Life of a Chalkstream

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Gavelwood, the land, the river, side streams, brook and water meadows, takes its name from a wood that makes up part of this tiny, forgotten part of England. The woodland, a mixture of native trees like oak and ash, is as unkempt as the meadows it borders. Nobody knows where the name came from, but it is clearly marked on the deeds of ownership. The medieval word ‘gavel’ meant to give up something in lieu of rent, so maybe in some distant century the lumber was exchanged for tenure. But here today I am not here for any timber, it is the river that is the draw. A beautiful chalkstream called the Evitt that runs gin-clear, the perfect home for fish and water creatures that thrive in a habitat that is as endangered and as worthy of protection as any tropical rainforest or virgin Arctic tundra.

The water that flows through the chalkstreams is a geological freak of nature, almost unique to England. There are a few chalkstreams in Normandy, northern France, and one is rumoured to exist in New Zealand, but taken as a whole 95 per cent of the planet’s supply of pure chalkstream water exists only in southern England. The water I watch flow by in the river today fell as rain a hundred miles to the north six months ago, was deep underground yesterday and will be in the English Channel in a few hours’ time, a cycle that has been repeating for tens of thousands of years since the last ice age ended.

A chalkstream river valley today is a tamed version of how it started out. After the ice age it would have been little 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 (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)

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 the river. I had hoped for better weather. This was to be a landmark day in the restoration of Gavelwood: our first step towards the re-creation of something special, where the fruits of our dreams and expectations would, at least in part, be rewarded. After a month of back-breaking work North Stream was ready to be opened to fresh, gin-clear, chalkstream water from the Evitt for the first time in four generations.

North Stream is an ancient carrier that connects the main river – the Evitt – with another side stream we call Katherine’s Brook. I say ‘connects’ in the loosest possible sense, because barely a drop of water has flowed through it in living memory. Along its entire length – about half a mile – it should really be a fast-flowing little river that takes the excess flow from the main river into Katherine’s Brook, which in turn will rejoin the main river some 3 miles downstream. Instead the stream was a morass of fallen trees, roots, bushes, debris and mud.

I parked up close to the junction of the main river, where there is a set of hatches, built long ago, to control the flow of water into North Stream. Back in July, when we had first conceived the restoration plan, those hatches were almost invisible. On the river side a thick margin of reeds had choked what would have been the funnel-shaped entrance to the river. Today, the weeks of work had revealed three upright pillars of limestone, about the size of a tall man, set into the bank. They are slightly pockmarked in places, but generally washed smooth by centuries of water. The fronts of the pillars are V-shaped to deflect the current, and running down each inside edge is a groove into which are slotted oak boards – these regulate the amount of water that flows from the main river into North Stream. The oak is newly sawn, a lovely bright honey yellow that would, in a few months, turn to a silver grey. But for now their newness is proof that the hatches are repaired and ready to play their part in the rebirth of North Stream.

With everything Gavelwood has to offer – miles of main river, side streams and hundreds of acres of water meadows – North Stream might seem an unlikely candidate for the first step in the restoration. At first glance, if you noticed it at all, it looks marginal. It is not very wide – a reasonably agile person with a short run-up could leap it in most places – and is fairly straight, without any particular features that catch the eye. My suspicion is that given a few more years it would have disappeared entirely to become a soggy ribbon across a water meadow, its original purpose long forgotten. But the first time I saw it I knew it had the potential to become the most wonderful spawning stream for trout, salmon and maybe even grayling.

On that first visit as I walked down the bank, occasionally pushing aside the branches of the bushes and trees that choked the channel, a few small, bright pockets of gravel glinted back at me, lit by the rays of sunshine that cut through the gaps in the foliage; the gravel kept free from silt by the spring heads that bubbled up from deep below. Loose, well-oxygenated gravel is vital for spawning trout. It is the place the gravid female lays her eggs and the home for the ova as they metamorphose from eggs to tiny fry, out of sight from the many predators that see them as a nutritious food source. My hunch was that beneath the silt and overgrowth North Stream was a gravel haven and finding out was not going to be very difficult.

In fact it proved harder than I thought. A combination of wicked stinging nettles that are at their fiercest in the high summer, plus the barbs of the hawthorn and the clawing tendrils of the wild roses forced me back each time I tried to push my way down the bank. Eventually I came across an ash tree that had fallen across the river, flattening my access. Using a tree branch for support I slowly lowered one foot into the shallow water, letting my weight push it down through the thick mud, hoping that I would make contact with the riverbed before the water reached the top of my boots. Fortunately I did, and the firm base beneath my boots told me I had reached the best kind of rock bottom. I jiggled my feet and through the thick rubber soles I could feel the friable gravel. As I waded upstream I kicked away at the silt bottom to expose what I had hoped for – gravel the entire length of the stream. The further I waded up the more certain I became of the plan to have North Stream ready for autumn spawning – with clean, bright gravel where the trout eggs would be nurtured by a constant flow of fresh water from the main river. Yes, the timetable was tight and yes, the work would be hard, but at that moment to miss yet another year, after the decades of decline, seemed positively criminal.

