brookend

This is it. This is where the river - such as it is - ceases to exist. Upstream it glints where streetlights catch the surface, dark bars between in the shadows of walls. There’s a willow tree above the culvert drain. It has cracked and split several times over the years, been pruned back to Venus de Milo stumps, a dozen beer cans at her feet where her roots hold back the earth bank. On the other side a chain-link fence between concrete piers, finished at the top with three strands of barbed wire - a make-shift prison camp. A pile of rubbish on the bank behind me: footballs, Stella cans, a traffic cone. Only the T-Rex is surprising. The smell of cooked brakes. Tail-lights climbing the hill beyond the main road, blinking between trees. And only here right beside the cascade can I hear the river. If I step more than a few feet away there is only the road. The river vanishes from sight and hearing. Here comes a kid picking up leaves, throwing them at his dad. Grantner and Sterne Builders Merchants. All the car park meters covered in black plastic bin-liners and police tape, the western skyline glinting off the windows of the Vernier building above Brookend Street, slab-sided, duffer’s bond, roof-pitch at twenty degrees – a man passes behind one of them, a shadow on frosted glass. Dulux sign in Neon. HSS sign beside it. A row of shagged out double-decker buses collecting weather. And between all that the river, overhung with ivy-cloaked trees, plastic high in the branches shaking in the wind. Car park lights creating pools of light now, orange cones hanging upside down out of the night. Sycamores, ash. A fruity drinks bottle spirals downstream, catches a branch and bobs just above the culvert. The band of light on the western skyline is almost gone. A siren. It starts to rain. Raindrops on the surface of the water. The river folds and fractures and drops away, a rushing hiss of white bubbles turning over and over. The river bed: flint, dead leaves, tin cans, plastic. The river is blind. It can do only one thing - flow.

city cock-fight

I watched this cock-fight a few days ago on an urban stream - a short slice of open river between where this stream emerges from under the streets and sinks beneath them again. The culvert upstream is over a mile long. The lower one has a grate and would be impossible to re-ascend. These two war-torn fish live and clearly have lived a long time in this hidden stretch of river. They were circling each other, occasionally lunging, biting. Suddenly the bigger fish came from underneath and caught the other one across the belly and clamped down. It swam across the river, the smaller fish crippled and helpless in its jaws, pushing across the surface and then diving down until the smaller trout was pinned against the bed of the stream. The bigger fish held the smaller there for a few seconds and then let go. They continued to circle each other but now the smaller of the two trout began to gasp at the surface as if trying to rebalance itself, adjust its swim bladder. I watched for as long as I could but after a few more minutes they swam up under the culvert and were gone.

Rivers on the Edge

The reason for my total absence of blogging is now online at last:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO13fPxOGbQ

Rivers on the Edge is a short fillum I've been making for WWF UK to support their campaign of the same name. The film ought - if it has worked - to make it kinda clear what the campaign is about. But anyway, for those without time to sit through a whole six and a half minutes (strewth! - too long for one commentator), it's basically this - USE LESS WATER.

Chalk streams are unique. A globally significant, rich and amazing habitat. But many are on the edge of survival. Abstraction licenses were given when no-one thought the pumping of water would have an impact, when the underground aquifers that drive these streams were thought to be limitless. But they weren't limitless and now some rivers barely exist, while all are affected.

But private water companies will not happily give up this source of cheap, clean water. If we are to save our national heritage of chalk rivers water companies have to be compelled to find other sources of water. But even if they wanted to (which some do, but most don't), our government, via OFWAT, won't let them. OFWAT protects the price of water.

But what price a river? A river is priceless. Especially if it is possible - which it is - to have healthy rivers and an adequate supply of affordable water.

We need to use less of it and we need to compel our government to make more sense of how we get it, so that we can see rivers like the Beane, the Darenth, the Misbourne, the Og flowing again as they used to.

Join the WWF's campaign. Adopt your local chalk stream if you're lucky enough to live near one. Write to your MP.

keeping the faith

I drove over to the Towy last week to chase sea trout again with an old friend - Steffan Jones. And now I think about it, the last time I fished with him was the last time I fished for sewin in Wales, too long ago at eight or nine years. Neither of us can remember exactly when, though it must have been in that order because the night was made legend by a fly Steff had recently tied called the Millennium Blue.

Back then Steff had peroxide hair and nose studs and was the enfant terrible of the valleys. He was also distraught. At the exact moment we met he had just lost a huge salmon from a dark corner of the Teifi and doubted he'd ever get the chance at such a fish again. He'd hooked it on this pattern the Millennium Blue. "Bloody brilliant fly," he said in that soft Welsh lilt. He gave me one. It caught a good sewin a few hours later and the far bank a few minutes after that and was gone. The following night as I sat and chatted with Richard and Jim Babb waiting for dark to fall, I spotted a fly wrapped around barbed wire. "Hey. It's the Millennium Blue!" Richard was at it like a hare. "My turn!" It caught Richard two fish on an otherwise fishless night and became immortalised by Jim in a story of the same name.

