MAKE HAY WHILST the sun shines goes the saying, so in early August we do exactly that. In pure farming terms we are later than most, in fact as much as six weeks later, but cropping the water meadows of the mixed grasses is more than just creating forage. In sheer practical terms, the meadows at Gavelwood were never designed for modern-day farm machinery that likes flat, geometric fields with easy access. Not only do our field boundaries follow the erratic course of the Evitt, but they are cut into odd shapes by the course of North Stream and Katherine’s Brook. Flat? Well, from a distance they might look flat, but head across them in a straight line and you will find that they are anything but, as the ground rises and falls in regular undulations that give the walker the slight sensation of surfing a shallow wave pattern, with maybe a 2-foot fall from peak to trough. These are the now redundant ridge-and-furrow water-meadow channels that radiate like ribs from the spine that is North Stream, and in winters and springs past would have flooded the fields.
Today, even in the comparative dry of August, the troughs are still wet and the tractor driver has to avoid the wettest sections or else get stuck, which is no bad thing, as a few uncut sections provide a useful refuge for plenty of the creatures. Occasionally, through misjudgement or just sheer bad luck, the tractor wheels will break through the surface and gouge huge ruts in the soft turf. Exposed, the sward that covers the meadows, which looks so permanent when viewed overall, is surprisingly fragile, the turf and roots no more than 2 inches deep. The soil beneath is deep black, more like wet clay, and apparently devoid of life other than a few earthworms; it squelches when I kick the sods back into the ruts and stamp them down to repair the damage. Left for a few minutes the ruts would soon fill with water, which is a gentle reminder that this land was, is and always will be a floodplain where the water table is constantly present, just a few inches beneath our feet. Once in a while I will spot an eel squirling in the water of a rut; whether we have disturbed his long-term home or he has broken his journey across the meadows back to the river for a revitalizing dip I cannot tell, but either way his vigour suggests he enjoys the feel of water on his skin.
Regardless of the practicalities I try to leave the haymaking as late as possible to preserve the homes and hunting grounds for the valley creatures. The field mice thrive in the thick base of the grasses. The bolder water voles range away from the river in search of seeds. Curlews, lapwings and the very occasional skylark make their nests and raise their young in the meadows, the damp ground providing all the food and cover they are ever likely to need. The river insects spread out all over. For the hunters like the bats, owls and herons it is a veritable English savanna. But in the end the cut must be made; removing what is now largely dead will bring on a new sward that will grow fast with the warm summer air and damp soil to herald a new phase in the annual cycle of Gavelwood.
With the long, hot dry days there is definitely a sea change in the pace of life for everyone. Gone is the frenetic activity that goes with courtship, hatching eggs, caring for the young and competing for territory. August is a time to consolidate. With the exception of the invertebrates that carry on regardless, just about everyone to be born this year has been born. That tricky phase from egg or infant to tiny creature has been successfully negotiated. Certainly there are plenty of hazards ahead, and your chances of being alive twelve months hence might still be slim, but to come this far is a victory in itself. August in the river valley is as close as it gets to heaven on earth for all the creatures; with warmth, food in abundance and healthy, growing bodies, there is very little bad.
The water meadows will spring back to life within days of the hay cut. Haymaking inevitably shakes out millions of seeds per acre that percolate into the turf. By day the birds endlessly peck away and by night the foragers move in. Now exposed to the sun, the wild flowers soon bloom, carpeting the turf with all manner of colours and variety; the yellow of the birdsfoot trefoil stands out, as does the meadow buttercup. The plain, stubby brown flowerheads of the ribwort plantain are everywhere, their ordinariness accentuated by the beautiful violet-purple flowers of the low-growing tufted vetch. Lie for a moment in a summer meadow to take in the huge kaleidoscope of colours. The twisting, twirling shapes of the leaves. The stalks that grow dead straight or entwine with competing plants. Butterflies will dance above you, and on every surface there will be insects, ants or spiders. And all this takes place amongst a cacophony of noise. At first you will not be able to place it, a white noise that is at odds with what should be a peaceful landscape. And then you will notice a bumblebee. Then another and then another. Raise your head to look across the tops of the flowers towards the horizon, and there will be thousands of bumblebees flitting from stamen to stamen as they collect pollen, buzzing as they single-mindedly go about their task. Don’t worry about a bumblebee stinging you, they rarely do; wasps on the other hand are an altogether different story.
