But today the needs of the millers and farmers are mostly a long-distant memory, and we do the weed-cutting for the river and the fish.
Weed-cutting is both a therapeutic and a back-breaking job; viewed from that bridge the sight of the pair of us in waders, abreast of each other, slowly making our way upstream with the silent swish of the scythe through the water, slicing the weed as easily as a hot knife through butter, is as pretty and bucolic as you please. I always look forward to the first hour of the day, the chance to slip into the cool water, look upstream and plot our cutting route. Unhampered by the need to catch fish, with the rhythmic motion of the scythe forcing a slow pace, you sort of melt into the river scenery. After a while the creatures just ignore you.
The water voles keep chewing on their reeds. The moorhens peer out from their nests but don’t dash away. The little insects buzz harmlessly around. If the sun is shining the darting nymphs and tiny fish will be everywhere to be seen, glistening in the clear water. Flies will hatch before your very eyes, popping from their nymphal shells, hesitating on the surface whilst their wings dry before flying for the first time. Trout get incredibly bold, so much so that you almost get to step on them before they swim away. Sometimes they bump against your legs, sending a little shiver up your spine. Even the swans will push by with hardly a glance. It is as if having come down to their level you have become one of the creatures; an odd one certainly, but not a dangerous one.
Make no mistake, this is hard work. After an hour the shoulders start to ache. After two hours the arms are tired. The breaks to sharpen the scythe blade grow more frequent as the weariness increases and I will take my time using the stone to hone the cutting edge. But it is easier for us than it was. The old river keepers had to swing a heavy, wooden-handled scythe with a cast-iron blade which was the very implement used to harvest corn before the advent of the combine harvester. Today the handle is light aluminium and the blade thin, tensile steel. But however light it may be, it feels heavier by the hour as the day progresses.
There is some logic to the cutting process; it is not random. There is a plan. Return to that same bridge and look for a pattern in the weed and you should see a chequerboard appear as the cut progresses: the black squares where we just trim the weed, leaving the bulk of it intact, the white squares where we cut it away entirely to leave bright areas of gravel. The idea is that the water will zigzag between the weed squares. Not every river creature likes it fast, not all like it slow. Some like the cover, some the shade. We are trying to build habitats for every creature in the river within every few square yards.
Sometimes we will break with the chequerboard pattern, leaving a bar of weed across the width of the river. This is our version of a living weir, a bank of weed that will hold up the flow to create depth. Other times we will leave a clump of weed untouched to float and grow on the surface. It looks untidy and unkempt but sometimes nature needs it that way. For the water crowfoot it has to break the surface to flower and seed, to propagate the next generation. Some insects appreciate the chance to climb out of the water to hatch or simply sun themselves. Or sometimes we have to take pity on a mallard or moorhen that has chosen a particularly thick raft of weed on which to make her nest, and leave well alone.
At Gavelwood we don’t cut the weed every month; in that respect it is a bit like your garden lawn, which grows a lot in the spring and summer, but not much in the winter. On the Evitt we all band together to pick out particular weeks that are set aside for cutting during the fishing season, with one week in each of April, June, July and August. It might sound a little regimented, but the cutting pretty well puts paid to fishing in those weeks, with the water disturbed and the floating detritus getting caught on the flies and lines. It is not quite so bad on the headwaters, where few upstream neighbours are sending down weed, but further downstream where there are 20 miles or more of river above, the rafts of weed are so huge that you might almost park a car on them. Mind you, the fish don’t care much; these times are an orgy of food, as all manner of shrimps, nymphs, snails and other goodies are dislodged.
Around mid-April there is definitely a moment when I know that spring is upon us. For a couple of weeks now the valley has been turning from grey-brown to green. The mornings are feeling warmer and the evenings are staying lighter later. The songbirds sing louder and longer. There is a definite intent to the way the voles and mice go about their daily business. The bigger fish are starting to show themselves that bit more, but it is the appearance of one particular insect, the grannom, which heralds the start of spring for me. It is, if you like, that moment when the players run out onto the pitch. Game on.
