Life of a Chalkstream: An English Journey (with a bit of Wales)

Greetings!

I am sitting in the cool writing this, on the hottest day of the year, at the round table at the very centre of Charles Cotton’s Fishing Temple. The oak doors are open. Outside we are on the cusp of autumn, that moment when leaves start to turn from pliant green to brittle brown. The fall is still someway off but, despite the unseasonal heat, you can sense change in the air.

A blackbird is my sole company his melodic, whistling call percolating into the stone room, For the most part he observes me from a nearby bush but, every so often, he alights to the triple tier of the entrance steps to get a better look at me, cocking his head sideways, to pretend with some birdlike deceit that he is not looking at me. We both know he is.

I would also like to pretend that my moment was an exact facsimile of when Charles Cotton and Izaak Walton both communed in this very building, built in 1674 by Cotton, a large and wealthy owner in these parts of Derbyshire, to celebrate their combined love of fishing. By this time The Compleat Angler, originally published in 1653, was already into its fifth edition, with the original thirteen chapters expanded to twenty one with Cotton adding the fly fishing sections. It would go on to be the second most reprinted book of all time behind the St James Bible.

Cotton's Fishing Temple on the River Dove

Unfortunately, 21^st century intrusions make it hard to exactly replicate the days of our angling forebears as, at 90 second intervals, at twenty five thousand feet the engines of huge aircraft bound for North America scream as they execute a sharp and rising turn to the west. I stand up to close doors, the heavy, cast iron hinges swinging the thick wood into the stone frame with satisfying precision. The blackbird gives me a dirty look as I do so but the closure does the job; as I return to the table three and a half centuries of silence envelop me.

‘Study to be quiet’. So wrote Walton so I did just that within the four walls, each as thick as your arm is long. The Temple is a perfectly square building. Not huge at maybe fifteen feet it each direction covered by a steep, four sided roof which is ‘tiled’ with slates hewn from the local limestone rock topped by a fish weathervane on a square pillar with a sundial on each face etched with the intertwined CWC initials of Cotton. Inside it is surprisingly bright and airy, with the rafters exposed to the full extent of the tall ceiling and similarly tall stone mullioned lead light windows in every wall. The floor is worn by age and use, but the square stones still sit in the regular fashion as dressed by those masons so many centuries ago. In one corner sits an open fireplace, spilling out ash with a surround, again stone, that sports the CWC motif in each corner.

Are we exaggerating in calling this a Temple? I think not. It is a temple to our sport that has survived wars, plagues and insurrections. As Tennyson wrote of streams, men may come and men may go but I go on forever. Such is our pursuit of fish. I hope sometime in the late 24^th century, another three and a half centuries on from now, an equally daft but dedicated cohort such as our own will still sit in wonder at Cotton’s Fishing Temple.

Walton & Cotton

This Editor Notes: This piece was originally destined for my Trout & Salmon column. However, in the early evening last Friday I had a call from the editor Andrew Flitcroft. Now, late calls usually mean one of two things: you’ve missed the deadline or someone is threatening to sue. I have had both.

However, this call was of the third type – you’re fired! Now to be fair to Andrew when Trout & Salmon changed hands earlier in the year, I said that if a columnist cull was required, I would willingly stand aside; six years and 71 columns being a fair crack. Well, if you put your head in a noose expect to be hung and so, as the magazine ‘is going in a different direction’, the trapdoor was released from beneath me.

Temple Catch Record Book

An unlikely place for a chalkstream

My visit to the Temple was part of a triangular road trip to the outermost reaches of the Fishing Breaks empire which started in the Yorkshire Wolds at Driffield Beck.

The flat, farming landscape, more akin to the fens than the southern chalkstream landscape always strikes me as an unlikely place for a river as lovely as the Driffield Beck which you can make sound even less appealing by pointing out that it is a tributary of the River Hull, eventually spilling into the Humber Estuary.

Andrew Dixon - Mulberry Whin owner

But north-east English caricatures aside, if you did not know any better you could easily mistake it for Hampshire’s best – clear, fast and with a verdant growth of the all-important ranunculus in quantities I have rarely seen anywhere else in recent years. As I looked at it with owner/farmer Andrew Dixon, the second generation custodian, I could not put my finger on what was wrong. It was only after we had walked almost all the river that I twigged what was missing: the wretched blanket weed which is an unwanted feature of most rivers by late summer, that straggly, filamentous weed that thrives when flows reduce and the phosphate count shoots up.

Of course, there is a downside to all this good weed – it needs to be cut. Andrew, ever the resourceful Yorkshire farmer, has eschewed one of our fancy southern weed boats for his own dingy, battery powered contraption. He tells me it is his favourite thing for a summer 4am start to whirr up and down the river, with a flask of coffee, taking in the dawn until the batteries run out and the farming day kicks in.

Where are you Mr. Barbel?

From east to west the various contortions of the M6, M54 and A49 took me to the border with Wales and the River Wye to meet my old friend John Bailey who was taking a few days out from filming the sixth (or maybe seventh I lose count ….) series of Mortimer & Whitehouse Go Fishing.

I am sure you all know it by now but from the outset John has been the Fishing Consultant to the series. It is he who scouts out the locations and lines up the fish (or not!) for the camera. It has now really become quite the operation, with each episode requiring a three day shoot and a crew of eighteen, plus reconnaissance visits by John and the production team.

But I was not there for any of that but rather a catch up with John and the chance to fill in a blank of my record book with a barbel. John has three lovely sections of the Wye just above and below Hay-on-Wye. This provides him with the chance to boast that he will catch you a barbel before lunch in England and another in Wales after lunch.

John Bailey

Sadly, we only had time to fish one swim on one section and I was to be denied any sort of pre or post prandial barbel with just Mr Chub coming to visit my boile* in the twenty minutes we actually spent fishing before the midday sun, on the second hottest day of the year, drove us off the river and out of our waders with me heading home and John to more televisual creations.

*John has a particular dislike for the term ‘boile’ and offers a prize (as yet unspecified) to anyone who can come up with a better name. John also has some insightful thoughts on canoeists, kayakers and rafters which I will bring you in the wider context of wild swimming and other rivers next time.

Quiz

The normal random collection of questions inspired by the date, events or topics in the Newsletter. It is just for fun with answers at the bottom of the page.

1) What is a gimmer?

2) Who landed on the Galapagos Islands on this day in 1835?

3) How long is the English/Welsh border? a) 120 miles b) 160 miles c) 200 miles d) 240 miles.