It is easy to think of river keeping as the perfect job, and in many ways it is. A chalkstream valley is no bad workplace and the river creatures are amiable work companions, blithely unaware of office politics. Certainly the weather is not always kind, and sometimes the work is very hard, but being effectively your own boss with a schedule of your own choosing is enviable. But without overstating the case, the work has its dangers: farm machinery and chainsaws come with risks. Working alone and unsupervised is not always a good idea. Most alarmingly, I know plenty of river keepers who can’t swim! But ask a river keeper what he fears most and the answer will be one word – wasps.
Wasps have a particular liking for the meadows; abandoned water-vole burrows make the perfect place for their underground nests, and the very thing the colony needs for food, the insects that the workers collect to feed the larvae, are everywhere in huge abundance as they flourish in concert with the growth of the meadow plants through spring and summer. That would all be fine in itself if the nests were easy to spot, but the trouble is that the entrances are usually hidden, a tiny hole in the turf not much bigger than a fifty-pence piece that is often shrouded by grasses. If you are walking or fishing you have half a chance; by the time we get to late summer the activity around the nests is at its peak, wasps entering and leaving the hole by the dozens every minute from sunup to sundown, so the noise or sight of them will give you a clue as you move along the bank. In the early months of the season the nests are less of a problem, and you can pass by the entrance without a second glance. However, as the colony expands the wasps grow notably more aggressive as they commute back and forth in an ever more frantic search for food. By August it is wise to give any nest a wide berth. Unfortunately river keepers, when driving a mowing machine or using a weed strimmer, don’t always get that prior warning. With the dust, noise and spray of cuttings, plus sometimes a protective face shield and earmuffs, the cloud of angry wasps can be up and around them before they even realize they have hit the nest. And wasps are vicious. Unlike bumblebees that sting as an absolute last resort and die after making that single sting, wasps can sting repeatedly, and they do. It sometimes looks comical to see a river keeper in the distance abandon his machine and run like the blazes swatting away around his head, but it is no fun really. Most keepers will tell you of the times when they have had multiple stings, and some carry injection pens in case of a severe reaction.
In general it is fair to say that the annual cycle of the river-keeper year does not contain many dangers like the wasps, but there is definitely a cadence as the months roll by that pushes us along and makes the job so special. Winter is undoubtedly the hardest. It is not just that the work is physically demanding, but sometimes the dark mornings, short days and driving cold rain can seep the will from the toughest bodies. Gavelwood doesn’t give you much back, as the creatures are either absent, hibernating or hidden away. But most days there will be something that reaffirms your hope and offers a reminder of better times ahead. A bit of watery sunshine that prompts a hatch of tiny olives. A water vole that pokes his head out of the burrow, then scurries off for food. A big old kelt salmon, exhausted from spawning, that swims past making his way back towards the sea. A perched owl that looks as wet and miserable as you do, with whom you share a shrugged glance that seems to say, ‘What can you do? It’s winter after all.’ But it does end, and all of a sudden the days are longer. The brown valley begins to get a tinge of green, and the first time the mowing machine comes out a symbolic corner is turned. All of a sudden a fishing season that seemed so distant so recently is only a few weeks away and there is a rush of preparations for the first anglers. The opening day and shortly after is a pleasant pause. It is a restoration of faith, a time when everything you work for all year has a point as the river gives up pleasure for the anglers who revel in the beauty and the sport. As May turns to June the workload multiplies; there will not be enough hours in the day or days in the week. The grass that needed mowing once in March now needs to be cut at least once a week. The miles of riverbank fringe that have been gradually getting taller without you noticing now need trimming. And every day there is something new. A stocking to supervise. A group of fishermen to cosset. A bridge to repair. The June weed cut is almost a blessed relief, as all other jobs get set to one side for this single priority. But I pay for the interlude, because as soon as the cut is over it is a question of picking up where you left off and making up for lost time. July is very much the same as June. Another weed cut, more mowing with everything still growing, and it is not really until August that there is a moment to pause for breath.