The grannom would never win a beauty contest; I hate to say this, because it does not do Brachycentrus subnubilus any favours in the popularity stakes, but it looks something like a cross between a moth and a cockroach. But trout don’t see the grannom that way, and for a few minutes for a few days in the middle of April they will go crazy to devour a hatch of these insects.
Grannom, as sedges or caddis – the latter is the same name, just in Latin – have no real reason to be around this early in the year. There are close to thirty different sedges we’ll see around Gavelwood, a small selection of the two hundred-plus species across the British Isles, but they all hatch in June, July or August – clearly the grannom just delights in being different, though as a riverine group, sedges tend to do things differently to other insects. The adults start off in the same way as most, mating and then laying the eggs in the surface that drift down to lodge on the riverbed. The eggs then hatch into larvae that look very similar to a maggot or a small, thin, pale, naked caterpillar. Unlike nymphs, which are good swimmers, larvae are easy pickings for everyone that feeds amongst the gravel, not least the salmon parr that eat them in great quantities between transmuting from fry around their first birthday and heading for sea as smolts. So to survive this onslaught sedge larvae have evolved a remarkable protection strategy that is matched only by our pugilist stickleback.
Essentially they build themselves little cases in which they live until the day that they mutate from larva to pupa, the final underwater stage in their life before they swim to the surface to hatch. In late summer you will see thousands of these abandoned white, bleached cases all over the riverbed or attached to the weed. They are small, maybe an inch to 2 inches long, a quarter of an inch in diameter, and are the shape of a narrow ice-cream cone. The larvae build the case by weaving a sort of silk pillowcase to which attaches little stones, pieces of wood and vegetation. The make-up of the case is determined by what is around at the time – our grannom larva is not that fussy – he just wants to crawl inside to be safe from predators.
Once inside he pokes his head out and feeds as he moves around, dragging the case around with his forelegs or relying on the current to shift him about. The larva feeds on whatever vegetation is at hand, until the time when he is ready to pupate, the stage when he transforms from a larva to being a fully fledged grannom. But first he has to free himself from the confines of the case, into which he is now effectively wedged. So he secretes a bit more of the silk material which he uses to glue the case to a stone or piece of weed, and once secure begin to eat away the case until free to swim to the surface. Now sporting four wings and half a dozen long antennae, the ascending sedge is very vulnerable in a body designed to fly, not swim. Once at the surface, things are not immediately any better. The sedge will have to scuttle across the water to dry its wings and get flying; it is this commotion and vulnerability that really drives trout wild for them.
It is a strange thing about the grannom hatch, but it is incredibly localized, which might explain why some people might go an entire fishing life without seeing one – you really have to be there. During most days of the season, if I compare notes with friends up and down the valley we’ll report much the same hatches on any given day. But with the grannom I can have a monster hatch at one end of the Gavelwood – it never lasts long, maybe half an hour at most – whilst someone just a few hundred yards upriver will not see a single one all day long. But when they appear they bring the river alive as the trout slash the surface at these big morsels of food. The truth is that sedges never get expert at flying, fluttering around and bouncing off the river surface like moths against a lampshade – it should be no surprise that the two are distantly related. Seeing the grannom, whether I am fishing or not, is definitely my spring moment. You can keep your cuckoos, gambolling lambs and Easter bunnies. For me it is most definitely the grannom that marks the start to the fishing season proper, and with it a routine that will keep me busy from now to October.
