Join Paul Gaskell as he heads for the hills
Boggy peat moorland on a chilly gritstone plateau. Early April and spring isn’t fully underway here. I had arranged to meet my friend Glenn to give him his official tour of our streams. This was going to be his first year as a member of our small syndicate for fans of wild trout on tumbling upland streams.
I knew he would fit right in ever since we started talking together on the subject of what draws us to wild, unspoilt places to fish. In fact, if you could hear Glenn speak, I’d defy you to remain unmoved by the strength of his passion for the miracles of stream-bred fish. The many connections between the bedrock, earth, water and the fish produced by streams that criss-cross through each landscape cannot avoid stamping a clear identity on those fish. They genuinely belong to one another.
Glenn often drives a 500-mile round trip from Suffolk to fish in Wales. He tells me with a big grin about work-colleagues’ reaction when he explains why the 8-inch brown trout he catches make it all worthwhile.
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“You’d drive all that way to catch a tiddler like that?”
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“Yeah, but it’s not about the size – that fish is just perfect. It’s just brilliant….I love it; my colleagues think I’m mad”
Our syndicate is a much shorter drive – and Glenn is clearly delighted at the prospect of exploring. He looks fit to burst when I say we have around 20 miles of streams (with just about 20 people who fish them with us). His only prior experience of the area was the small section of one water he saw on a group fishing event last summer. But I guess that taste was enough.
I even remembered the pork pies this time…
On our previous trip I’d promised and then stunningly failed to deliver a much-hyped crisp, hot water pastry-wrapped package of deliciousness. I had some atoning to do (and Glenn, quite rightly, was quick to remind me of that fact).
Travelling from the lower valley floor up the winding tracks to the upper moors takes about half an hour of careful driving. I love this because it feels a lot like passing through a kind of air-lock. You get to leave the mess of everyday life at the door and the forest scenery sliding by outside the window re-tunes you to nature. Charlie’s glass lift out of the Chocolate Factory…
By the time you emerge above the trees at the parking spot and get kitted up; you are in the right frame of mind to fish.
On our day, the morning air is cold, slightly damp and the moors have a grey-green caste. Between isolated stands of forest you can see tussocks of cotton grass making a patchwork dotted with heather bushes separated by areas of grazed turf and the occasional sheep. All this is flanked by steep, heather-blanketed slopes. It is too early yet for the bracken to be much of a feature – and only the conifers in the wooded sections could sensibly be called “green” at this time of year.
Although relatively new to tenkara, Glenn is an excellent, thinking fly fisher (and is fast becoming an excellent tenkara angler too). He enjoys details and revels in the landscape and wildlife as much as the fishing. It makes it an absolute pleasure to spend time with him. On these new-member introductory tours, the fishing has to wait a little while before some practical details have been taken care of. The formalities of access points and characteristics of the different streams need to be pointed out – this is a necessary fact.
Our quick-stop driving and walking tour takes us up to just around lunchtime. We have a chance to walk a section of stream before sitting on its grassy bank and enjoying that crisp, savoury pork pie - perfectly matched with a sweetly-acidic apple each (washed down with a hot drink).
As we are putting up our gear I notice one of the local specialities – the nationally-rare orange striped stonefly. It is clinging to a tall grass stalk and (if you’ve ever seen one) is a fairly good-sized beast. Probably somewhere around a #10 or maybe #8 longshank hook would be about right. In their armour plates these look, to me, like tiny dinosaurs and I quickly snap some photos with Glenn’s help to position the stem so I can see it properly.
We start to fish.
Despite the stonefly I wonder whether we are still too early in the year to expect fish to feed up here. The spring has been very cold and the landscape has a raw edge to it. I also know that the smallest changes can switch the trout from “feeding” to “comatose” in a matter of minutes on these streams.
We are in luck though. In the bubbling peat-brown (but transparent) water a good proportion of the wild resident fish are hunting for a meal.