August gets a mixed press with anglers as a fishing month; some revel in the peace of the summer meadows and the uncrowded riverbanks, as many of their fellows fall prey to a family holiday that will rarely include fishing. Others throw up their hands in shock at the slightest mention of fishing in a month in which they consider the water levels to be too low or the weather too hot. I am firmly in the go-fishing camp, but the stay-aways have a fair point, and at Gavelwood August is the month when I have to box clever to keep the river in prime condition. It is the month, and September as well for that matter, when the Evitt will be visibly lower and the side streams, Katherine’s Brook in particular, narrow as the vegetation grows in and the velocity of the water pushing through reduces. Common sense tells you this is going to happen; after all the summer months are the driest, so why should it not happen? There are all sorts of demands on the river. The trees along the banks suck up vast quantities. Farmers require irrigation. Homes need water. Evaporation is a significant factor, but most of all the chalk strata, the huge sponge that feeds the aquifers that in turn spring from the ground to create the rivers, are gradually deprived of water with less rainfall. That one drop in, one drop out principle of the saturated sponge no longer applies. The longer the summer goes on the more we are reliant on the reservoir of water held in the chalk, but it is diminishing with each day.
There is no need to panic; after all this is the natural order of things, and good winter rains will reset the balance, but for now I need to conserve what we have. Katherine’s Brook is the first to suffer; if I follow the stream up from Gavelwood towards its source there will come a point where it is completely dried up by now. Though it is never good to see, small brooks are often winterbournes near the source, streams that flow entirely from the springs, and as the water table drops they gradually dry up. In wet years they keep flowing longer into the summer and the distance that dries up is less; in dry years the reverse. Down where we are, 6 miles from the source, the Brook has never dried up in living memory, but the effects of a dry as opposed to a wet year will have an impact. If you stand and look upstream it will be noticeable because the water has narrowed to maybe a third, or in really arid years a quarter, of the wintertime width. The channel will be delineated by watercress, snaking down the middle where it has grown out from the banks to occupy the space that was previously water.
This is nature’s way of preserving life in a brook. In the same way that the crowfoot is a haven for nymphs, so is the watercress. And not just for nymphs. The snails, the shrimps and tiny fish successfully make this their home for a few months, out of the gaze of many of their predators. Even the occasional larger fish will occupy the margins where the watercress floats on the surface creating a refuge beneath. By narrowing the size of the river the water continues to flow pure and fast, still a perfect chalkstream, just reduced in size. And as a regulator the watercress is the river keeper’s dream, adapting to the conditions, growing and narrowing as the summer progresses, even acting as a filter for silt and anything else bad that might try to flow into a river when it is at its lowest and most vulnerable. So my job is to do nothing. To cut back the watercress would be a disaster, destroying a habitat that nature has worked so hard to create, and so it all grows at its own pace until the autumn turns to winter and the heavy frosts kill the watercress (being 95 per cent water, freezing does it no good) and it dies back, opening the river up as the water levels return to normal.
Fortunately there is no commercial value in the watercress, so nobody bothers with it on that score. It is not the stuff, Rorippa nasturtium-aquaticum, that is familiar on supermarket shelves, but rather the aptly named fool’s watercress Apium nodiflorum. I will admit I find them hard to tell apart at a glance, but lift up a clump of the fool’s variety and you will see leaves that are shaped like arrowheads and grow in regular pairs along the stalk. The eating kind has rounded leaves that are totally irregular on the stalk, but if you are in any doubt apply the sniff test. Crush a bunch in your hand. If it smells of parsnip it is fool’s watercress. Whether that is edible in any quantity I do not know, but it certainly does not have that peppery bite of the real thing, tasting more of old celery. There are a couple of spots around Gavelwood where the Rorippa grows, and a few handfuls in a lunchtime sandwich makes as good a meal as you are ever going to get. Everyone worries about liver fluke, a parasite worm that sheep and cattle carry, but we pick our cress from the fast water, well away from the margins, and haven’t succumbed as yet.
