Life of a Chalkstream. Simon Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ more than a vast, boggy marshland, with no river to speak of but rather thousands of streams, rivulets and watercourses that randomly flowed this way and that. At some point in time, it is hard to say exactly when, the early Britons must have started to use the valleys for a purpose, initially farming, which involved draining the land. Inevitably drainage involved reducing the myriad streams to a few channels, which in turn became the rivers that have evolved into the chalkstreams we have today.

      It has been a mighty long process: five or six millennia for sure. The barges that carried the stones for Stonehenge were brought up what is now the Hampshire Avon, probably widened and straightened for the purpose, from where it enters the sea at Christchurch Harbour 33 miles from Amesbury, the Avon’s closest point to Stonehenge. But these incremental activities changed the river valleys very slowly, and it was the advent of the watermills that was to prove the penultimate step on the way to the chalkstream valleys we see now.

      Again it is hard to pinpoint precisely when watermills became a regular part of the landscape. One thing is for sure, there are plenty listed in the Domesday Book, so it is fair to assume that the valleys were taking shape to meet the requirements of water power by this time. Essentially the mill wheel requires a good head of water to drive it, so a special channel would be dug to supply the water to drive the wheel. This ‘millpond’ would be controlled by a series of hatches, which when opened would turn the wheel for a few hours. Once depleted, the hatches would be closed and the millpond given time to refill from the river and streams.

      The unintended outcome of all this would be to drain the land in the immediate vicinity, which in turn created the most wonderfully rich grazing pasture on the alluvial soil left behind after many millennia of flooding. This bounty of nature did not go unnoticed, so over the centuries that followed the river valley was gradually drained not just for the mills but for farming. The water was concentrated into a single channel which is the River Evitt today, supplemented by the side streams and ditches that provide the drainage.

      But the story has one last twist. Having deprived the land of the flooding, the farmers realized that they were taking away one of the very things that had made it so productive in the first place – the nutrient-rich water that every winter washed over it. So around the seventeenth century, as the agricultural revolution took hold, landowners realized that drainage alone was not the answer and that managed flooding would dramatically increase the yield from the land, so the water meadows came into being.

      By digging carriers, or leats, quite literally streams that carry water away from the main river, redirecting side streams, filling in others and creating a series of hatches to manage the flow of water, the farmers were able to use the winter and spring flows to flood the meadows from February to May. The term flooding is something of a misnomer; deep, static water over the grass would do little more than rot it away. The skill in floating, the creation of a water-meadow system, is to keep a thin layer of water constantly moving over the surface. The warmth of the water and the protection from frost, plus the nutrients carried in from the river, allow the grass to grow earlier and quicker. When ready for grazing the cattle would be let in, to be taken off when they had eaten it down and the land reflooded. If this all sounds a laborious process, it probably was. It was far beyond the daily regime of the farmers who banded together to employ a drowner, or waterman, who regulated the flows.

      Today drowners are a long-distant memory, the advent of artificial fertilizers sounding the death-knell for the meadows from the early 1900s. When the watermills finally stopped grinding a few decades later, the raison d’être for this integrated water system would have all but disappeared except for the fact that somewhere along the line, in the period when the chalkstream valleys went from marshes to meadows, the brown trout had become the dominant species in the river. Never ones to miss an opportunity, anglers soon followed, first for food and then for sport, at which point the chalkstreams became a byword for angling perfection. The drowners and farmers were replaced by river keepers who lavished care on the rivers far beyond the basic needs of an agrarian England.

      Fishing, angling, call it what you will, with an insect, worm, net, hook, spear or anything else that captures the fish, is as old as mankind. But as a pastime, done for the pleasure of the activity as much as for the outcome, it has to be credited to the Victorians. They did of course have their antecedents. Dame Juliana Berners, an English nun, wrote A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle in 1496, which can be claimed as the first book about fishing as a sport, although she has been eclipsed in history by Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, which followed 150 years later. But these great anglers and writers were exceptions; for most people trout were there for catching and eating with the minimum of effort. So why the Victorians? Well, it was a coming together of wealth, leisure time, technology, the railways and the insatiable curiosity of a few individuals.

      Gavelwood today is a tiny proportion of what was once a huge country estate, running to thousands of acres and 11 miles of the River Evitt. In fact the entire river valley, encompassing all 30 miles of the Evitt from source to estuary, was in the ownership of just three families. Hardly very egalitarian, but those were the times, and for fishing, and the chalkstreams in particular, they proved decisive for the future. Once the fishing craze caught on amongst the landed gentry the rivers became much more than farmland irrigators and power sources for mills. River keepers were employed, banks maintained, fish reared for stocking, river weed cut, predators removed. The water meadows were kept in good shape not just for drowning but fishing as well. Suddenly the owners of the great estates began to value the rivers for the sport they could offer.

      As the railways made the countryside more accessible, great houses hosted grand fishing parties. Gunsmiths turned their hands to fine reels, rods, lines, hooks and flies, using the latest techniques and materials. Weekly magazines like The Field and Country Life lionized innovators like Frederic M. Halford, a wealthy industrialist in his own right, who codified fly-fishing in a single book. Fly-fishing went from an obscure pastime to the ‘must do’ sport in a matter of decades. If you fished for salmon Scotland was the place to head for, but for brown trout dry fly-fishing the chalkstreams of southern England were the ultimate destination.

      The mayfly period, or Duffers Fortnight, became as much a part of the English season as Ascot or Wimbledon. The future kings of England were elected president of the world’s most exclusive fly-fishing club. Fine tackle manufacturers received the Royal Warrant. Government ministers cut short cabinet meetings to catch the train in time for the evening rise. Eisenhower took time out from the D-Day preparations to fish the River Test. As the fly-fishing craze spread across Europe and the Americas, visitors from abroad took home stories of the fabled chalkstreams which took on deserved iconic status. But time, money and enthusiasm are not always limitless, and as I walked around Gavelwood on this late September day I could chart the progression from a chalkstream paradise to something that is today a shadow of its former self.

      Nobody set out to make it so. It was simply another twist in the evolution of the rural landscape. In succession the water meadows, watermills and finally fly-fishing were no longer part of the daily life of Gavelwood as the ownership changed to commercial farming. No longer were the myriad carriers and streams of any use, so they were left to atrophy. The meadows were ploughed, fertilized and sprayed for crops. The river was left untended. Gradually as the diverse habitat disappeared so did the creatures that inhabited the river, banks and meadows.

      But three or four decades of neglect did not put Gavelwood beyond redemption.

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       WORK BEGINS

      AS EVER, MY ancient leaking Land Rover provided little protection against the sideways rain of the late October day as I drove down the potholed track to СКАЧАТЬ