Life of a Chalkstream: 2025

Saturday, 8 November 2025

The death of Irish lakes and rivers

Greetings!

The fish kill of 32,000 salmon and trout along a 25 mile stretch of the River Blackwater in August may have been the largest event ever of its kind in Ireland but really it is just the foaming head on what is the Republic’s toxic river brew.

The headline ‘The death of Irish lakes and rivers’ is not mine; it is taken from the Irish Times on 15/October which reports on the latest six-year review from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the newspaper concluding that the ‘continuing deterioration of rivers, lakes and estuaries risks arriving at a point where they become ecologically dead.’

A few of the victims of the River Blackwater fish kill

The situation is as bad as anything we have in mainland Britain with 70% of estuaries failing to reach satisfactory status, 44% of rivers having too much nitrogen and one third too much phosphorus, with generally 48% of waters rated below minimum standards. Urban wastewater, urban run-off and forestry are all listed as significant polluters, but it is agriculture that the Irish Times turns its editorial guns on. Citing the River Blackwater, with echoes of our own River Wye, the paper talks of the accumulating environmental stresses and persistent EPA-licenced facilities breaching their operating conditions, with little by way of penalty or prosecution.

I feel slightly vindicated by the Irish Times article because when I am on the road doing my Life of a Chalkstream talks I am nearly always asked whether our calamitous situation in the UK is unique. My answer is no, but even when I cite examples, I can tell I lose the room. However, there are three immutable truths about water pollution across the world. The first is that it does not matter who owns the water companies as it is the management that matters and that is nearly always bad. Secondly, agriculture is always a worse polluter than the water companies, but the public ire is rarely directed in the direction of farmers. And thirdly, water regulators always seem to have rings run around them by the very people and institutions they are supposed to regulate.

In case you are wondering as to the cause of the Blackwater kill, I am afraid you will, as with all of Ireland, be kept wondering. Three months on nobody is any the wiser beyond the fact the fish died from some sort of chemical exposure. Where or from whom that came is not known. In fact, and with echoes of the British Rail ‘wrong kind of snow’, the evidence is thought to have washed away.

That was the year that was 2025

How quickly things change. This time last year I was reflecting on one of the wettest seasons in my memory where some rivers ended the year in the condition you might more normally expect them at the start of the year. In fact, if you recall, conditions were so wet plenty of beats opened late, some not at all and some I closed early as the condition of the banks made access all but impossible but for the most intrepid of souls.

Fast forward twelve months and we are ending this year with one of the driest seasons in my memory, where carpet slippers are as much as you need to keep your feet dry. It has been a tough year for the headwaters and small streams, but once you get into the mid-sections of the major chalkstreams they have looked picture perfect, the River Itchen in particular has barely missed a beat.

A summer on the Itchen

Of course, we now start the long march of winter with the hope of copious rains falling on the chalk downs to recharge the aquifers. Currently the data looks something like this with England as a whole, and the chalkstream regions in particular, experiencing four-fifths of average rainfall during the past six months. Bearing in mind that we mostly have thought of this as a drought year, plus those three mind blowing heatwaves of June and July, makes me feel that 80% is a we-got-away-with-it figure.

According to the data crunchers at the Environment Agency it will take just average rainfall over then winter months to get us where we need to be for the start of next season. That instinctively seems to me about right as the groundwater levels, that is the water stored beneath us from past rain, are rated Normal everywhere I checked. By the way in an interesting aside (if you like this sort of thing) a recent study that sampled water entering the chalkstreams to measure pollutants found a way to date the water concluding that some of today’s river water fell as rain 30 years ago. I have to confess that years ago I was told something similar but I thought it something of a chalkstream myth, but apparently not.

All that brings me to wrap up what has been a successful year, one I will look back on and say yes, 2025 was up there in the top quartile of my professional chalkstream life. From a business point of view we have had more clients than ever, the fishing school barely had time to pause for breath and the guides are gibbering wrecks. We had our end of season party last week and the talk was of just chillin’ with a few days of fishing for fun. Go for it, you deserve it.

LH side from front: Mark McElroy, Si Fields, Steve Batten, Bob Preston, Richard Leamon, Diane Bassett, Steve Dowling, Chris Sawby & Lucy Waddington. RH side from front: Jamie Pankhurst (legs & arms only!), Keegan Kennedy, Steve Smith, Nick Parker, Malcolm Price, Mark Bedford-Russell, Sarah Lindsay, Livvy Colechin-Jones & Charley Portsmouth.