There is very little I can do to make the Brook a live fishing prospect once we get into August; I will keep the pathway mown and the worst excesses of the fringe trimmed for the occasional angler who will wander up to have a try at one or two of the wild fish that have found a niche. Conversely, the fate of the North Stream lies entirely in my hands, by virtue of the amount of water I choose or am able to let in through the Portland Hatches from the main River Evitt. For most months of the year it is not something I have to think too hard about; in winter all the boards that regulate the water flowing into North Stream are removed and in the spring they will be replaced to slow it down. But by August I have an entirely different problem. North Stream was dug, admittedly many centuries ago, for meadow flooding. The water engineers of the time cared nothing for summer flows; their interest was solely for the winter and spring. So all the gradients and structures that work so well most of the time do nothing to help North Stream as it is gradually starved of water, the pace of the flow falling away as the summer progresses. I could of course let it go wild, as I do the Brook, but that would fly in the face of everything the restoration was meant to achieve, so somehow I have to work out a solution. In an ideal world I might build an enormous current deflector to redirect the water out of the Evitt and into North Stream, but actually it wouldn’t be so ideal, a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. No, the solution lies in harnessing the power of what the river has in abundance. Weed.
The chalkstreams work so well because they are all about gradual gradients. Nothing dramatic; the fall of 2 inches over a mile is enough for that steady pace of water that creates the burbling streams that trout, invertebrates and all the other creatures love. Any more and the water would rush to the sea, emptying the rivers faster than the aquifers could fill them. Any slower and the cool, oxygenated water would soon start to stagnate. Somehow I knew back in July I’d have to replicate this fall between where the water comes into North Stream from the Evitt and then returns to the river some three-quarters of a mile downstream. So during the weed cut that month we left a bar of weed 50 yards long, stretching across the width of the river immediately below the entrance to North Stream, uncut. After a while it began to look raggedy and unkempt, looking more untidy by the day as the white crowfoot flowers carpeted the surface to the point where no water could be seen except for a few rivulets that forced a threaded passage between the weed. As August heated up, the surface weed flourished, and beneath the water the bulk of it thickened, so much so that a family of moorhens more or less took up permanent residence, building a sort of nest in the middle of the weed bed. The grey wagtails moved in as well to call it home, with their bright yellow bellies and frenetic tails that beat up and down as they hopped around searching for insects as if on solid ground.
Gradually (things rarely happen fast on a chalkstream) the barrier the weed bar created started to impede the flow, raising the water upstream of it a fraction of an inch every day, which had nowhere to go but down North Stream. At first it was a question of stemming the wound, but as the days went by I could see the life come back into North Stream, and when the time came around for the August weed cut we were able to trim the weed immediately below where the carrier rejoins the Evitt to give the water free passage out of the North Stream, allowing it to flow faster still. Crisis over; the weed bar would stay in place until the autumn rains came, when we would cut it away.
Trout get lazy in summer. Too much time. Plenty of food. As the song goes, the living is easy, but in this case the fish aren’t jumping or more pertinently rising, which is when the box of nymphs comes out from the fishing waistcoat. For some the very thought of fishing with a nymph is the folly of a philistine, the piscatorial equivalent of cheating at patience, but fly-fishing comes in all shapes and sizes. Essentially the style of fly-fishing on the chalkstreams falls into three groups: wet fly, dry fly and nymph. Each method has its detractors and supporters, but essentially the aim of all three methods is to cast, or at least put, something in front of the trout (or salmon) that looks like food. The rest as they say should be history.