Fishing could happen every day of the week if we so chose; there are no Sunday prohibitions on fishing in England and Wales as there is in Scotland. However we do hold to what we call a ‘rest day’. Not everyone observes them; it is a throwback to gentler days when there were fewer pressures on the river, but we keep to it because, well, some traditions are worth keeping when they are at the same time both useful and pleasurable. For me at least the word ‘rest’ is something of a misnomer; the day would be better described as a non-fishing day, set aside for all those river jobs that are best done when the fishermen are not around. From an angling perspective the idea is that if you leave the fish to their own devices for almost forty-eight hours, i.e. the last cast on Sunday evening to the first on Tuesday morning, the fishing for the rest of the week will be that much better. Do I or anyone else have any empirical evidence to back up this claim? The answer is no. But even if my head tells me it might be arrant nonsense, in my heart it seems the right thing to do and I cannot believe there are not some benefits from it.
By the time the grannom has put in its fleeting appearance the weekly routine at Gavelwood has fallen into shape. It is really best to look upon the place as a giant garden where you have jobs that are routine, seasonal or annual. In my case routine would be something like mowing the banks, seasonal the weed-cutting, and annual a task like the restoration of North Stream. It is those routine jobs I try to get done on the rest Mondays.
I spend an inordinate amount of my time driving a mower or handling a brush cutter. The banks of Gavelwood end to end, which cover the main river, North Stream and the Brook, reach close to 4 miles. That is a lot of cutting: mown paths along all the banks from which we fish, plus the connecting paths across the meadow. The mowing is easy, the trimming of the fringe, or bankside vegetation, less so. First of all you have to heft a heavy and noisy brush cutter, but more importantly you have to find the right balance between cutting too little and cutting too much. Cut too little and the fishermen can’t get to the river. Too much and you remove the plants like hemlock figwort and meadow-rue that make a chalkstream riverbank like no other in the world.
Fortunately for me I have another month before the fringe will need any serious attention, but the grass starts to grow once the early morning frosts become fewer and less harsh. In a mild spring it will be late March, but more commonly sometime in April. The first cut of the year, with that newly mown grass smell, is definitely another of those ‘spring is here’ moments, but dodging the mower along a bank that has molehills like riverside measles takes the fun out of it.
The number of molehills is really quite stupendous; some areas are so thick with them that we will have to either spade the soil away or run a roller over the ground to flatten them before mowing. The fact is that during the winter when the meadows are at best wet, or at worst flooded, the moles gravitate to the higher, drier banks where they have to dig new tunnels, the numerous hills the spoils from their labour. The moles are really more of a nuisance than anything else. They don’t weaken the structure of the banks – the tunnels are too insignificant and close to the surface to have any effect. They don’t compete with the voles or mice for territory or food, mostly eating earthworms, grubs and roots. They are certainly not aggressors; if you pick one up you can see why. Under that beautifully soft fur is a body with very little strength in the torso. They sort of flop in your hand. They are pretty well blind as well. All the power is in those front feet, whose appearance belies their power. The feet look like the hands of a human baby – bright pink and crinkled. But each finger is covered in fine white hairs and tipped with iron-hard curved claws for digging. Occasionally I will see one pop his head up from a run, or see the earth moving as he goes about his daily chores, but on the whole they are an invisible presence, bar of course those molehills. Sometimes I find a dead one on the grass; stoats and owls will kill them when they venture above ground, but nobody ever eats them. That diet of worms doesn’t make for good eating by others. But the moles are only a nuisance for a few weeks at most, and by mid-May they will have headed back out to the meadows.
In centuries past the water meadows would have been drained of the flooding since mid-March, and the sheep let onto the fields for the ‘early bite’, which was the growth of grass that the drowning encouraged. Sadly today we just have the remnants of the water-meadow system; the North Stream is the most obvious and viable part of it. Maybe in the years to come we’ll revive the entire thing, but even without the drowning the valley is still ahead of the more exposed downland by a few weeks. So the local farmer brings down his flock, plus lambs. It takes me a couple of days to get used to the incessant baa-ing that runs from dawn to dusk, but after a while it is part of the fabric of Gavelwood, and when the sheep leave in mid-May to let us grow a hay crop and graze cattle, the silence will seem just as overwhelming.
