Life of a Chalkstream: I bought a mill. Was I mad?

Greetings!

Buying a mill is something of an act of faith. Surveyors reports are a waste of time at the best of times (apologies to FRICS members reading this but you know what I mean) as the complications of foundations that have spent centuries, or sometimes millennia, submerged sends your well-meaning assessor and most mortgage companies running for the hills.

Purchase is an act of faith and like a pre-loved Land Rover, handed down through decades of ownership, nobody really wants to tell you what you will find under the bonnet. With every restoration there are the unexpected ‘what the f**k’ moments as the costs, plus even the merest hint of finding anyone to carry out some obscure building process probably last done in Medieval times, set to confound even the most stoic owner.

But then, even when it is all your own, you will have the annual knockdown, drag out contest with your insurance company where some AI driven bot has concluded that your mill spends six months out of every twelve flooded despite the fact that no flood claim has been lodged in a quarter century of ownership. Mills, you point out repeatedly, laugh in the face of once-in-a-decade flood events. Centuries of use has seen the building out of every possible flood scenario.

Now, to be fair to our insurers the NFU, they finally get this after proposing one particularly egregious premium hike. After much toing and froing, I offered, so confident was I of the non-existent flood risk, that they remove flood cover from the policy. Apparently, for reasons nobody could ever explain, this is not possible but the very thought seemed to send the bot into some sort of existential crisis and the policy was renewed with flood cover in place at a cost lower than the pre-increase rate.

The dark, wee hole .....

All this tumbled through my mind on Sunday as I pondered some strange behaviour of the side stream that flows in a 25 yard channel under one side of The Mill house – water seemed to be going in at the normal rate but coming out in a trickle. If I was a potholing enthusiast, I might have relished the challenge of inspecting what is effectively a dark, wet tunnel a bit over shoulder width and with two feet of headroom. However, the closest I intended to get was with a high beam torch. At the entrance I hung over the edge of the stream, my head so close that my hair flopped into the water. As the beam shined darkness back at me it was abundantly clear there was some sort of serious blockage.

Now my default in this situation is drain rods, of which I have an impressive collection and a variety of bespoke end tools. My plan was to penetrate whatever the blockage was until the rod end appeared at the other end of the building. At which point I would attach one of my ‘special’ tools, pull the rods back until the tool engaged with the blockage to use brute force and the power of the built up water to free whatever it was. Brilliant! It never fails until it fails, which it did here. My rods were not up to the basic task of penetrating the blockage, as effective as hammering a rubber nail into a brick wall.

As you may have guessed the blockage was not conveniently located close to either end of the tunnel; the drain rods seemed to indicate somewhere in the middle. The first attempt at ramming it with a 5 metre section of 2x2 timber amply proved this deduction to be true as I lay in the stream (yes, I’d given up all attempts at staying dry) with my head and shoulders in the entrance with arms outstretched. Screwing a second 5 metre section to the first provided the bingo moment with the satisfying thud of wood against blockage. Of course, it is bloody hard to manoeuvre a square pole of that weight and length but the water helped, floating it into position and the natural warping of wood gave it a bit of a banana curve so by rotating the square pole I could alter the height at which it hit the blockage.

The 'tunnel' goes under what was once the Vincent Bakery on right

At first not much happened, a few leaves and twigs floating past me until there was a bit of a rush of dirty water followed by a yew tree branch, the clean saw cut indicating a pruning. Goodness, I swore and wished great evil upon whichever villager had discarded this in the stream. It is not by chance yew is the chosen material for long bows; it never rots or breaks. A second yew branch followed the first and all of a sudden, the stream was flowing as it should. Victory! Or it was until I did one last check, the torch revealing two pieces of timber, one each side of the tunnel that appeared to have fallen from the roof onto the stream bed to create a V against which the yew branches had lodged which, with the build up of other detritus, had created an effective dam. The timbers clearly had to go.

Perching the torch in the stream on a pile of flints for some sort of light it was now a case of randomly bashing away with the 10 metre narrow pole, in the direction of the edge of a narrow board in the hope they might connect. They mostly did not but when they did it was enough to have some effect, the first floating down into my hand the second more problematic jamming crossways a few times before finally seeing the light of day for the first time in four centuries. My guess is that when this particular part of The Mill was built these oak boards, still in remarkably good condition considering the age and dank environment, had been used as shuttering to cover up the stream on to which the floor was laid.