I plotted the timetable as I walked. We needed to be finished by 1 November. River Evitt trout typically start the act of spawning around mid-December, but they would need at least a month to grow familiar with their new environment before beginning courtship. To have us clumping around would put an end to that before it even started. The trout fishing season ends on 30 September. It would be tempting to start clearing the stream earlier, but our downstream neighbours, not to mention our own anglers, who regularly fished at Gavelwood, would not thank me for sending muddy water and debris their way. So we had four weeks to take what looked like a clogged ditch and transform it into a piscatorial love nest and nursery.

There are two ways to restore a river: the easy but expensive and the cheaper but hard. The easy but expensive way involves signing up an ecological consultant who will start by carrying out a painstaking survey (at your cost) of the river and surrounding land. Every tree will be plotted, the curvature of each bend delineated and the depth of the pools plumbed. Soil and water samples will be analysed, flow rates monitored and the wildlife censused. In return for a mighty fee you will receive a mighty document with maps, drawings, graphs, commentary and appendices. You’ll read it. Actually you won’t – you will read the two-page executive summary at the front and glance through the rest. Fortunately your fee includes a presentation, so you head for the consultancy offices. Having been ushered into the boardroom by a receptionist you are then glad-handed by the team. Everything is very exciting and the possibilities immense. You can only agree, but how do I do it, you ask. At this point the meeting gets serious. Sitting across the table from you is the Chief Executive, who takes a copy of the report and places it squarely on the table in front of you.

‘May I be frank with you, Mr Cooper?’

My advice to you at this point is to say no and leave; no good can ever come with a person who opens with this line. But you are curious, so you invite the man to continue. He opens by telling you what you know already. The report on the table is the perfect guide to do-it-yourself restoration. Everyone around the table knows this, but our wily Chief Executive casts a fly into your path he knows you will take.

‘How much were you planning to spend on the project?’ he asks innocently. You quote a number, faintly embarrassed that you thought it could be done for so little. He purses his lips. ‘Here’s the thing,’ he says. ‘You will do an OK job with that budget, but this is such a very exciting project, the potential so immense, that we should think big. Let’s quadruple your budget, apply for funding, and in the end you’ll only have to dip into your own pocket for a fraction of what you originally thought.’

The lure of his fly is too much and you rise to it like the greedy chap you are. The thought of twenty grand’s worth of work for the cost of five is too much to resist. Leaving the room an hour later you have been truly hooked and landed. The consultants are delighted (but not surprised) with a new contract to seek out funding and manage the project when the grants roll in. You are of course still on the hook for their fees if the funding never shows up, but that is a discussion left for another day.

But I don’t much like easy and expensive. It takes too long, the finished job is never as good, and it seems a bit immoral to me that half the money will go to consultants, however expert. And quite frankly, where is the fun in handing the project over to strangers? I wanted to get my hands dirty: stand in the river, look upstream and with a trout’s-eye view of the world fine-tune the work as I went along.

But all this was still ahead of us when my team and I gathered in August to make plans for North Stream’s restoration. It was not the best month to do our kind of survey – the undergrowth at its most dense, the flow almost non-existent – but we could see enough to make some educated guesses. The work was going to be done by Steve, Dan, myself and a team of irregular helpers.

Steve is the closest thing we have to a full-time river keeper. A retired fireman who looks forty but is in fact fifty-five, he runs triathlons just for the hell of it. He can, and does, work all day felling trees, cutting weed and hammering in fence posts. He is in fact more of a coarse angler, and Gavelwood sort of inherited him when some local lakes closed down.

Dan is young. We tease him for being young and he mocks us for being old. In his early twenties, Dan is on a sabbatical year from his university ecology course. I have a feeling he may have dropped out for good, but it is a suspicion I have kept to myself.

The irregulars are a band of loyal fishermen and locals who simply like to help. They turn up as they wish, or Steve will put out a call when he needs some extra hands. It seems to work and every few months I put some cash behind the bar at the pub for an evening of merriment. Work on the river next day is sparsely attended.

