the forgotten chalk stream - bamboo diaries #5

As is customary at this time of year I'm looking in two directions, almost at once. I'm looking forward to the new trout season ahead, trying to think where I should be making a symbolic first cast on opening day - and to decide this I'm looking back. Back to a page from my diary of last summer..    

This place is special, unique. 

I feel like I've stepped back in time, and in a way I've had to, in order to find this hidden gem. I love books and I can't resist searching the second-hand shelves for old fly fishing titles. The one that spoke of this stream, the one that brought me here today, was written in the early 1900's. A short passage describing the river captured my interest because it's set in an area of countryside that's vaguely familiar to me through the travels of an earlier life. Of the river I was unaware, though my journeys had unwittingly taken me close by. Such is its hidden nature, folded into the landscape, that to an outsider the river could remain forever unknown.

Intrigued to learn more, I had trawled internet fly forums looking for any little scraps of information that would tell me of the health and fishability of the river today. With a bit of digging around I discovered that about a mile of the river flows past land with public access and while fishing rights are obscure, the forum entries, scant as they are, speak only of low flow, silt and pollution, and not of trout. 

So it was here that my quest almost ended. Except that by fluke a business meeting recently popped up in my diary just a few miles down the road, and do you know, I just had a curious feeling that I should go and find out the state of play for myself. I suspected much of the anecdotal information to be incorrect - arising from a popular confusion between this river and another in a neighbouring county. This was borne out earlier when my GPS,  acting on the only postcode I have, guided me to a wrong location by the wrong river. Adding to this confusion, the river is mis-named on Google Earth. 

A conspiracy of techno red-herrings then have kept the river secret, concealing it from all but the determined few. What I thought would be a casual twenty minute stroll after my meeting turned into hours of driving farm tracks, bushwhacking and talking to locals. But eventually, more by luck and perseverance than by judgement I eventually found my stream. And my eyes popped. Good flow, meandering clear water, bright gravels, pools, riffles, mayfly ... and trout. Wild brown trout. And save for the farmer's boy, probably never fished for in living memory, in a trout's living memory at least. A rare and precious fragment of wild chalkstream, untamed, unmanaged and unstocked, as the Gods intended. The only manicure this river receives is administered by livestock through a barbed wire fence. 

There's certainly no concession made here for anglers, but this seems a perfect place to bring the cane and horsehair to try for a trout. Fishing lowland rivers with tenkara is a very different prospect to the broken, tumbling water of high gradient upland streams, which in comparison are to be honest, a piece of cake. You may grow in the belief that you are a good angler on such rivers and perhaps you are, but here in these placid, gin clear glides with tight casting and the spookiest of trout, you may begin to doubt. I certainly did, and the over the few hours I was able to fish here, I could only stand and regard the river's mystery. Silent she stayed, and  no matter how hard I listened she told me nothing.  

But if I pay my dues, the stream I am sure will eventually offer up her riches on the understanding that I hold them but a short while then slip them gently back.     

So this coming new season, should the Weather Gods smile and hold the river bright and clear and confined within her banks - then perhaps on opening day I shall.