The manner of the wet fly we fish today, which is mostly used for sea trout and salmon, is a long way from the wet-fly method that our ancestors fished until mid-Victorian times. Fishing scenes in paintings from the seventeenth or eighteenth century generally depict gentlemen in breeches and waistcoats holding long rods, maybe 12 or 15 feet as opposed to those nearly half that length today, facing and fishing downstream. The rods they used were not much good for casting in the way we do today, fashioned as they were out of stiff, heavy greenheart wood. It was more flicking than casting, the line made of tapered horsehair tied to the tip of the rod – these men fished without reels. The wet fly attached to the end was fished in the manner the name suggests, sunk beneath the surface with the current giving it movement as it swung across and downstream. The wet flies were not tied to imitate a particular nymph or insect, but rather as an attractor that goaded the fish into action – if it looked like anything it would be a small fish. As a way of catching fish it can’t have been easy. On a windy day, getting the line out would have been a struggle and all that chalkstream crowfoot offered endless prospects for getting caught as the line swung round on the current. Add to that an outfit that was hardly what you would call sturdy: a stiff pole, no reel, and a horsehair line that could easily be snapped by a two-pound trout, which made the prospect of landing a fish, let alone hooking one, daunting. And heaven forbid that a salmon took the fly – you would be smashed up in a trice. This was the world that was as familiar to Izaak Walton of Compleat Angler fame in 1653 as it was to anyone fishing at the time that Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, but during her reign everything was to change.
The change happened for lots of reasons: intellectual curiosity, an adapting society, advances in technology, but most of all because what came after (dry fly) was better than what went before (wet fly) for the very reasons people go fishing – to catch fish. The technology of the time, such as it was, brought innovations to the fishing community. Proper reels, rods made of flexible split-cane bamboo, braided silk lines and steel hooks became commonplace. The grand estates moved from being purely agrarian to the playgrounds of the landed gentry, the entertainment including fishing. Educated people had the time, means and desire to seek new ways of catching fish, and one of them was a successful manufacturer, Frederic M. Halford. It is often said that Halford invented dry fly-fishing, but that is as wrong as saying that Doctor Johnson invented English. What he did do is draw together the disparate practices of his day, codify a collection of fly patterns in common use at the time, and give some semblance of order to define what we now understand as dry fly-fishing. A chalkstream man through and through, Halford would recognize Gavelwood as every bit the type of river on which he based the two books, published in the 1880s, that sparked the dry-fly revolution. The creed, which demanded that the fly-fisher only fish to a rising fish with a fly that accurately imitated the insect it was rising to, swept the trout fly-fishing world. However his pre-eminence was challenged thirty years later by G. E. M. Skues, who truly did invent a new style of fly-fishing, that of using a nymph, to cause a rift in the fly-fishing community that exists to this day.
The problem for Skues was that by the time he started to write about nymph fishing in the years just before the outbreak of the First World War, the Halford way had become the only way to fish; wet fly-fishing was consigned to history, and anything that involved a sunken fly on a chalkstream derided. It is hard to imagine it now, but Halford became something of a superstar. Anyone who was anyone with an interest in fly-fishing at one point or other made their way to pay homage to him at his Oakley fishing hut on the banks of the River Test at Mottisfont Abbey, including by all accounts Skues, who published his first book on nymph fishing, Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream, in 1910, four years before Halford’s death. I have no idea what sort of man Skues was, but he must have had broad shoulders, for the opprobrium and downright hatred that greeted his style of fishing were beyond all reason. Cheating. Unsporting. Unethical. These were all words commonly used, and many river owners banned the use of the nymph, a ban that continues to this day on some rivers for all or part of the season. It was an extraordinary outcome really; all Skues was doing was applying the same logic as Halford – identify a feeding fish, but this time under the water, and then fish upstream of it using an imitation of the sub-surface insect, namely the nymph.
If anyone thought the schism would close with the death of Halford they would be in for a shock, as the disciples of the dry fly became more vociferous and determined to promulgate what they saw as the only proper manner in which to fish a chalkstream. Skues ratcheted up the pressure with a follow-up book, The Way of a Trout with the Fly, in 1921 that established the nymph-fishing technique in the same way that Halford had with Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice in 1889. It all culminated in 1938 with an Oxford Union-style debate called by the committee of the venerable Flyfishers’ Club entitled ‘The ethics of nymph fishing in chalk streams’. The parameters of the debate and the direction of travel were clear in the manner in which the title of the debate was framed, but Skues, now eighty years old, entered the lions’ den to put his case to the assembled members. To the surprise of none he was roundly defeated, the vote vastly in favour of dry fly as the only acceptable method. Fortunately for the August anglers at Gavelwood the result of the Flyfishers’ debate doesn’t hold much sway today, and techniques Skues pioneered are meat and drink for the thoughtful as the nature of a summer river changes the mindset of the fish. I said the fish are lazy – they are not really. It is rather that they adapt to what is happening in the water around them; after all they are better placed than anyone else to observe the habits of the insects they like to feed on, and those habits change as the days get hotter.