On that particular August morning Steve, Dan and I had gathered at Bailey Bridge, a steel latticework bridge of the same name that was invented by the British army. You used to see them all over the river valleys at one time, but most have rotted and rusted away. Built of light steel and wood, in sections small enough to be lifted into place by hand, they were ideal for bridging meadow streams. Designed to take the weight of a tank, they were much loved by farmers, not least because they were easy to ‘liberate’ from the nearby military camps on Salisbury Plain if you drank with a friendly sergeant major.

Our bridge looked to me like it was getting towards the end of its life, but we estimated that by replacing a few of the wooden boards and repainting the metalwork we could eke a few more years out of it. I had my doubts about its inherent strength but Steve was prepared to test it out by the simple act of driving a tractor and laden trailer over it. Sometimes he worries me.

The first decision we needed to make was whether to clear one or both banks along North Stream. Both sides were equally overgrown, and there are merits whichever way you choose to go. In sheer practical terms opting for a single-bank restoration halves not just the work required for the initial clearance but also regular maintenance in the years to come. With our tight timetable it was an attractive proposition, but ultimately we had to decide on what was best for the wildlife, the river and the fishing.

Stepping off Bailey Bridge and towards the stream, our path was blocked by chest-high stinging nettles. Nettles are no great friends of ours – sure, they are much loved by caterpillars, who feed voraciously on them, but for the river keeper and angler they are a menace. They grow fast, crowd out more useful bankside plants and sting like crazy. Fortunately getting rid of them is not hard, at least if you have someone like Dan to do the work. Nettles are nitrogen addicts – in their effort to run wild they suck every last drop of nutrient out of the ground. But when they die back in the autumn the rotting stems and leaves put nitrogen back into the soil ready for next year. However, cut the nettles down and rake away the cuttings and you deprive the next generation of their nitrogen fix. Other species soon encroach on the ground left bare and new plants thrive in place of the nettles. For Dan a couple of weeks with a scythe and rake were on the cards.

Beyond the nettles and bordering the stream was the scrubby woodland that ran the length of North Stream. On both banks it was 10–15 yards wide, because some years earlier it had been fenced off. The fence was pretty much all but gone, save for a few posts and rusting strands of barbed wire that would no doubt trip us up at some point. The main growth was really stunted hawthorn, which had done us something of a favour in the absence of the fence, by keeping the cattle away from the banks and out of the river. Pretty in its own way, and home to the hawthorn fly, we mulled over how many of these bushes-cum-trees should stay, be trimmed or cut down. I am a huge fan of hawthorn. It is the constituent element of every hedge in the chalk valleys and in April its vivid lime-green leaves and white or red flowers are the first tangible proof of spring’s arrival. Admittedly the flowering bushes do emit the most awful stench, which makes you think there is a rotting corpse under every hedgerow, but once you know what it is it does not seem that bad.

What’s more, the hawthorn fly or St Mark’s fly (Bibio marci, so called because it hatches around St Mark’s Day on 25 April) causes much excitement among fly-fishermen in the first few weeks of the season, not least because trout go on quite the feeding frenzy when these clumsy fliers drop onto the river surface. The fly has no real connection with the river, so why trout go mad for these freakish-looking creatures is a mystery about which one can only hazard a guess. At first glance the hawthorn fly looks like an athletic housefly, but at second you’ll see its long spindly legs dangling below it, like the undercarriage of an aircraft, with big knuckles for knees and so hairy you might even stroke them. The flies don’t live for long, maybe a week at most, having emerged from larvae in the soil beneath the hawthorn bushes. Once hatched they hug the hedgerows for protection from the wind, but from time to time an unexpected gust will whisk them across the meadows. From this point on things get tricky. They are, without shelter, the most hopeless fliers and you will see them buffeted by the breeze. Occasionally when the wind drops they regain control, but it will be short-lived and once over water they will plop onto the surface. Unable to break free of the surface tension they are easy pickings for the trout.

Along the length of North Stream and among the hawthorn are a few spindly ash, plus some alders, clumps of hazel, brambles and wild roses. The trees we wanted to keep we marked green, those we would thin, blue, and the rest – marked red – were to be cleared. It soon grew abundantly obvious that on this bank there was not much to preserve, whilst on the opposite side pretty well everything, bar a few branches that were falling into the river, could remain undisturbed as a sanctuary for the creatures that live along the riverbank.

Part of the restoration process is about letting light back into the river and onto the riverbed itself so that the weed there can grow. The term weed does these river plants like crowfoot, starwort and water celery something of a disservice. Weed implies that they are invasive and bad, but the reverse is true. The right river weed, in the right river, is home to nymphs, snails and all manner of tiny aquatic creatures. It provides cover for fish, shade from the sun and refuge from predators. And as a filter for the water, a healthy river needs healthy weed, and that will only grow with sunlight. It is hard to say anything bad about weed, and a chalkstream without it is on a downward spiral.