Anyway, to come back to my original question was I mad to buy a mill? Certainly, on certain days it does afflict you with a certain madness – Sunday was one of those days. But it is a good mad. The flow of the water is endlessly fascinating and the creative genius of whoever designed the layout back in pre-Domesday Book days a constant source of admiration to me. And when I held those boards, whatever nuisance they may have caused, I wondered of the person who had last held them in the early 1700’s when Nether Wallop was part of the Earl of Portsmouth (family name Wallop) estate that extended from Basingstoke to the sea, George I was still yet to ascend the throne and life must have been so, so very different. It is sort of humbling and makes it all worthwhile.

Both wood and me considerably dried out

Your rod licence money down the Swanee

I frequently take to task our old friends the Environment Agency (EA) and the Angling Trust (AT) both here and in other forums. I rarely get upbraided with regard to the former who seem to have few friends these days, except in the corridors of power whose mandarins as yet do not seem to have twigged the EA as a serial incompetent. The latter has more defenders and CEO, Jamie Cook usually fights his corner. But the latest figures that highlight a 14% drop in rod licence sales in five years tie them to the same whipping post.

For those of you who are not aware of the labyrinthine workings of the EA, part of your rod licence money is redistributed to the Angling Trust who have a multi-year contract, which runs to many millions of pounds, to promote angling whilst also policing the enforcement of rod licences on the riverbank.

During the decade or so in which the Trust has had this contract it has built up an impressive bureaucracy of engagement, training, diversity and enforcement personnel to deliver all this under the umbrella of the National Angling Strategy (NAS) which they boasted in a press release on 18 January 2024 was doing ‘sterling work … in helping maintain and grow the sport …’.

Really? The data from rod licence sales tells a whole different story. Since 2018 (the NAS in current form began in 2019) the number of licence buying anglers, after a brief uptick during Covid, has declined by 118,211. In 2018 there were 847,846 unique anglers, in 2024 that figure stands at 729,635. Whatever the EA, the AT along with other funding recipients the Angling Trades Association, Association of Canals and Rivers Trust, Get Hooked and Sport England are doing it is clearly not working.

My long held view is that it is high time the rod licence was abolished; if you really want people to do something do not tax them to do it! We do not pay to run in a park. We do not pay to canoe on a canal. We do not pay to fish in the sea. We do not pay to hike in a National Park.

If you strip out the costs of collecting the rod licence, the cost of enforcement, the cost of court prosecutions, the pointless money-go-round of the National Angling Strategy you will be left with something under £10 million, an accounting margin for error in the mammoth £1.3 billion annual budget of the Environment Agency.

Why our rivers are the way they are .... and how to save them

Just a swift reminder for those who missed it that I will be speaking tonight in Nether Wallop on Friday 16 February on the topic, “Why our rivers are the way they are .... and how to save them”.

Doors open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start. Admission is £10/person including a glass of wine with all proceeds to the Village Hall Fund. Everyone welcome and pre booking not required. The talk takes place at the Village Hall, The Square, Nether Wallop, SO20 8EX.

The strangest film on endangered Atlantic salmon you will ever watch

Wild Summon, described by the Bristol-based filmmakers as a ’natural history fantasy’ and mostly shot in Iceland tells the life story of the Atlantic salmon through animation, CGI and a salmon-like woman in a wet suit.

If it sounds strange, it is strange but it won all sorts of awards at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is nominated for an Oscar and is up at the BAFTAs this Sunday. Personally, I hated the trailer that almost stopped me watching the full 14 minute film. But the film is brilliant. It encapsulates all that is amazing about the lifecycle of the salmon whilst highlighting the natural dangers and our human destruction.

For most of us, we are pretty jaded by the truth of the dangers to Atlantic salmon. But we have to hope that a film of this nature, given enough visibility, will alert a new generation to the wilful destruction of yet another precious species.

Wild Summon can be streamed for free on Bafta’s YouTube until 20 February

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 did Howard Carter open on this day in 1923?

2) Name one of seven English towns or villages that start with the letter Z.

3) Which monarch was on the British throne in 1700? Clue: same name as the next monarch after Charles III.