Essentially, if you are a nymph ready to hatch on a blazing hot day you will find you face something of a conundrum. You are all pumped up and ready to go, but when you reach the thin final layer of the river surface through which you have to push, it is an unfriendly place to be: unnaturally hot, sucked clean of oxygen and stretched tight. Add to that the fact that none of your fellows are hatching and you might wonder if all the risk and effort will turn out to be ultimately pointless. So you decide to wait, maybe for the cool of evening or the damp of the following morning, but one way or another with your feeding days over, so that you have nothing to do but flit around near the bottom to while away the hours. You are naturally not alone in this thought process, and as the day heats up more nymphs arrive at the same conclusion, with fewer and fewer hatching.
For the angler on the bank the river is glassy flat, barely a fly or a rising fish to be seen. But this is August. The streams of Gavelwood are truly pellucid, the bright sunshine illuminating the riverbed, the rays bouncing back off the gravel. Down close to the bottom life goes on in the perfect cool of the chalkstream water. It may be arid at the surface and blazing hot in the air, but for the trout and the nymphs everything is just as it should be. As I peer into the translucently clear water I don’t need polarized glasses to see the fish, who gently hang a few inches above the stones, swaying with the current. If I am careful I can watch them unobserved, but the bright sunshine is a double-edged sword – if you can see them, they can see you. Confident though they are out in the river, eager to feed, they are ever alert to predators. The slightest shadow, even a bird flitting across the face of the sun, will send them dashing for cover to hide under a clump of weed or bank undercut until the coast is clear.
As morning turns to afternoon there develops something of a nymph logjam under the water, as the hatching grinds to a halt and the numbers multiply. The trout can hardly believe their luck. There are nymphs everywhere, and not even hidden away; freed of the necessity to feed, our little invertebrates abandon the cover of the weed beds to enjoy the open water. It is hardly a wise career choice, as the trout take full advantage, but it is fascinating to see how they go about it. Six months ago Scar Boy and his cohorts, half the size that they are today, would have been in total ferment, careering back and forth chasing down every nymph, expending nearly as much energy in the chase as they gained in the consumption. But now they are not lazy but wise. They know that if they wait the nymphs will come to them, and a simple movement of the head, or a slide of the body by a few inches left or right, and the food will all but swim into their open mouths. It is the ultimate reward-for-effort equation and the trout just revel in it. And so do the anglers, at least those of the Skues persuasion, who will snip off the dry fly and tie on a nymph.
The Gavelwood anglers treat this time of the year as one all of its own; a challenge thrown down by nature and the trout to be taken on in no uncertain terms. Gone are the waxed jackets, bulky waistcoats and rubber boots; the trout are cool and comfortable, so there is no reason why we should not be as well as the summer stillness envelops the river valley. The cattle barely move in the heat. The birds rest in the shade of the trees. The voles relax in their damp burrows. The otters sleep in their holts, as do the bats in the dark recesses of the Drowners House. Alone of the creatures beside the bank it is the damselfly that revels in the conditions as the mercury rises. Quite unlike any of the other invertebrates on the chalkstreams, with the exception of the dragonfly, which are far less common, they are by a long way the biggest insects you will see all year. If you are in any doubt as to whether it is a dragon or a damsel watch them fly; dragonflies can hover whilst damselflies cannot. But regardless of that, it is amazing how the neon blue of the damselfly body will stand out against the pink, yellow, purple and green of the riverbank plants. There will be hundreds, maybe thousands, within a relatively short stretch of river as they fly from stem to stem in search of a suitable mate. The mating itself is extraordinary, the two furling their long abdomens into a heart-shaped mating wheel. The male lands on a stem directly in front of his mate, stretching his abdomen back to grasp her by the scruff of her neck. Supported by the male, she is in turn able to curl her abdomen under her body to grasp his reproductive organs from below, and in this rather beautiful tableau the mating takes place.
