“Disembarking at the tiny Mottisfont and Dunbridge station,
I’m met by cheery painted cutouts of grayling and trout, schooling along
the platform fence: avatars of a celebrated river. But the welcome fades
fast as I join the Test Way and encounter a plethora of fences and signage
designed to keep walkers away from the very thing most people come here
for. I meet an agitated elderly man struggling to clean his hands because
he’d inadvertently touched a gate daubed with black anti-climb paint. By
the time I manage to (briefly) encounter the famously clear, bright chalk
water from a bridge, I’m starting to regret coming.
The estate upstream is Mottisfont, owned by the National
Trust. There I meet Alex Olejnik for a tour of the four river beats
immortalised by the father of dry fly fishing, FM Halford. Alex is not what
you might expect a head river keeper on this hallowed water to be. She’s
been in post for 18 months, during which time her boss, Dylan Everett,
recommended she learn all she could about traditional fishery management,
then forget it, because things are changing here.
Last year they stopped stocking fish, mowing banks, cutting
waterweed and removing fallen trees. In March, fishing was paused while the
river restored, and wild fish grew in number and size. Alex no longer
spends time gardening, provisioning huts with water and charcoal, or
cleaning up fishy barbecues. The only grass she’s mowed today was for a
yoga group, and they’re looking into opening up some stretches for
swimming.
The banks are now thick with loosestrife, forget-me-not,
great willowherb, watermint, yarrow, hemp agrimony and vetch, and there’s
movement everywhere: clouded yellow, peacock, red admiral and gatekeeper
butterflies, tiny moths and beetles, dragonflies and damselflies. New
reedbeds have established. Bees nest in one of the thatched fishing huts.
There are tiddlers in the shallows and trout flickering faster than the eye
can follow over golden gravels between thick tresses of water crowfoot.
“It’s a challenge to find the right balance, but we’re
supposed to be a conservation and access organisation,” says Alex. “Fishing
is an important part of local heritage, and we hope there will be anglers
here again. But they’ll be sharing the river with more wildlife and more
people.”
I’m glad I came, after all.”
I agree with Alex – the National
Trust is indeed a conservation and access organisation. But it is also,
based on the Act of Parliament that bought it into being, an organisation
charged with preserving our cultural heritage. Abandoning two centuries of
fly fishing tradition at a stroke strikes me as an abdication of a
responsibility to preserve the birthplace of sport that is now practiced by
tens of millions worldwide who look to the River Test in the same way
that others do to Wimbledon for tennis or St Andrews for golf.
Let us take that analogy a step
further. Would anyone seriously suggest that the fairways and greens of St
Andrews be let to grow wild, the golf reduced to a narrow mown path between
tee and green? Of course not but, apparently, when it comes to fly fishing
such an act of cultural vandalism is absolutely fine based on what seems to
me a whim rather than any thought out strategy beyond some rewilding
fantasy.
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