Back then Steff was an obsessive sewin angler, about nineteen years old, full of theories. He was iconoclastic. He enjoyed breaking the rules, defying ancient doctrine. He was - as much anyone could ever be - a punk sewin angler. Nearly a decade on Steff has been through university, come out the other side and put on a veneer of ... what? I dunno exactly, because words like respectability or maturity would still be wrong, implying that neither existed before - which they did in their own way - or that the older Steff is more sedate. The Steff who, about an hour ago, shouted down the phone to me: "Sleep is for losers!" is not sedate. He has softened a little that's all. He's trying to make a living.

Steff arrives at the Abercothi Lodge a short while after I've woken from my derided afternoon nap. I'm sorting kit at the back of my car when he rolls into the courtyard in a battered silver Daihatsu, dents in the wing, a half-flat rear tyre. He must notice me looking too long at his motor because he gets out and says, "Now that's a fishing wagon." He's right. It is. Inside the rear seats are folded flat and are buried under a pile of waders, rods, coats and boxes. Steff probably lives out of this thing in the summer. We convoy to the pub - I'm never going to fit in his car and he's never going to tansfer all his gear into mine - to meet Jamie, the keeper of the Golden Grove beats on the Towy. Jamie is waiting outside with a pint when we arrive. He and Steff are old mates, both of that younger generation of sea trout anglers passionate about this peculiarly Welsh heritage, both rewriting it. Steff as guide, Jamie as keeper, they both might just have their dream jobs too. We eat a too leisurely supper and realise as it ends that it is getting dark quickly. By the time we arrive at The Dragon's Back it is too dark to see the shape of the tree the pool is named after. The water is flat and glassy. An apparently featureless run. Only it isn't. It looks as if there is no flow. Only there is. Steff keenly describes these crypt-black expanses of mirror calm, all buried in night and the shadows of trees, as if he was stroking his hands along the contours of the riverbed. It strikes me then that sewin angling in the black of night is as much about the imagination as anything. Seeing the fly out there swimming through the contours of pool and current, imagining at every cast that the fish is there ready to be teased, provoked, tricked into taking, just as if I could see it, as if I was fishing to a salmon or trout or pike there in front of me. In that sense it is also about belief - about faith in the thought that the fish are "there" - not just in the abstract of "there in the river" but in the particular "there in front of this cast".

As we set up I spend a few minutes messing around with long exposures on my camera. I've missed the dusk, but the moon is up and bright - too bright. Cows are lying on the dew-soaked field. I grab a picture at 15 seconds shutter speed. And it works. The spectral silhouettes of cows ghost under the cold, burning moon. I ask Steff and Jamie to hold still, but a sewin jumps in the last few seconds of the exposure and they both look up in unison and blur the shot. So I take a picture with a flash before remembering myself. "To be honest Charles," says Steff. "It doesn't make a blind bit of difference. The times I've used flash, torches, the works, and caught fish right after. It doesn't make a blind bit of difference." Still iconoclastic then.

And then as we fish - I have gone in first and I'm working the pool ahead of Jamie and Steff, working in silence, working quietly - the two of them are chatting away like they're either end of a noisy pub, their voices echoing off the trees and carrying easily through the night. Later Steff comes up behind me to shepherd me down the pool and he doesn't stop talking then, or reduce his volume. I whisper replies. Steff is much more concerned about whether my fly is reaching the far bank, whether I'm putting that right mend in the line to bring the fly down under those trees: "So you can imagine it dropping with the mend and then just lifting up off the bottom as you start the retrieve. Cast square in this water, Charles. Yes. That's it. I like the look of that cast. Get ready."

The sewin crash through the night - heavy, fat explosions of stroppy, territorial fish - just so we know they are there. And yet I still have trouble fighting the mechanics of it. In Steff's mind with a fish there under every cast, the mechanics never get a foothold. It's all target and imagination - luring, tempting. For me, within a few casts it is mechanical. I can't keep the imagination or the faith alive. I don't really ever believe I'm going to get one.

And then I do. For three heart-stopping seconds at least. The line pulls sharply tight. The rod jabs down. A flash of white splits the dark. And then as I lift the rod into the tension - gone! "Oh bugger," says Steff. " It took on the dangle. Always a bastard when they do that."

But now I am alive again, alive to the possibility that I might actually catch a fish. Alive to the faith. I fish the rest of the run with more of all of those things that Steff has as a matter of default, that I only have when I can see what is going on. To no avail. Nothing else takes. Jamie leaves as we near the end. It is now one in the morning. I'm desperate for a piss and I'm cold. We climb out and prepare to fish the run again. But already time is running out. Stefan says that dawn is closing down on us. We fish more hurriedly this time, and though I've put on a sweater and a coat, somehow I'm colder. At least the moon is down now. It is much darker.