My final duty of the trout season is to announce the winner of the Grand Draw from all the feedback form entries this season, the winner collecting 52 flies (a hot dozen of 13 patterns, 4 of each, enough for a whole season), a hand drawn/illustrated book and one an engraved 4” classic Wheatley boxes from our vice master, Nigel Nunn. Well done, John Hall a regular of many years standing who, on this occasion, fished in July at Qing Ya Xi.

A good trout will always appreciate a well tied fly .....

Dick Cheney: fly fisher and politician

I cannot say I ever met Dick Cheney, but I did once stand beside him in the dinner queue at the One Fly in Jackson Hole, Wyoming his home and the state he represented in Congress on his way to becoming Vice-President under George Bush Jnr.

His passion for fly fishing became something legendary during his time in the White House, the local fishing guides to this day recounting tales of snipers watching over him from high up on the bluffs over the Snake River, Secret Service people in unlikely fishing attire in outriding drift boats, with divers dressed, ready for action. Cheney used to joke that far from being there to prevent some James Bond-style waterborne assassination attempt they were rather there to prevent him drowning. Fishing Wyoming rivers entails taking on Class V whitewater rapids every day, with capsizes frequent. In fact, the One Fly nearly ended the year it started when a guide drowned in exactly these circumstances and I can attend, as judged by the eighteen stiches in my head, as to the ferocity of the water and the unforgiving nature of the rocks.

Ready for fishin' not politicin'........

Wyoming loved Cheney and fly fishers loved him more. When he arrived at the One Fly dinner the room would rise as one, cheering and applauding as he made his way to his table. Actually, that is not quite true. My friend would remain seated, arms crossed with a face in a rigid scowl. But then again, he did once run, unsuccessfully, for the House of Representatives as a Democrat.

It is fair to say that Cheney was a polarising figure and with his VEEP popularity rating at 18% low his Washington advisers suggested his love of fly fishing, if more known to the American people, might knock off some rough edges. By all accounts the Vice-President did not really take to the idea; the great outdoors did not come without risk. When first nominated at Secretary of Defense by George Bush Snr. he had to fess-up to three youthful indiscretions. Two were drink driving and the third was fishing out of season, for which he received a fine and, in his words, the annoyance of the rangers ‘confiscating the f*****g fish’. I guess the current Vice-President, with his recent snaffo whilst fishing unlicenced with our then Foreign Secretary, David Lammy was just continuing a long tradition of piscatorial disobedience.

Cheney had also been caught out, aside from the time when he accidentally shot a fellow hunter, in what we would now call a social media pile on when an official photo released of him apparently fly fishing seemed to show naked women reflected in his sunglasses. The truth, a bare arm and some weird reflected optics, was only established when the White House distributed the original hi-res image allowing all to determine he was indeed outdoors and fishing, sans any accompanying dance troupe.

Richard Bruce Cheney, politician and fly fisher, born 30 January 1941; died 3 November 2025. He is survived by Lynne and his daughters.

The sunglasses photo from 2008

Don’t abandon the Chalk Stream recovery pack

This was the UK Parliament petition that 13,081 of you signed earlier this year in response to the abandonment of the Chalk Stream Recovery Pack by the current administration, a report commissioned by the last Conservative government when chaired by Charles Rangeley-Wilson.

If you are not familiar with the Pack, this is how Charles describes it:

“The abandoned but oven-ready recovery pack addressed that protection through a range of commitments including time-bound goals for abstraction and phosphorus reduction bringing all chalk streams to good or high status by certain key dates. It also included undertakings to consider chalk streams irreplaceable habitats in planning law, to consider better practical measures to reduce run-off in improved farming rules for water, to include special consideration for chalk streams in national highways and local road network technical guidance, and in restrictions relating to septic tanks.”

Charles Rangeley-Wilson

You can read here the full Government response to the petition, and why the Pack was abandoned. But in a nutshell the reasoning goes, in what are mostly the Government’s words, that the planned creation a new, powerful, and integrated regulator in place of Ofwat, including a regional element to ensure greater local involvement in water planning allows all sources of pollution to be addressed across the river catchment which makes special measures for chalkstreams obsolete.

If you look at the voting map for the petition signatures you can see where the government is coming from on this with support for chalkstreams overwhelming coming in Tory voting constituencies in regions where there are chalkstreams. Randomly clicking around the UK I did find a parliamentary constituency where just one person had voted for the petition and plenty where it was just a handful. You and I may love chalkstreams, but clearly the Labour ministers do not consider them vote getters.

