NOT EVERYONE AGREES, but June gets my vote as the best month of the year. River keepers dread it because it is the heaviest and hardest weed cut of the year. Two weeks of hell most will tell you, and for once they are not exaggerating. Fishermen dislike it because a post-mayfly torpor seems to grip the fish. Suddenly after a month of savage feeding and in-your-face fly hatches the fish get hard to catch. People will tell you that the trout are stuffed full of mayfly, unable and unwilling to eat anything for many weeks to come. This is patently untrue. Try it yourself sometime. Gorge yourself to a standstill and then see how many days you can go without eating. Not more than a few I would guess. Trout are no different to us in this respect. The truth is that the fish go back to type for the other eleven months of the year: cautious and selective. As fishermen we have forgotten this, grown a little complacent and lazy in our habits. We need to reset.
But for me June, aside from any fishing niceties, is the month when the chalkstream valleys are at their most sublime. At every turn the meadows are wrapped in colour. This is still early summer. Everything is bright and lush, that dustiness of late summer still a while away. The rivers shine and glint like sterling silver. The days get longer as the evenings get later. It hurts me to leave the river whilst there is still light in the day, so I usually don’t, choosing to stumble around in the dark to find my way home. It makes for a long day, especially when half of the June days are spent wielding a scythe and manhandling rafts of heavy weed, but it is really no hardship. The work must be done, and against the backdrop of such perfect countryside how bad can it be?
Weed-cutting is one of those oddities that as an organized and vital part of river management are pretty well unique to the chalkstreams. At fixed periods during the season when the rivers close to fishing, we don our waders, pick up the hand scythes, step into the water and for as long as two weeks at a stretch cut, trim and clear the weed that grows up from the riverbed. Often when I mention it to people unfamiliar with the term, I can see the cogs in their brain whirring to compute the concept Weed? Cut? River? Really . . . They are right to be baffled. After all, where else in the world would the river owners devise a system whereby out of a seven-month fishing season, one and a half months will be out of commission?
The success of this unusual arrangement is part historical, part legal, part necessity, and with a bit of peer-group pressure thrown in for good measure. The historical has nothing to do with fishing. The practice of neighbours cooperating to coordinate cutting goes back centuries, to when there was a watermill every couple of miles on every chalkstream. Cutting the weed that impeded the passage of water down the river was a necessity for the millers, but if you failed to tell your downstream neighbours of the cut weed heading their way it would very soon jam up the waterwheels, so to avoid angry disputes a progressive rota from the headwaters down to the estuary came into being. As it turned out this suited the fishermen just as well as it did the millers, so when the milling died out the organized cutting rota remained in place. Whilst this is simply common sense, creating a practice that spilt over into fishery management, the legal is more esoteric.
In most nations around the world rivers are public property; a free-for-all where nobody owns the fishing rights and the fish that swim in the river are there for anyone who wants to catch them, usually only for the cost of a government fishing licence. Sometimes the access to fish the rivers is nuanced by ownership of the land that borders it, with ownership rights conferred on someone down to the high-water mark. But generally speaking, if you can get onto the river from a road or some such it is yours to enjoy, be you an angler, swimmer, canoeist or whatever takes your fancy. But on the chalkstreams, and most other rivers in England and Wales for that matter, quite the reverse is true. The rivers, access to them and the right to fish them is in private ownership. Every inch of bank and every square foot of fishing rights from the moment the water emerges from the ground to the tidal estuary is owned by someone, enshrined in ancient statute, and if you are one of those lucky few you have the right to call yourself a riparian owner. Is this good or bad? You can argue the case on many levels, but the fact is that by owning a river you have a vested interest in looking after it. Aside from the obvious point that they are valuable (good beats change hands for millions), it is hard to own a river and not want the best for it. And you don’t have to be a riparian owner who fishes for this to apply. A badly tended river tugs at the heartstrings as much as a once beautiful but now neglected garden.
On a more practical level the chalkstreams have a vital role as irrigators of the river valley, and cutting the weed regulates the flow. Leave it to grow unchecked in the summer and gradually the river will become so clogged that the banks will burst and flood the water meadows, either destroying the hay crop or denying grazing for the cattle. If you are both the riparian and landowner, aside from any fishing interest, the cutting becomes as much a part of the farming routine as hedge-cutting or harvest. If you own just the river you could of course ignore any such obligations, but the ideal of being a good neighbour is still alive and well in rural Britain.