"I'm in!" Steph hooks one behind me. Somehow it seems as if the atmosphere changed even before had I heard him say it, before the thunderclap of a splash broke the night, before Steff said, "Oh bugger!" Now he had pricked and dropped one. Things were at least hopeful in amongst the minor disasters. Finally, with less time than we'd have liked, we head down to the next pool below us, the best pool on the river according to Steff, to "the Whistle": a huge corner-cauldron, inky black, swathed in a dense mist - a sewin wormhole.

I stepped down the bank into nothing again, faithless again, mechanical again. Steph went upstream. I fished in silence. A silence I realised I'd missed amongst all chatter.

The moon is gone now and with it the spectral blue light that cloaked the river for the first few hours. The sky is running the palest blue in the east. Last night another rod fished on until dawn and caught two fish as the birds began to twitter. They are still quiet now. A deep, foggy quiet broken only by the occasional hollow smash of sea trout breaking the surface. Finally as the dawn lifts a fish jabs my line. It wakes me up. I had drifted thoughtlessly into an achingly slow retrieve, the fly had dropped through the water and was deep on the hang. Now, with renewed faith I wanted to try the run again to be less perfunctory, to give it more belief. I was just asking Steff - he was back on the bank of fixing his line - if this would be worthwhile, when my line jabbed again, and this time the fish held.

"I'm in! .... Shit! It's a small one."

"Hey, it's a fish!"

The little sea trout came bouncing towards me: a fish of about a pound. I reached to unhook it and the fish felt warm-blooded, like it was swimming in tepid soup. It flicked around like a crazy thing in the torchlight and finally, just as I was thinking it might look like the breakfast, it flicked away back to its warm womb. Shit I was cold. The birds were singing now. A crow cried hard from the tree opposite, a crude rebuke or laugh. A little owl tewit-tewood from the heart of the word. I rose out of the river onto the dewy bank, my body feeling weirdly heavy after five hours of moon-walking. I took pictures of Steff fishing in the half light, but he was already talking about "tonight" in the future tense.

"We'll get some tonight," he said.

We did. The forecasters were wrong. The night predicted to bring plunging cold temperatures brought instead a light blanket of cloud, which drew over the end of the fetid, hot day, to lock in all the heat that had vanished into clear space the night before. The moon, tamed by this thin cover, did not burn so fiercely. There were no shadows. And the tail of the Whistle was buried in darkness anyway - that thick wood soaking up the light, emitting black faith. And with it I kept the black faith too. And I caught three fat sewin. Amen.

big trout like it slow

click play above or on the link below for a short piece of hot, lip-smacking mayfly action ... oh yeah, oh yeah.

http://gallery.me.com/rangeleywilson#100075

in iceland big trout eat little flies

An experiment with new settings for video on the web - I've posted this short trailer before, but this one should play better. 

Shot in Iceland, last year and the year before, this is just a taster of some of the footage I have for a film I'll be fi(ni)shing this summer.

A bigger version of the same thing can be seen here: 

http://gallery.me.com/rangeleywilson/100057

Rivers on the Edge

Last Tuesday WWF launched its River on the Edge project aimed at campaigning for a more sustainable approach to water resources in the the UK, particularly focussing on the over-exploitation of water from our stressed chalk streams. With WWF putting its lobbying weight and expertise to this cause things may indeed happen.

I've been helping them get the project off the ground and was asked to give a speech at the launch. It was extremely encouraging to see the head of OFWAT nodding as I spoke about how water needs a value that reflects its environmental cost.

Watch this space ...

This is the text of what I said:

I'll begin with a quote about chalk from a famous 19th century geologist, Thomas Henry Huxley: "I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely to have a truer conception of this wonderful universe than the most learned student ... The longest line of human ancestry must hide its diminished head before the pedigree of this insignificant shellfish."

This piece of chalk I’m holding is 100 million years old. It was laid down as the remains of billions upon billions of tiny shellfish that swarmed as plankton in prehistoric oceans. A porridgy ooze of dead shellfish hardened over time to form chalk and rose from the waves to become the chalk downland of England - a landscape as familiar to us as fish and chips. Some of these chalk hills are hundreds of metres deep and every metre of chalk represents about 100,000 years of deposition, every centimetre 1000 years, every millimetre 100 years. Hold that small lump of chalk in the palm of your hand and you are holding more time than has elapsed since the last ice-age.

There’s chalk in other places: in Russia, and Texas, and Australia. But nowhere else in the world other than here in south-east England does chalk and parts of northern France – washed over by our loveably temperate climate – give rise to the spring-fed rivers known as chalk-streams.