The truth is I am open minded about the whole Pack debate; not everyone in the chalkstream industry gave it their full support. But on the other hand, I fail to see the logic of the Government argument that all rivers are equal. We offer plenty of special protections such as National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Beauty, Green Belts, SSSIs and so on; the Pack was good because it gave us a case for special pleading. But in the end the real worry is that we are putting all our eggs in the new-style Ofwat basket, plus some touchy-feely stuff about a Plan for Change. It is hard to be hopeful.

Quiz

The usual random collection of questions this week inspired by the date and topics today.

1) On this day in 1800 what were women in France banned from wearing without a Police permit?

2) Is the River Blackwater the longest river in Ireland?

3) Under how many US Presidents did Dick Cheney hold government positions?

Answers are at the bottom of this Newsletter.

Have a good weekend.

Best wishes,

Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk

Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk

1) It was trousers, a law not annulled until 2013

2) No, the longest is the River Shannon

3) Three. Gerald Ford as White House Chief of Staff. George H. W. Bush as United States Secretary of Defense. George W. Bush as Vice President of the United States

Saturday, 25 October 2025

Mr. Heron is dead. Long live Mr. Heron

Life on a Chalkstream

24th October 2025

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· Mr. Heron is dead. Long live Mr. Heron

An outbreak of bird flu reaches the Wallop valley

· Arise, Lord Jardine!

· Learning something new about yew

· The power of Gone Fishing

· Wildlife Photographer of the Year

· Quiz

Greetings!

A sad sight the other morning - our resident heron floating dead, partially eaten, on the lake at The Mill.

This is not the first time I have found a dead, adult heron here; a few years back on the Brook I found another that had just been shot. The reason for the death of last week’s heron was harder to discern. We speculated that it may have been attacked by an otter or fox but in a life or death tussle of that nature my money would be firmly on Mr. Heron. They are strong. They are tough. And that is a beak that will pierce deep into any flesh. Maybe, though I could see no injuries to confirm it, that this one had also been shot and wounded, returning home but with injuries that would eventually end its life.

However, all my guesswork was well wide of the mark, for a few days later I heard that in our next-door village of Broughton an outbreak of bird flu had been declared on 11/October the same day we found the corpse. This seems to me the most likely cause of death and that the ever opportunist otters had had a go at the body.

You might think that the death of a heron, a fish eater, might be the cause of celebration but really they are not birds that have much impact on the trout for they are far more focused on easier, smaller prey such as frogs, mice and bullheads. That said, I think Mr. Heron and I had reached a sort of working arrangement. Most mornings I would see him patrolling along the edge of the lake (plenty of our fish have heron-inflicted scars) at which point I would go out onto the balcony and wave my arms which, despite the 50-75 yards distance between us, he would acknowledge by lugubriously taking off to fly a short distance to grumpily take up station in the water meadows.

Of course, I think we both knew we were indulging in a fiction for he would inevitably return later in the day when I was not around. However, judged by the evidence of dead fish, otter kills and heron kills being distinctly different, I would say fur outkills feather 20-1. Anyway, to kill a heron is pointless – there is always a population of the dispossessed looking for a new haunt though for a week or so in our particular instance the egret, who usually had to play second fiddle to Mr. Heron, strutted around with that strange egret head jerk walk, as king of the hill.

But on Monday the natural order of things returned. As I walked around the lake clearing the grilles of the autumn leaves, my daily task between now and Christmas, a grey body curled in the air above my head executing a deft landing on the bank of the lake. Mr. Heron is dead. Long live Mr. Heron

Arise, Lord Jardine!

There are not many headlines that make my heart sing with joy but the one on Monday “Fishing to be taught in schools” certainly did.

For those who missed it, this is a new GCSE, BTEC and A-level qualification that has grown out of The Countryside Alliance Foundation’s Fishing for Schools programme which has been championed by Charles Jardine for nearly twenty years. My gut tells me this might be the fillip angling, and outdoor pastimes in general, needed to arrest the decline in interest of successive generations we have seen over many decades.

Charles Jardine at the House of Commons launch of the new qualifications accompanied by the Lakedown Fishery & Brewery crew

I say this having seen the massive benefit of our local Sparsholt College, a leader in fishery management courses where it is not all about degree level academia. Sparsholt takes young boys and girls at that critical crossroads in their education, where they can swap classroom learning for an institution that values outdoor talent. Fishing Breaks is living proof of this, many who do and have worked with me, proud and talented alumni of Sparsholt. It seems to me that these new qualifications, to be taught in schools from late 2026, which range from Level 1 (Introduction) through to Level 3 (Advanced Skills), the latter earning university entry points, may do for the whole country what Sparsholt has done on a more localised level.