Weed-cutting at Gavelwood starts on the second Monday in June; it has been thus for as long as anyone can remember, coinciding with the end of the mayfly hatch and Duffers Fortnight. In a way it is something of a relief for us who work on the river, despite the hard, physical labour ahead. For the past six weeks it has been relentless. Fishermen every day. Early starts to get everything ready before they arrive, late finishes to see them home. It is not bad in any respect – sharing the excitement of some of the best and most unique fishing on the planet is a joy in itself – but I know the selfish parts of us all yearn to take the river back for ourselves. As get it back we do, in spades.
Essentially there are four ways to cut a river; chain scythe, hand scythe, pole scythe or weed boat. The last is regarded by most as the least worst option when the first three are not possible. There are parts of the Evitt when you get close to the sea where it is too wide to work from the bank and too deep to wade, so the boat is the only option. The flat-bottomed boat is driven by paddle wheels on either side operated by a man who sits in the middle raising and lowering a cutting bar that looks a bit like a giant hedge trimmer, which is fixed to a hydraulic arm in front of the bow. It is a mighty efficient way to cut weed; a good operator can do in a few hours what would otherwise take days back in the era when the only other option was hanging over the side of a rowing boat with a scythe. But that said, it is something of a blunt instrument and sometimes ecologically destructive; chugging along with limited manoeuvrability, it is difficult to discriminate between the weed you want to keep and that you wish to cut. Subtle changes in the riverbed, so easy to see when wading, are harder to fathom. The other option, chain scythes, have many of the same drawbacks, plus they are damned hard work. Standing on one bank, with your partner on the other, dragging two hundred pounds of submerged steel blades upstream with a sawing motion for a day is as much hard graft as most people do in a year. If you think the blades cut like the metaphorical hot knife through butter, think again. It is more tearing than cutting as they drag along the riverbed, every so often becoming so entwined with weed that you have to drag the whole kit and caboodle onto the bank to clear it before hauling it back across the river to start again.
I don’t much care for the word ‘cut’ in relation to the work we do to control the river weed; it is the one we always use, but it smacks of destruction or removing something bad, like cutting out a cancer. That venerable river keeper on the Wiltshire Avon Frank Sawyer had it right when he referred to the cut as mowing. It sounds so much more positive, more grooming than cutting. Taking something that is already good and making it better. In fact the hand scythes we use today used to be called ‘mowing tackle’, the very same ones that one man and his dog Spot of nursery rhyme fame went to mow a meadow with. So it is with these in hand that we all gather on the first morning of the Gavelwood June cut at the Drowners House.
There is never any great rush to get going; we all sort of need to decompress after the mayfly. In truth we haven’t had much time to be together or gossip over the past few weeks, so this is a time to catch up. Inevitably the conversation is a mayfly post-mortem. Was it early? Was it late? An average year, or better or worse than most? That everyone has an opinion is what makes it fun, plus memories of seasons past and the comparisons we make are never perfect, so there is plenty of scope for disagreement. Eventually we will coalesce around a consensus, and that will be another mayfly consigned to history. If you work on a river you have to be a bit pragmatic in that respect. What is gone is gone, and the anglers who come next week will not thank you for telling them they should have been here last week.
As the others took whetstones to the scythe blades to get them razor-sharp I walked the length of Gavelwood to assess the ‘mowing’ we needed to do this year. No two seasons are identical, and over a period of a decade you can have anything from years when the June cut is almost a non-event to others when the river is clogged with weed, the two-week allotted period barely enough time to complete the job. It is the sun and water that dictate how much the weed grows from late April to early June, during which time all cutting is embargoed. Plenty of sun plus well-oxygenated water in the spring, and boom, the surface of your river will be a sea of little white flowers where the crowfoot has grown like Topsy and broken out onto the surface. The fish just love these years; plenty of cover and plenty of food all concentrated into the fast rivulets between the weed beds. As you might imagine, this is a hard one for the keepers. On the other hand a dry winter followed by a dry, overcast spring and large sections of the river will be devoid of weed, with at best meagre growth covering only sections of the riverbed. Fish hate these years, fleeing to the deeper sections for cover and food, whilst the keepers make the best of a bad job, preserving the weed they have the best they can and hoping the conditions improve.