What happens next is pretty well unique amongst the invertebrate kingdom (at least on the chalkstreams) as the two fly off together for the egg-laying. This is completely at odds with the mayflies, the midges, the sedges and just about every other fly you care to name, for whom once mating is over the usefulness of the male is at an end, left to die in the meadows as the female returns to the river. It might be one step up the scale from the post-coital female praying mantis devouring the male, but is by any measure a long way short of a romantic finale, but the damselfly pair redeem them all as they head for the margins along the river together. Alighting on a stem or reed emerging from the river, the female crawls down to lay her eggs beneath the surface, whilst all that time the male, at her most vulnerable moment, keeps guard from above until the eggs are laid and they can die together. Some days, as I creep upriver in the summer heat, a fish will throw himself out at the guardian damselfly, crashing down amongst the reeds. Rarely does the exuberance seem to have the reward the effort deserves, as the male flutters away unharmed, though quite how the commotion affects the female mid-laying one can only guess. Her greatest danger is really from the eels, and I can’t imagine how the male hopes to protect her from Anguilla other than by being a lookout, so however chivalrous his intent, it is a mystery to me why he does what he does.
These days of late summer always feel to me as if nature has rolled out a giant aquarium through the valley. The silver ribbon of the river is perfectly framed by the vivid green of the banks. The water is so clear that you hardly know it is there, but its wetness varnishes each stone on the riverbed. The sun, so high in the sky, casts no shadow, the penetrating rays magnifying every thing and every movement. Even I, who think I know the river better than anyone, notice things I have never seen before – the brick foundations of an old bridge pier that must have been demolished decades ago. A line of rusted iron posts, the jagged tops just poking out of the riverbed, evidence of some long-forgotten bank repair. The contours of the riverbed showing up as if in 3D, a tapestry of green weed, loose gravel and soft silt. Standing there on the bank, with a bird’s-eye view, all the life of a river is laid out before me. It is as if, for the first time in the year, nothing is hidden from sight. Every fish, every eel, every crayfish, every snail, every shrimp that moves I see. As my eyes grow accustomed to the glare even those at rest or keeping out of the glare come into vision. But best of all, every generation of trout is represented within each few square yards of water, proof that the future is assured. The tiny ones, no more than 4 inches long, the product of the winter spawning. The yearlings, now eighteen months old, are easily distinguished by the black tips to their fins and tail that contrast with their pale bodies. The third-year fish are the perfect ones, with elongated bodies, white-golden skin and bright red spots. This winter will be the first for them to pass on their genes, and with each successive year they will grow darker and plumper, but for now they are the fish that catch the eye.
But for all that I can see, the one thing I can’t pick out is the nymphs. I know they must be there. The trout tell me it must be so, as they all, regardless of age, hover on the current, making the occasional small movement left, right or forward to swallow down the food which is unseen to me. This is too good a moment to pass up, so I open my fly box and stare at the array of nymphs, hoping inspiration might come for which to pick. After all, unlike dry fly, where it is all writ large, there is nothing I can see that tells me what the trout are eating, other than it is a nymph, but of what sort I do not know. In my head I run through a list of what it might be. The constant presence of the damselflies offers a clue; it could well be a damsel nymph. On the other hand an olive nymph of the blue-wings caught in the spider webs seems logical. Common sense tells me that at this time of year the caddis nymphs will be stacking up ready to hatch. Whichever I choose, it is really through inspired guesswork and by trial and error that I will eliminate each until I find what works. Maybe it was this, the imprecise science of nymph selection, that so infuriated the Halford disciples.