On a side note, four or five years ago, I was asked to sponsor an application for an OBE which I willingly did. For reasons I do not know that OBE was never granted but frankly that person deserves more for his legacy, which will now cascade down through many generations. Arise, Lord Jardine! Can anyone make that happen?

Learning something new about yew

I learnt a new word today – aril. My father had a liking for yew berries but still lived to a ripe old age despite the general assumption that they are deadly poisonous. I was reminded of this as I walked around the perimeter of The Mill this morning which has a yew hedge which this year, in common with most hedgerow plants, is thick with berries.

Unlike my father, I have never quite had the cojones to eat a yew berry, called an aril, the trick being to remove the seed (the poisonous bit), from the red flesh which is indeed edible much liked by birds and, strangely, foxes both of whom have a digestive systems through which the seed passes undigested providing distribution for the species.

However, for nearly all other creatures, including ourselves, yew is deadly poisonous with no antidote which explains why the tree, essential for longbow making, was grown in churchyards - one of the few fenced off areas away from livestock in the times before the first Enclosure Act of 1604.

Of course, like most plants, the yew is not all bad from a human perspective. The drug Docetaxel is derived from yew leaves, a highly effective chemotherapy compound. Slightly more esoterically on hot days, yew can give off hallucinogenic vapours and standing in the fine golden pollen is said to shift consciousness, which may well explain why everyone finds The Mill, with over half a mile of yew hedging, such a calming place!

The power of Gone Fishing

It seems unbelievable for such a cockeyed concept but Gone Fishing, that begins its eighth series on Sunday, has propelled angling back into mainstream consciousness.

Quite why two old gits and a dog has found the sweet spot in the TV viewing habits of BBC watchers I have no idea but I can say for sure, judging by the many people who call up to cast that first line or rekindle a childhood passion, Bob and Paul are mining a productive seam on behalf of all of us in the fishing business.

It is a seam that looks set to continue as angling consultant to the show, John Bailey, tells me they have already begun filming the ninth series, a tenth is under discussion and the Christmas Special is in the can.

John, Paul & Bob

I caught up with John on Tuesday evening, just in from a day trotting with maggots and worms for perch on the River Wye, the banks of which he moved to not so long ago after half a lifetime in East Anglia. John described the day as ‘amazing’ with plenty of good sized perch, chub and barbel. He reckons, subject to rains and frost, we probably have another six weeks to wring out from the neck of the season. So, if you fancy a last gasp day this side of Christmas check out the options with John here ……

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

As ever, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, currently on show at the Natural History Museum did not fail to impress with both the beauty and pain of nature captured by some remarkable people. Having just been writing about egrets it seemed rather appropriate to share this one with you, definitely one of my top ten from the exhibition.

Egret chasing ladyfish chasing bait fish in China

I am sure that you, like me, have fond memories of childhood visits to the Natural History Museum; it is sort of in our collective DNA so I must admit I felt rather embarrassed as a native for the greeting the Museum gives to its visitors, a majority of which are clearly from overseas. Firstly, the cost of admission to Wildlife is an eye-watering £17.50 a head, plus you get harangued to give an extra donation. I do mean literally harangued as once past the ticket barrier you have to pass along a zigzag path between ten donation touch screens with a man shouting imprecations to pull out a credit card to give one last time. I could barely understand what he was saying and I could see the bafflement of non-English speakers who had no idea whether this emotional obstacle course was compulsory or voluntary. And this from an institution that received over £70m this year from the taxpayer.

The commentary that went along with each photo was for the most part helpful and illuminating; rarely are these photos the result of a random point and press of a smartphone. However, readers did get rather bludgeoned with the theme of ‘we are trashing our planet so wake the f**k up’. Genuinely, I do not think anyone there needed to be told this with every third photo.

And then as you leave the darkened exhibition area you enter a brightly lit 10,000 sq. ft hall full of what is best described as tat. You know what I mean; all those pointless trinkets, baubles, mementos and keepsakes that only seem to have a home in tourist gift shops. I suspect 90% of the product is sourced overseas, 95% manufactured from manmade materials and 100% of it all will be landfill within a decade.

Perhaps the Natural History Museum should take a long look in the mirror to ask whether they are doing to our planet themselves precisely what they abhor in others.