For the angler the sparse years make the fishing easy, but the catching harder. An open river with no weed to get caught on when casting, or heavy beds that a hooked fish might bury itself in, might seem attractive at first glance, but without the cover and food that the weed provides the few fish that remain will be easily spooked. On the other hand casting into those narrow fast runs between weed that sits on the surface requires great accuracy. Err a few inches to the left or right and you get snagged. Hook a fish on the wrong side of the weed and he will be a devil to land. Hiding in the dark shadows beneath the weed beds the fish are hard to spot. All in all, when it comes to nurturing and cutting the weed the river keeper has the unenviable task of finding a way between these two extremes. This year at Gavelwood we are at neither extreme; it is going to be one of those years where we have to cut to open up the river for the fishermen whilst at the same time preserving enough weed for cover and to hold up the water levels.
After weeks of seeing the river from the bank, it suddenly looks very different from in the water. More beautiful. More serene. More alive. The crowfoot flexes in the current, gently pulsating, fractionally raising and lowering the height of the water, the little fronds of the weed skittering in the wake of the small waves the movement creates. Dozens of tiny olive insects drift down on the water, spinning on the surface as they get caught in the fast, irregular flow of the rivulets between the weed. I cup my hand to scoop one up who shows no sign of concern or indication that he wants to take flight just yet as I hold him up to the sun. His arched body is rigid, the three long tails keeping him poised and upright as the large pale wings catch the gentle breeze. Along the banks the tall yellow flag irises are the plant of the moment, but the hairy willowherb and water forget-me-not that tumble over the bank are the flowers that catch the eye from river level. And all the while from behind the barbed-wire fence the cattle stare down at us, chewing the cud as if ruminating as to why we are in the river and not them.
The first slice of the scythe through the water and a long tail of crowfoot is a satisfying moment. The freshly honed blade truly does cut like a hot knife through butter, exposing the white ends of the cut weed that hangs immobile for a fraction of a second until the current catches the cut weed, the buoyant stalks bob to the surface and the detritus starts its long journey to the sea. From time to time the cuttings will get caught, their downstream progress halted until they free themselves again or another river keeper sends them on their way with a shove from a weed rake. And so a new chapter opens for the myriad bugs that live in the cut portion of the weed, the cutting displacing them from their place of birth. Surprisingly they tend not to cling on to the safety of the floating weed for long, preferring to swim away at the earliest opportunity to find a new static home, and in a few hours most cut weed will be devoid of any invertebrate life. But in these few hours a vital exchange will have occurred. The deeper water where the weed doesn’t grow will be seeded by the displaced nymphs who depart the floating weed, and the general mixing up of the populations reduces the chances of interbreeding, which brings in new blood-lines to improve the gene pool.
At Gavelwood we cut in pairs, working two abreast across the width of the river cutting in tandem. The idea is that we are creating the perfect home for a trout; the weed is where he can hang out when resting or hiding from predators, whilst the open areas are ideal when he is on the fin, looking out for food. We are cutting the weed for the fisherman as well; in an ideal world we’ll want him to be able to cast his fly so it lands over the just submerged weed bed to then drift into the open area where the fish is looking up for food. So as far as we can we trim the weed so that it doesn’t break the surface. Beneath the surface the zigzag path of the water created by the pattern of the cut suits the nymphs very well. The fast channels between the weed beds cleanse the gravel, keeping it well oxygenated for the eggs that are incubating. And once they have hatched they can hide between the loose stones until they are big enough to head for the weed cover. Sometimes we will break with the chequerboard pattern, which hold back the flows and create some depth in areas that might otherwise be too shallow in low-water years.
The cutting is the easy and satisfying part of the job; the clearing down is just plain hard, but no less important. Inevitably the cut weed gets caught up on everything you can imagine: uncut weed, bridge supports, branches that hang into the water, shallow gravel sections, tree roots, back eddies . . . we try to make our lives easy by starting downstream and working upstream to make the cut, but this only helps so far. So by the middle of the afternoon we will lay down our scythes and pick up the long-handled grab rakes, progressively loosening the caught weed and sending it on downstream. And there is the rub really. Not only are we moving on the weed we have cut, but also the weed that has been sent down by the keepers cutting above us. And woe betide any keeper who fails to clear down each day, instead waiting until the end of the week to send down huge and unwelcome rafts of weed to his unsuspecting neighbours downriver.