Every so often my Monday routine is broken by the arrival of Royston with the trout I ordered way back in the winter. They arrive on the back of a Land Rover in a tank that is fed with oxygen for the 15-mile journey from the fish farm. For reasons that defy any logic, whenever Royston pulls up we’ll do exactly the same thing: jump up on the back, lift the lid of the tank and stare down at this splashing, heaving, swirling mass of brown trout whose red spots gleam against the white glow of the interior of the tank. Why do we do it? I know what a trout looks like. Royston certainly does. Just by looking there is no way we can count or measure the fish. I don’t know. In truth it is just exciting to see. When it comes to actually putting the fish in the river there is no great science to it; it is more past practice, intuition and guesswork. The Brook we leave unstocked, so the fish will be divided roughly two-thirds in the main river and the remainder in North Stream.
Putting the fish in the Evitt is really quite straightforward, though the North Stream I have had to prepare for by building a fish box, a contraption that will allow us to get to places the Land Rover will not. On the main river we drive up to the bank, Royston jumps up to the tank and dips in a long-handled net to scoop out anywhere between six to ten fish. He hands me the net, I lower it into the water, and within ten seconds they will all be gone. And I mean gone. They don’t hang around to acclimatize. They simply shoot off. Vanish. They say owning a yacht is like standing under a shower tearing up fifty-pound notes. Stocking fish feels very much the same.
Actually these fish are more acclimatized than most people imagine; the farm they were reared on takes its water from the same catchment as the Evitt, so the water will have a familiar taste and smell, imperceptible to humans but important to fish. They have also spent the last few months of their time in a stew pond that replicates a river, slowly weaned off a daily diet of fish food. So within a couple of days they will act exactly like their wild counterparts, finding a spot on the river to call his or her own, where they seek sanctuary, rest and food.
The bank along North Stream is starting to grow over the scars of the restoration; the bare earth has a slight tinge of green to it and the trees we trimmed have green sprigs pushing out. The river itself looks everything we hoped after just four months, with a tapestry of shallow gravel sections and then deeper runs. With more light and a healthy flow the crowfoot is starting to grow on the shallows; not enough to require a cut for now, but certainly in June. In the deeper parts starwort has taken hold – a weed that always gets mixed reviews. It certainly looks lovely, lighting up the riverbed in dayglo green, each clump made up of thousands and thousands of tiny leaves, rather like a giant version of the watercress you might grow on your kitchen windowsill. But it is something of a silt trap, and given the chance will out-compete crowfoot in a low-flow year. It is not as invertebrate-friendly either; do the same as before by running your hand through the fronds, and once the silt has cleared the harvest will be one-tenth that of crowfoot. But it grows in places that would otherwise be weedless, so for that reason I like it, and the trout are happy to use it for cover.
The fish box is something I have made from a memory long past when I watched the river keepers of my childhood transporting fish along the river. There is nothing very sophisticated about it; a wooden box 4 feet long, 2 wide and 1 deep. The side panels are fretwork, drilled with dozens of 1-inch-diameter holes to let the water in and out, plus a crude lid in the top and a rope to tow it with. Essentially I don my waders, step down into North Stream with it, and allow it to submerge, flip the lid and pour in as many fish as it will take that are passed to me in a net from the transporter on the bank. Then I make my way down the stream, stopping every so often to remove a fish by hand and release it. The last one in the box always takes an age to catch, but it’s worth the effort. Brown trout are a sedentary bunch and in half an hour with the box I will spread them out along the length of North Stream in what would otherwise take weeks if we just put the trout all in the one spot.
So by the time the end of April looms the die is cast; the river is full, the weed is cut, the banks are trimmed and the fish are stocked. Everything up to now has been the prelude for May, the single most exciting month in the chalkstream calendar, the month when nature lays on a show the like of which you will only ever see in these few river valleys. Mayfly time is just around the corner.