Removing a fair amount of the thicket growth along the south-facing bank was going to suit us very well. In this respect clearing the north bank alone would not have helped, because as the sun tracks east to west across the sky during the day it would have left the stream perpetually in shade. If you ever doubt how bad perpetual darkness is for the ecosystem of a river, glance under a bridge one day; it will be as bleak as the surface of the moon. That said, our work was far from about eliminating all shade; trout and all the creatures thrive best where there is a mix of light and dappled shade, so before we took the saw to any bush or tree we cocked our heads to each in turn to decide stay, trim or go.

All the way up North Stream the stream itself was no great issue for us. Sure there were plenty of branches and stumps to pull out, but the dark shade had pretty well prevented anything growing. Once the obstructions were removed the sheer volume of water over the winter would flush away the mud and slime. That was of course always assuming we were able to open up the Portland hatches.

Removing the decades of compacted silt could be done by hand but it would be long and laborious, so we elected to bring in a digger to do the job. Machines are great, but sometimes you have to go easy with them or risk doing damage to the very things you wish to preserve. The Portland hatches were a case in point. They had stood the test of around 500 years because they had been carefully constructed with strong foundations. Smash those with the digger bucket and our problems would multiply.

Steve produced a steel rod with a T-bar handle. Jumping down onto the silt he pushed the rod into the ground until at around 5 foot down we heard a muffled clunk. He tapped the rod up and down twice to confirm that he had hit something solid. Over the next hour, working like an avalanche rescue team on snow, we each took a rod, gradually mapping out the depth and extent of the stone slabs ready for the digger to do the hard graft once the season had closed.

There is never what I would call a really good time to embark on a restoration; every month, every time of year has its merits, but inevitably there is disruption to the natural order of things – removing the bad and encouraging the good. The bad comes in all shapes and sizes: people, fish, animals, mammals and even plants. Yes, there are even bad plants on the chalkstreams, the most invidious of which has its origins on the foothills of the Himalayas.

My problem with Himalayan balsam is that I rather like it. The tall plants stand high above the surrounding vegetation in vast swathes and the light red-pink funnel flowers are a sea of colour that gently waves in the late summer breeze. The smell from the flowers envelops the riverbank. It is a dry, sweet smell – lightly medicinal and cathartic at the same time. It is completely alien to anything else that grows in the meadows. It looks different, smells different and has the most amazing way of distributing seeds when the flowers have died and the tall plants are denuded of leaves, just leaving brown seed pods. Brush past the balsam and the seed pods burst with an audible ‘pop’, shooting their kernels yards around. It happens with quite some force; you will feel the sting if they bounce off your face or hands. Young children love to grasp the plant at the base, shaking it with all their might while the rat-a-tat of seeds sails harmlessly above them.

Imported as an exotic species from Nepal in the early 1800s, Himalayan balsam is now established in Britain, but has had particular success on rivers where the seeds, which can survive two years, are distributed by the water. As a single plant it is no great problem, but that is not in the nature of Himalayan balsam. It is an invader that grows faster than any native plants, shading out and eventually killing all others. Walk the banks in October where the balsam has taken hold, and the area looks like a wasteland. Everything beneath the balsam is dead. In truth it looks like the ground has been sprayed with a toxic weedkiller, and come winter, that soil is bare and ripe to be washed into the river.

Fortunately for me and river keepers everywhere, Himalayan balsam is an enemy that can be defeated. For now, in October, there is not much I can do, but come early summer when the balsam pops its heads above the surrounding growth we will walk through the meadows pulling out the plants by hand. Mercifully they are shallow-rooted, so they come out easily or snap off at the base like soggy celery. However, not all my enemies are so easily defeated.

Mink have thrived in the abandoned Gavelwood. Wily creatures, the thick undergrowth and clogged streams are heaven-sent for this predatory invader. Predatory they certainly are. Fish, water voles, field mice, duck chicks, frogs, baby moorhens, even rabbits – if it moves mink will eat it. The mink I see at Gavelwood are American mink – Neovison vison – which first arrived about a century ago as escapees from the fur farms that were established between the world wars. Despite their fearsome reputation they are really quite cute; I always think they look like a bigger, elongated version of their favourite prey, the water vole. Mink have the most beautiful dark brown fur, almost black in some light. Strangely, though all the mink you spot today are this colour, they all originated from the light-coloured mink imported by the fur trade. Clearly, however, being white in green meadows was a poor lifestyle choice. After a century of wild living it is a moot point as to whether mink can still be regarded as an invader. Non-native definitely; indigenous never; but successful settlers yes. They took hold at precisely the same time that the otters declined. It was no fault of the mink that the otter almost became extinct in Britain, but nature abhors a vacuum.