Oddly enough the weed-cutting activity doesn’t seem to bother the fish that much. On days of good hatches they will continue to rise until you could almost bop them on the nose with the tip of your scythe, and it amazes me that they will return to their usual haunt almost as soon as we have waded past. Fish are strange creatures sometimes; one day a single splashy cast will spook them for hours, but wade through their home, slice away half the weed they live under, and hey, no problem, I’ll be back in a minute or two, they seem to be saying. In truth the activity we stir up with the work, both the wading that disturbs the gravel bed and the cutting itself, creates a food bonanza for the trout. Unlike grayling, who are foragers, trout want service. The lady of the stream is quite happy to poke her snout into the riverbed to dislodge food; not so brown trout, which prefer to wait for the food to come to them. So all our clumping about is heaven-sent for the trout who will take advantage of the momentarily homeless nymphs by cruising under the cut weed to take advantage of this seasonal windfall.
Our general activity also disturbs the huge and ever-present population of freshwater shrimps, which are, perhaps a little surprisingly, one of the staple parts of the trout diet. Like flamingos that need shrimp to pigment their feathers pink, so it is with trout, whose flesh is a pale pink from the shrimps and other crustaceans they devour. It seems contradictory to talk so readily of crustaceans as an everyday part of life in a river in the context of the chalkstreams – it is a term you might more readily associate with the sea – but they are as much part of everyday life as the nymphs and fish. Look in a fisherman’s box for a clue. Amongst the delicate dry flies and practical nymph imitations you will see something that looks just like a shrimp, or if you prefer a tiny prawn, which is about one quarter the size of your small fingernail. It is tied on a curved hook, and with a plastic body that shines when wet it looks every bit as real as its bigger cousin you’d see on the fishmonger’s counter. It is a fly (we call it that although it so patently isn’t) that anglers use all year long, sunk deep in the water to imitate the scavenging shrimp who likes to forage close to the riverbed when he is not hiding out in the weed or gravel.
Even something as apparently indigestible and unpalatable as a snail will catch the attention of the fish from time to time. Aquatic snails need calcium-rich water, so the chalkstreams are heaven-sent in this respect, and as they need highly oxygenated water to breathe in the attraction becomes greater still. In normal times at Gavelwood we will not see much of the snails; they pop up to the surface to fill their lungs, then sink down to feed on the weed. But they have a weakness that makes them vulnerable to trout. The ecosystem of the snail is a hopeless converter of air from water, and at certain times in the summer, when the water temperature rises by a few fractions of a degree the oxygen content will drop to the point that the snails must abandon the depths to hang in the surface film by their feet. Stuck suspended, especially in the shallows and back eddies in August and September, they are low-hanging fruit for the trout, who hoover them up in terrific numbers, swimming with their bodies half out of the water as they patrol with open mouths. Catch a trout on days like this (yes that same fly box will have a snail imitation) and the belly of the trout will feel like a well-stuffed bean bag.
If you thought an imitation shrimp or snail pattern sits uneasily in the lexicon of a fly-fisherman I’d hazard that a fake crayfish makes it more confusing still. Who’d think that these mini-lobsters have any part to play in the daily life of an English chalkstream? But they do, and the population that thrives today is an exemplary case of what might go wrong, will go wrong. Strangely the story starts not in North America but Sweden in the 1960s, where the population of the native Scandinavian noble crayfish had been declining for the first half of the century. For the British any decline of our own white-clawed crayfish at around the same time might well have gone unnoticed, but among the Swedes this arthropod was harvested in its millions, very much part of the cultural and economic life of the rural regions. So in 1969, to fill the gap, the government took delivery of shipments of North American signal crayfish. As a plan it worked great; the newcomers thrived in the Swedish lakes and rivers, growing faster and bigger than the native nobles. What nobody knew was that the imports carried the crayfish plague Aphanomyces astaci, a water mould that wiped out the natives wherever the introductions took place. However before this was known the signal had gained a reputation for being a fast and easy grower, so the introductions spread across the entire country. It took a full fifteen years for the facts to sink in to the point where imports stopped in 1994, and by that time the damage was done, the nobles all but extinct.