Some people say you need to achieve a Zen-like state to be a nymph fisherman of the highest order, with your actions and mind totally focused on the fish and the act of fishing. That might be something of an exaggeration, but if I am in a hurry to be elsewhere or my mind is on other things it rarely goes well, and the belief that you need to see the world without distortion definitely rings true. Kneeling down behind a clump of fluffy meadowsweet for cover, I get in position to survey the fish 10 to 15 yards ahead. In terms of which fish to target I am spoilt for choice. Part of me says go for the biggest. Another part says just cast and hope. Neither option seems very Zen, so I look for the one I would most like to catch, picking out a beautiful third-year fish who is hanging under a clump of weed, showing himself from time to time as he moves to the left to feed. The first nymph up for trial – picked, I have to confess, at random – is the damselfly. It is bigger than most others in my selection, green, with tiny glass eyes and about an inch and a half long, half of which is a waggly tail. This is a tasty morsel for any fish and surely cannot fail with one as eager to feed as this one. But fail it does. After five casts not even a look, or any indication that the fish even acknowledged my fly’s existence. Time to change. This time I go to the other extreme with a tiny olive nymph no more than a quarter of an inch long, barely bulkier than the thin wire of the hook onto which it is tied. The results are similarly dismal but yet more annoying, as the fish continues to feed just before or just after my fly has trundled past. Failure seems to make the sun burn hotter, so I rest back on my haunches to watch the fish to divine some clues. I cannot see what he is eating, but I can see how he is eating, only picking food that is in a layer 3 inches above the riverbed, the precise level at which he has positioned his body in the current. He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t look down. However he is willing to go a foot to the left for his chosen nymph, just so long as it is in the layer. Clearly the depth of my fly is critical.
Back in position behind the meadowsweet, this time I tie on a Pheasant Tail Nymph, a drab but simple pattern, so called because it is made with a few turns of brown pheasant feather held in place with copper wire. Its very ordinariness belies its effectiveness, the single most successful fly ever invented, which catches trout from Australia to Alaska and every continent in between. Created by a humble Wiltshire river keeper in the 1950s, on a chalkstream no more than 25 miles from where I stand today, it is a generic nymph pattern that must trigger something deep in the psyche of trout wherever they happen to live. My first cast has something of a tracer-fire quality to it. It would be good to make it my best, as I would a dry fly, but there is the variable of depth to add to direction and length. As my nymph lands on the surface I have the same problem as the real nymphs do in coming up; a taut layer of surface film that is hard to break through. Woefully inadequate as a first cast, the nymph has barely broken the surface by the time it passes, unnoticed, over the head of the trout. The second cast is a bit better; the nymph has taken on a little water and the extra density helps it sink maybe 4 or 5 inches. Not enough – I need to triple or quadruple that – but a start. With each successive cast I land the fly further and further ahead of the trout to give it time to sink. Depending on the refraction of the light or how it hangs in the water I can sometimes spot the nymph, but generally not, relying more on instinct (Zen?) than sight to estimate the depth as it passes the trout.
Soon the world narrows to just the cast, the nymph and the fish as I repeatedly lay out the line. Sometimes I think he has moved across to my fly. I tense, pull in a little extra line ready to strike by raising the rod tip the moment he opens and closes his mouth. But he doesn’t take the fly, so I relax to let the line pass him by before re-casting. Other times I strike only to realize he had swallowed down a real nymph, not my apparently feeble imitation. As a rhythm establishes itself I have this absolute certainty that, just so long as I don’t spook him with a splashy cast or careless shadow, I will catch this trout. It is simply a matter of timing: his and mine. And then it comes together. The cast. The movement of the line and the nymph. The posture of the trout as he readies himself. He moves to the left. He opens his mouth. I raise the rod tip. The rod bends, the line tightens and for a fraction of a moment I can see the confusion in the trout as the hook sets. Then anger replaces confusion as he violently shakes his head but unable to free himself heads away upstream, pulling line off the reel. Our trout is still young, without the wiles of the older trout who would have headed for a tree root or some other obstruction that spelt safety, but with his three-quarter-pound bulk he is easy to control, and within thirty seconds I guide him back downstream, into my hand; once released he heads back to the clump of weed where I first spied him, this time burrowing his head into it so that he disappears from view. Extraordinarily, none of the other fish seem fazed by what has occurred, continuing to feed and hold station as before. That is typically trout – do a bad cast or spook them in some way and the whole lot flee for cover. But hook one, have the ensuing fight and release it, and none of the others take a blind bit of notice.
On that basis I am tempted to try for another, but the day seems to be getting oppressive, hotter by the minute. Across the stubble of the meadows I can spy the Drowners House, and the siren call of its cool, damp interior beckons.