The engine room of a chalk-stream is the chalk. Rolling hills of this soft, porous rock. When rain falls on these hills it is soaked up as if by an enormous sponge. The rainwater trickles through the fissures and cracks starting an underground journey that might last a week, or a year, that might take that rain drop five hundred metres or fifty miles. No-one knows what goes on down there. It is a fabulous mystery. But when that water sees daylight again, as a spring creating a river, it is cool and it is fertile and all the extremities of drought and deluge have been buffered by the vast underground reservoir that lies within those chalk hills.

There’s something special about a spring-fed river, any spring fed river. The Romantic poets knew that. Springs are life-affirming, symbolic of something that speaks right to the heart of us and our relationship with the natural world. Coleridge wrote of the mystery of a river that springs from the ground:

Unperishing youth ! Thou leapest from forth
The cell of thy hidden nativity;
Never mortal saw
The cradle of the strong one;
Never mortal heard
The gathering of his voices;
The deep-murmured charm of the son of the rock,
That is lisp’d evermore at his slumberless fountain.

But if spring fed streams are special, then chalk streams – a particular type of spring fed river – are the most precious of all.

All the qualities of a spring-fed river – the constancy of flow and temperatures, the richness of their waters – these are all magnified in a chalk-stream. Chalk streams are spring fed rivers with their tails up – like peacocks. They are an amazing and globally unique ecosystem. And they are here – at our doorsteps, sometimes literally under our feet. They are ours to look after. They are our rain-forest, our Barrier Reef, our glacier. And we are failing them. We are flushing them – quite literally – down the toilet.

Does that matter? There are lots of them. Miles of them.

There were lots of dodos. There were lots of passenger pigeons. The first steps on the road to trashing the natural world consist of complacency in the face of abundance.

And besides chalk-streams are not abundant. There are a little over two hundred of them between the western edge of Dorset and the north eastern edge of Yorkshire: an alphabet of ancient English names: Ash, Beane, Colne, Darenth, Ewelme, Fontmell, Gade, Hiz, Irwell, Jordan, Kennet, Lambourne, Mimram, Nar, Oughton, Purwell, Quin, Rib, Stiffkey, Tarrant, U - no U, Ver, Wissey, no X or Y either, or Z. But for those four letters there are several alphabet’s worth.

To me this number only highlights how finite chalk-streams are. It points to the opposite of abundance. And though, if you laid them all out end to end, there are perhaps thousands of miles of chalk rivers, to me that says the same. God isn’t making any more of them.

But we are sure as hell using them up.

Chalk-streams flow through some of the most highly developed landscape on the planet.

Perhaps in one sense it is a miracle they are there at all: that they aren’t all dry ditches full of tin cans and abandoned shopping trolleys. Many are still beautiful. But when I try to think of a perfect bit of river, one small part I might call perfect, a bit untouched by dredging, or pollution, or intensive farming, or urban sprawl, or abstraction – I can’t.

Chalk-streams are under pressure – any natural ecosystem would be in such a busy part of the world. But my point is that there is room for both. There is room for us and for this amazing habitat which could - which should enrich our lives. With imagination and most of all political will, we can shape the way we interact with this amazing environment, so as to cause it less stress. It is not actually that inconvenient. It just has to matter.

The problem is this: we suck the life out of this environment and we don’t put any value at all on it. We have no real perception of the environmental cost. There is no value to the water.

And every pressure a chalk-stream faces is made worse by the abstraction of water from the springs which feed them and the impact of every pressure would be lessened by slowing down those pumps.

I moved a while ago to a house with a water meter. Not used to looking at one I have to confess I didn’t bother. Our first few bills were much the same as ever and I liked to imagine I was a careful user. But a recent bill caught my eye. It was uncomfortably big. We must have a leak. I hunted for a leak. But there wasn’t one. I don’t know how or why but occasionally were using as much 1000 litres in a day. Twice the family average the Environment Agency is looking for. I spoke with my kids, gave lessons in turning off the tap while brushing teeth, in not turning it on full to wash hands, in only flushing when there’s something considerable to flush. I re-set all the cisterns to close off when two thirds full.

We became more careful with one easy change of mindset, and we went quite easily and with no decline in health or lifestyle from that embarrassing 250 litres per head per day, to 100. And we have maintained it too, quite easily.
The point is, I care deeply and yet I’d never have checked without a bill and never have known without a meter.

Think about how a river connects time. The same river witnessing history unfold, always flowing. There has been water flowing past the Houses of Parliament since there’s been a parliament. Since forever.

Last week I walked along the River Beane in Hertfordshire … and I mean along it … without getting my shoes wet. I did the same along the River Og a month before that.

So Coleridge called it a slumberless fountain? But with unfettered and irresponsible abstraction we have proved him wrong.