Across the North Sea, soon after the Swedish imports began, word spread of this wonder crop, and it was not long (1976 to be precise) before the first signal crayfish arrived in the UK, not to make up for any decline in our own population but as a get-rich-quick scheme that was well advertised in the press. The pitch was essentially this: if you own a lake or river, seed it with a few North American signal crayfish, leave them alone to breed for a couple of years, then reap a lucrative harvest for many years to come at almost zero cost. Too good to believe? Well, the proposition was correct in many respects. Crayfish do breed easily and fast. Once they are in a body of water nothing stops them or eradicates them. Catching them is easy. Lob out a lobster-style pot overnight, bait it with just about anything (a partially opened tin of cat food works well) and you will have a full pot the following morning. So far so good. The problem was that for a get-rich-quick scheme you need buyers, and back then (this was long before the days of Pret A Manger’s crayfish tail and mayonnaise best-selling sandwich) there really wasn’t a mass market or appetite for crayfish, so the fad was short-lived – unlike its effects on the native white-claw. Britain is a small country, where the waterways, canals, rivers and lakes are either interconnected or separated by relatively short distances, so once introduced the North American signals spread like wild fire and the same plague that did for the Swedish nobles is now wiping out the native British white-claws.
At Gavelwood we don’t have native crayfish any longer – I am told they disappeared decades ago – but creeping around on the riverbed we have plenty of signals. I guess I should be rather angry at them for taking over, that ‘non-native’ tag a badge of shame, but it’s not really their fault and on the Evitt at least, they don’t seem to do any great harm, though I am wary that if the population gets out of hand the salmon, trout and bullhead numbers might suffer. True, one of their favourite foods is caddis nymphs, but the decline of the sedge population is equally great on the chalkstreams without crayfish, so it would be unfair to lay that at their door. On the canals I am told they weaken the banks with their tunnelling, and coarse fishermen curse them roundly as they strip their hooks of corned beef, sweet corn and maggots, but here at Gavelwood I find them endlessly fascinating.
They are not the easiest of creatures to spot; with that dark brown shell they are well camouflaged, and tending to hide in dark recesses and move by stealth they mostly go unobserved. Sometimes greed gets the better of them – fish eggs always get them going – but they are most of all the vultures of the riverbed. They don’t exactly circle the dying, but corpses, be they fish, fowl or animal, get torn apart by their large front claws. For something that only scuttles along on the riverbed they have a remarkable propensity to spot humans. How they do it I have no idea, but they can move pretty quickly when they see me. That said, picking them up before they get away is easy as long as you time it just right, clamping them with thumb and forefinger where the body ends and the tail begins. What I love about them is that they get so angry when picked up. They have no sense that you might be bigger, smarter or stronger than them. They twist between your fingers like an angry steel cable, frantically waving their eight legs about and fixing you with the purple dots of their eyes. They try to arch back to grab you with their pincers. If they succeed it actually does hurt, and I for one give up the struggle at that point.
The females are usually more docile than the males; turn one over during the winter and early spring and you will see the eggs in clusters under the tail, very much like a lobster. And then a month later do the same to see the extraordinary sight of the hatched eggs transformed into tiny infant crayfish that stay attached to the tail until June. Once free of the mother the troubles for the young are legion. Everyone likes a baby crayfish, which looks like its parent, just much, much smaller and translucent white, like a living crayfish skeleton. Naturally enough fish eat them when they grow a bit older, but in the infant state carnivorous nymphs like the damselfly have a great liking for them. Things don’t get much better as the crayfish get larger and grow a hard shell; the beak of the heron spikes them easily with one jab and otters will eat them all day long whatever the size. In fact against these odds you have to wonder how they survive at all, but that is one of the great things about a chalkstream – there are so many niches that all sorts, however unexpected, find a place in the hierarchy.
It is strange, but the whole river seems to take a collective pause for breath around mid-June. For us who work there we will have broken the back of the weed cut and we can throttle back for a few days whilst we trim up the river, send down the last of the cut weed, and still have the place to ourselves before we reopen for fishing in the third week. The fish are definitely less frenetic – the memory of the gorging weeks of the mayfly hatch soon fades, and with nearly eighteen hours of daylight and with the living larder of the river writ large – nymphs, shrimps, snails, beetles and insects at every stage in the life cycle abound – they hunt for food when it suits them. The creatures, birds and animals, are more at ease with their world. The water voles are by now well into their second litter and maybe a third. The imperative to perpetuate the breed is sated; admittedly perhaps only one third of those born have survived to this point in the year, but in the numbers game that they play to repopulate each year those odds are plenty good enough. The wild fowl are done with nesting, except perhaps for the occasional duck or moorhen that rather mournfully sits on a nest, the first attempt having been stripped of eggs by a greedy stoat or some such river raider. But for those who avoided such a fate, life is very much easier; the fledglings are halfway to adulthood, beyond any real help that might be provided by their parents, and it seems they stick together more out of habit than need. The exception to these rules is most definitely the swans, and for a bird that has nothing to fear from anyone it makes you wonder why.
