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.

Strictly Upstream

Friday, April 24th the second incarnation of Simon Cooper’s River Test One Fly competition ... The Field magazine enters a team: Jonathan Young uber-editor, me fishing editor and Nick Zoll as trouty bandit, or “ringer” as it’s known in the competition world. Not really because any of us is routinely into fishing competitions, or fishing the River Test, but because we thought we could hang a fundraising cause to our efforts.

The cause was the Wild Trout Trust’s “Trout in the Classroom” project - an idea pioneered by the Wandle Trust on the River Wandle in London. I went last year to an event in Mordern Hall Park, south London, where a hundred or so excited kids from a handful of local schools got together by the river to seed into it trout fry they had each reared from eggs in tanks in the classroom. It was great to see the kids taking pride in what they had done and taking pride in their local river. As an exercise in bonding children with a concern with the fate of the environment I doubt it could be bettered: it is educational, practical, and pro-active. Funds permitting, the Wild Trout Trust is now going to be taking that same idea into schools all round the country.

So we were hoping to help them get started through the selfless act of a day’s fishing.

Okay, there’s an irony to catching what would likely be stocked trout from the River Test to raise cash for the Wild Trout Trust who would in turn use it to raise stocked trout in the classroom. But however it happens, it is a positive thing for the Wild Trout Trust to benefit from an event on the River Test and for the owners of beats on the River Test to get to hear about the sorts of things the Wild Trout Trust does, to feel involved. One keeper expressed a real interest in getting his local school in on this project.

Anyway to the day ... a good crowd of thirty or so entrants and the same number of guides assembled at the Peat Spade pub for bacon sarnies, tea and roll call. Guides and beats had been picked by blind draw earlier in the week and this is when we discovered who we were with and where we were fishing. Our team of three was split, we each got different beats and fanned out of the car park, up (Nick) and down (me and Jonathan) the valley. In my case down, down, down until I was closer to the sea than Stockbridge. The idea of tickling wildies out on the bullet-proof yet subtle hare’s ear nymph I’d tied specially that morning became more and more preposterous with every passing mile. When I saw the water running the colour of a “special-clinic” urine sample, it was a no brainer: either the dumb-bell crayfish pattern I had somewhere in the bottom of my bag or the black woolly-bugger thing that was down in there with it. A boat would have helped. And a purse-seine net.

I’d drawn Peter Roberts as my guide - a water engineer from Ringwood, and Parsonage as my beat. “You won't be needing that,” said Peter of the fey tennis racket in my car boot. His net was designed to double as a branch snagger and we used it for that as much as for landing fish.

I settled finally on a hirsute, black number. A fly that looked as if a size 12 long-shank had been wrapped in a used waxing strip. Peter asked what it was called. I had no idea. I though “the Brazilian” might work, but remembered I was on the Test. "Let's call it the Tasmanian Devil," I said. In fact it had been tied by "Muz" Wilson, and been given to me by Michael Youl, both from Tasmania, and Michael the great grandson of the James Youl who pioneered shipping trout there in 1864. So maybe it would be a lucky fly.

I fished it - this gorilla’s back - upstream, as only the best purist would. The fact that I jigged the bejeesus out of it is best glossed over. All my fish took it under my nose, but "strictly upstream". So I hooked and landed five. A sixth came off at the net and counted as half a fish. A few others tugged the line for brief seconds and fell off to howls of anguish. So, five and half for the day - a half short of a full bag. And I kept the hirsute number on all the time - in spite of the best efforts of several of Hampshire’s trees - for an extra fish's worth of points.

But upstream at Wherwell Nick had been catching a hatful - every fish beyond the six adding a useful tally of bonus points - at first on a little shrimp pattern from Macedonia and then on another of the hare’s ears I had tied and abandoned the idea of using. And though Jonathan had been on a fishy desert, we still managed to scoop first prize (Nick winning top rod and pretty much single handedly gaining us the gong).

Better still, by kick-off we’d raised over £1500 via our www.justgiving.com website page. That in addition to cash donations on the day and tax rebates amounted to over £2000 to kick-start Trout in the Classroom. And Simon Cooper has generously suggested the competition could be used to raise funds for this project again next year. Should we return to defend the title? Or quit while we’re ahead?

Quit I say. Perhaps another trio will step forward to fly the Wild Trout Trust flag?

In the meanwhile, the justgiving.com page is still open for anyone who would like to add a sum, large or small, to this very worthwhile “Trout in the Classroom” project.

http://www.justgiving.com/wildtrouttrust