Life of a Chalkstream: • Jeremy Clarkson should ban pesticides not Keir Starmer

Greetings!

I saw that Jeremy Clarkson has banned Keir Starmer from his new pub until he gives farmers a ‘better deal’. Poor old Keir. I can well imagine he is devasted and already worried for 2029. After all the farming community, who voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, tipped the balance in his favour to give him that marginal win in the recent General Election.

Now, I like Clarkson’s Farm. It is good TV but it is as much removed from the reality of everyday farming life as The Grand Tour is to keeping the family car on the road. But despite that, Clarkson has become the poster child of British agriculture, ready to lead them, pitchforks in hand, to the barricades to storm the citadels of government who give them such a bad shake. Really?

Jeremy Clarkson

Farming is one of the most cosseted industries in Britain, despite its tiny contribution to GDP. Tax breaks. Planning breaks. Grants galore. Subsidies. The National Farmers Union is embedded right in the heart of government; no policy, trade deal or tax change gets the go ahead without them getting to run the rule of farming interests over it. If that is a bad deal my next car is a Bentley Bentayga.

The truth is however much we might love our farmers and the countryside over which they hold such sway, agriculture is responsible for 40% of all river pollution, more or less the same as sewage pollution. I was really pleased to see that this point is being repeatedly made in the PR for Feargal Sharkey’s water march on 26th October. It should become a given that what is good for the goose (intense scrutiny of water companies) should also be good for the gander (intense scrutiny of farmers). Neither should have a free pass to lay waste our waterways.

I never tire of telling astonished audiences the tale of organophosphates, predominately used as pesticide in agriculture, that took the British otter and raptor population to the brink of extinction from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. This was a complicit stitch up by government and the farming industry who knew during each and every one of those four decades of the huge damage being done by this DDT derivative but refused to institute a ban. We could well be on the cusp of something similar today with bee-killing pesticide neonicotinoids, banned across Europe since 2018, given a special exemption for use by sugar beet farmers last year.

The truth is however much we might yearn for a benign countryside of gently swaying corn fields, contented cows chewing the cud and rough-handed farmers doing the right thing, the reality is very different. British agriculture is for the most part a high tech, high intensity, highly financed food industry that largely does its polluting away from prying eyes, aided and abetted by authorities who turn the other way. That needs to change.

Hanging up the scythe

This week doors will slam and weary bodies will slump into comfortable chairs. At the sounds of a popping beer can and long sigh, river keepers the length and breadth of the chalkstream counties will intone one happy phrase: thank the f**k that is over. For it is the end of the weed cutting season, scythes honed, oiled and hung away until next spring.

Weed cutting on the chalkstreams has been elevated to a high art which is rarely replicated anywhere else in the world. Yes, weed is cut for flood management, lake clearance or opening up waterways for navigation but as an active ecological tool not so much. Plenty think it downright eccentric but when done correctly, aside from looking beautiful, it is every bit as effective as pruning is to a rose bush or land management is to a wildflower meadow.

Aidan Turner in Poldark

As a river keeper you have to juggle four purposes when hefting the scythe: habitat for fish, habitat for river bugs, flow management and the demands of fly fishers. Inevitably, these are sometimes competing demands. Let me explain.

Imagine you are standing in a river, wader clad, up to your waist in water and scythe in hand – it is the sort that farmers (think Aidan Turner in Poldark) once used to harvest corn. Looking upstream the river is thick with weed so your job is to remove some of it but also leave some of it. The simplest approach is to look upon the river as a linear chess board; your task is to cut out the weed in the black squares and leave the weed in the white squares to create, you have guessed it, a chequerboard cut which has the effect of forcing the flow to zig zag creating open places for fish to feed, fresh gravel cleaned by the flow and open spaces into which to cast. The remaining weed acts as an in-river weir holding up the flow, a home for tiny fish, nymphs, snails and freshwater shrimps plus cover, refuge and resting places for larger fish. Of course, in practice it is a tad more complicated than that, but you have the general idea.

Our very own Poldark, Si Fields, head river keeper

This major aspect of chalkstream management is not without its controversy. Firstly, it seriously impacts on the fishing season with some four weeks of river closure spread across May to August on the major rivers. Just as a by-the-by some of the most fractious meetings I have ever attended were ‘discussions’ about the allocation and duration of these periods with river keepers, understandably, wanting maximum cutting time set against everyone else who wanted maximum unimpaired fishing time. On the minor rivers, where no weed cutting dates are imposed, we all rely on the good nature of neighbourly relations to minimise disruption. You can imagine how that sometimes goes ……

It has to be also said not everyone is signed up to the merits of weed cutting and this has a long and honourable history going right back the early 1900’s when the Test & Itchen Fishing Association first regularised the weed cutting dates. Until then it had been a free for all not only for fishing purposes but also by water mill owners, regular cutters to maximise flows.

The 1962 Mottisfont Parish magazine reported on the retirement that year of Bob Coxen, river keeper of the Mottisfont Estate fishing on the River Test for 55 continuous years, including the final seven years of Frederick Halford’s that ended at his death shortly before the outbreak of World War 1. As you can see, Coxen was not a fan of weed cutting though I suspect his conclusions may be a bit off as the formalised dates, which really just set it stone many decades of practice, began when he was just 10 years old. More interesting I think are his views on fly life, the decline of which he was noting over a century ago not so to dissimilar to the views that many hold today. Very little changes!

Mottisfont Parish News 1962

More on my elderly mill

I had a terrific response to my piece last time on the antiquity of Nether Wallop Mill, not least from my friend Charles Rangeley Wilson who popped up to point me in the direction of academic Margaret Hodges who produced a paper on Domesday Water Mills in 2015, which cited in a footnote,

“The earliest reliable allusion to the existence of a corn mill in England occurs for the year 762 AD in a charter granted by Ethelbert of Kent to the owners of a monastic mill situated east of Dover (Bennett and Elton, op. cit., 11, 96).”

This suggests my guesswork putting Nether Wallop Mill at 600 AD is a bit early so the hunt for a definitive date continues as unfortunately, the Hampshire Mills Group, with whom I was also put in touch as a result of the piece did not have any further clues focussing, as they do, on preserving the mills that currently exist.

However, they did send me a fascinating document that relates to the attempt in 1276 to turn the River Itchen into a waterway, removing all the mills in its path, to link Winchester to the sea for shipping. Even back then the proposed plan ended up in court, the final decision being made by an Ad Quod Damnum Inquest to assess the potential harm. More of this another 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) Who were the other two presenters in the final series of Top Gear with Jeremy Clarkson and then with him on The Grand Tour?

2) Who wrote the Poldark series of historical novels set in Cornwall?

3) On this day in 1888 how many grouse did Lord Walsingham (4th from left) shoot? a) 270 b) 470 c) 670 d) 870 e) 1070.