Maybe it is because swans mature much more slowly. They will not breed until their third year, whereas most other birds do so in the second year or earlier. It is certainly nothing to do with size. Even though by June the cygnets are still half the size of their parents they are bigger than just about every bird on the river bar geese, who are their only competitors. It is extraordinary how tight the swan family group remains right through until the autumn. At Gavelwood we have our resident pair that hatch anywhere from four to eight cygnets; inevitably a few fall by the wayside from predators like foxes, who will grab them when they roost on the bank at night, or disease. Wet, cold summers seem to be bad in this respect. This year we are at three, and by this point the really dangerous months are behind them, but they stick like glue to the parents. At any given time, day or night, there will never be more than a few yards separating the five. If anyone or anything comes in range they start this strange sort of sotto bark-cum-cluck that they fire at each other constantly until the perceived danger is past.
Perceived is definitely the word; the only creatures that go near swans are geese, and the two are most definitely warring tribes. Geese are really the only birds that compete with swans for food. Both of them like to graze the riverbed for the weed, snails and insects, though with a neck twice as long, the swan will always outcompete the goose for the choicest, lushest shoots. Maybe it is some need to prove themselves, but during the summer the geese seem to go out of their way to infuriate the swans. They only do it in groups – I guess safety in numbers – but you can see the tableau evolve over a morning. The fact is that the Evitt has more than enough grazing for both groups, but working on the principle of the grass always being greener the geese will gravitate ever nearer to the swans, who will gather tighter together until one goose will, without a doubt deliberately, stray into their midst. The cob will not tolerate this for more than a few seconds before chasing the goose away, and at this point all hell lets loose as the other geese retaliate by charging at the swans. It is probably the bird equivalent of a pub brawl that starts with the words ‘Oi, you pushed my mate’. The river explodes into a brawl of thrashing wings that beat the water white as everyone lunges at everyone else, spray misting the scene. This is definitely sparring rather than fighting; the two types of bird rarely make physical contact beyond clashing wings. Only once have I seen a true fight, when the swans cornered a young goose, repeatedly pushing it under until it either drowned or died of fright, which I could not tell. But the clash is always short-lived and the outcome the same. The swans will regroup at exactly the same point they began, waggling their tails in a feathered V sign at the geese, who quickly retreat, sloping off to a safe distance chastened, unharmed but determined to do it all again. What was the point of all this, who can tell? The one thing I do know for sure is that the lives of all of us on the river – people and creatures – are dictated by the turning of the seasons. Sudden changes, subtle changes. They all matter, and Midsummer’s Day, the summer solstice, is a day I approach with mixed feelings. It should be a celebration of everything that is great about the chalkstream summer. Long, warm days when everyone harvests the sun and the easy living it brings, but somewhere at the back of my mind there is a little voice that reminds me this is the high point of the year. There is more that has gone before than lies ahead. The days get shorter rather than longer. Animals and plants have done most of their growing, from here on in it is about consolidation. Maybe I am being a misery. Certainly in angling terms I have no reason to be gloomy. Looked at sensibly, the mayfly apart, we still have three and a half of the most glorious months ahead compared with the one and a half just gone.
I suspect I am not the first to have these feelings. Not far from the banks of the River Evitt is Stonehenge, where modern-day man makes a huge fuss of the summer solstice. That is all fine and all great fun, but the truth is that there are plenty who hold to the belief that the circle of stones was not built to celebrate the height of summer but the depth of winter. On reflection it makes a certain amount of sense; for Stone Age man five millennia ago the winter solstice was far more of a turning point in the year, the moment when the first half of the winter was over and the march towards spring seemed just a little bit shorter from every day thereafter. But for all my glass-half-full attitude to Midsummer’s Day, the shortest night is the one we celebrate to mark the annual return of that prodigal, the sea trout.