Using a black thread-bodied wet fly with a few turns of grizzle cock hackle, I dropped some short, searching casts into the softer pockets of water in the lee of boulders and the odd bankside reed tussocks. Perhaps eight or ten casts in and the “plop” of the wet fly caused a fish to flash up from the cobbled bed and engulf my offering.
Setting the hook and hooping the rod brought it skittering and fussing within reach. I slipped the hook free and admired the fish as it flicked sideways back into the main flow. Happiness.
Moving upstream and making our way under a small jutting rock outcrop (across an awkward, muddy step) we look up to see a rather large, plush-coated rabbit on the slope above us. It takes a moment to realise that we’ve seen a mountain hare. The fact it took a while to sink in does not flatter our powers of perception. Only half an hour earlier we’d been talking about how our mutual friend Stuart took part in surveying their populations on these hills.
In our partial defence, they were generally found on the slopes a good deal higher than the banks of this stream.
Pushing on through the heather, I step back so that I can enjoy the sight of Glenn fishing upstream through a run. His high rod tip making one side of a triangle with his casting line angling across the stream to form its matching, sloping side (like a gently pitched roof). A deft, single pick up and lay down cast in each likely spot and then the artful control of the line and short drift let him carefully search the stream features. Again, in short order, several perfect trout came to the fly and were quickly released. There is no need to stock these streams and - as ours is the first club to manage these waters - they have never received farmed fish. Because of that, the trout populations that live here are likely to have changed very little since the last ice-age.
This shows through the varied colours and markings in the trout from different rivers (or even sections within one river), small tributaries and other less-obvious borders and junctions across the different areas of our fishery. Without exception they are as gorgeous as they are varied and this is testament to the lack of homogenisation of stocks through either competition or hybridisation with fertile farmed fish.
Our spells of fishing were alternated with watching the stream, talking and short walks between likely-looking runs. The day passed happily, punctuated by some memorable wild trout – though none would be described as large. Even so, A particular stand-out fish came when I splatted down my simple fly into a patch of thick, creamy foam (produced by the humic acids in the peat) in a back-eddy. In the next second a dark - almost black - back of a solid trout rolled like a porpoise through the thick, velvet surface as a fish confidently snatched the fly in one, fluid movement. The hook-set and rod suddenly springing to life felt pretty much inevitable after such a casual acceptance of my artificial. The fish was dark and beautiful; a perfect match for the brown-ale coloured waters.
Soon enough, it came time to return to the car and make the drive back down to the valley floor. That “decompression chamber” aspect of the reverse journey in the glass lift back to civilisation is such a good opportunity for the classic post-match analysis chat. Time to recalibrate. I was really glad to share this particular trip down with Glenn as we both seemed to have tapped into exactly the same buzz from our time on stream. It continued all the way back to the main fishery-office car park where Glenn could collect his van. In fact, it was a real wrench to call time on our excited chatter so that I could make good on my domestic responsibilities.
Parting from Glenn and wishing him well for his next trip let me set off for home, looking forward to catching up with my family over a good meal. Each time I make this journey, I am taken aback at the beauty of the views provided by the moorland that I prefer to cross on small roads. But my trip after fishing with Glenn had an unexpected extra bonus too.
On that evening in early April I was treated to a front-row seat for what, I think, is a totally brilliant and maybe little-known spectacle. Seeing the male lapwings pin-wheeling down through the air in their pre-mating displays is, to me, astonishing. I pulled the car over and just watched. The crazed propeller-like spins that those birds launch into as they fall towards the earth are breath-taking. Saving themselves at the last moment and then climbing again to safe tumbling altitude is endlessly fascinating – especially when framed in a soft, late-afternoon light.
Looking out over the boggy moors and taking in this scene made me hugely grateful. I realised how lucky I was to witness it – and I also felt the universal truth that life really is so short. Yes – a cliché, but not any less true because of it. I genuinely will be sad to leave this world – a place that contains views, friends, sights, sounds and scenery like the ones that had filled my day. I feel the need to drink it in while I can – and I hope you can do the same too.
Carrying that bittersweet, deep happiness I clunked the car door shut, located the key in its slot, sparked the engine back to life and steered for home.
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