On that filthy late October day the success of our survey and the work Steve had done with the digger was there to see. The silt and mud were gone, smeared over the grassland around the hatches. The wet surface of the slabs on the base of the river glinted back at me. Some of them were truly huge; a full 10 feet square and nearly a foot thick. One could only wonder at how they were ever put into position all those centuries ago. The digger stood by ready to drag out the reeds within the hour.

I wasn’t exactly sure where Steve, Dan and the irregulars were working that morning, but the whine of the chainsaw through the rain from somewhere far downstream gave me a rough idea, so I followed the noise. For all our hard work over the past month North Stream really looked in quite a sorry state. I am tempted to say worse than when we had started, but it is always this way, a sort of darkness before the dawn.

The ground along the bank was churned up; deep ruts showed where the tractor had strained and dug deep to pull out the worst of the trees. Every so often I would come across a round circle of ash where the lads had lit fires to burn up the detritus. There was a pile of tree stumps, too big to burn and unwieldy to cut up, so they would be taken away to be dumped and end their lives in a rotting heap. This would be a paradise for woodpeckers seeking easy food and a palatial home for woodlice. From time to time I came across some long, straight tree limbs which had been carefully trimmed and set aside. This was our kind of recycling; logs and branches that would be useful for building weirs, flow deflectors and groynes in the river when we reached the next stage of the restoration.

The entire bank was pockmarked by tree stumps, cut level with the ground: the cream white of the ash; dark red of the alder and burnt orange of the hawthorn. The hazels looked like bundles of cigarette filters pushed into the ground. The fact is we only pulled out the stumps we had to; by far the most were left in the ground. There is no point in ripping them out, as the root structure will live for years and bind the bank together. Some of the stumps will sprout again, indeed species like the alder thrive as a result of the extreme pruning. And as North Stream evolves over the coming years, we’ll let some grow back into mature trees for cover, shade or simply extra interest.

If I thought the banks looked bad, the stream itself looked worse. The water reflected the sky; it was dark and gloomy. Barely flowing, the surface was covered in twigs, chainsaw shavings, dead leaves and chopped vegetation. On the far bank the bushes and trees had shed all their leaves, the spindly branches dripping from the rain. The only comfort I took was in the windbreak they provided from the north wind whipping the rain across the meadows. A north wind is the enemy of all fly-fishers – the cold kills off hatch and stops the fish feeding, which gives rise to that old saw, ‘When the wind is from the north only the foolish angler sets forth.’ However, today was not the day to worry about the north wind, which is an almost daily occurrence in winter, sweeping as it does down the river valley. Days like this are always the fun parts of a restoration, when months of planning and weeks of work come to fruition. Today all we needed to do was dig out the plug of reeds, lift the boards in the Portland hatches and let the river flow in. And that is what we did.

Steve used the digger to scoop out the reeds and we laid them to one side. The flag irises, with their yellow flowers that bloom in May and June, were too beautiful to discard, so we’d replant the rhizome roots down North Stream to kick-start the regrowth in the spring in the parts of the stream left bare by their removal. The reeds gone, the water started to build up against the honey-yellow oak boards. These boards are never completely watertight; water weeps through the gaps between them. So as the flow backed up and the pressure increased, water squirted through the holes as if from a hosepipe. We were ready to open up. Standing on the bridge boards over the hatches we worked in pairs to lift the top boards out. The lower four quickly followed and within moments the fast flow from the Evitt rushed into North Stream. Like excited schoolboys we followed the bulge of water as it forced its way downstream. From time to time it came across an obstruction. Then the water would begin to back up, but when the force grew too strong the obstruction would give way and the flow continued. On it went down North Stream, carrying the mud and debris in its path. Under Bailey Bridge and the final straight to the main river. Standing by the deflector we watched the confluence of the two currents, the first time anyone had seen this for maybe forty or fifty years. True it wasn’t the prettiest of sights, with the dirty water of North Stream adding a nasty stain to the clarity of the Evitt, but the knowledge that our plan had worked was enough for now. Given a few weeks North Stream would flush itself clean, and then the fish would return.

4 (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)

SPAWNING AND THE CYCLE OF LIFE (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)

AFTER THE FRENETIC activity of summer I miss my riverside companions on a winter dawn morning. No reed-chewing water voles suspiciously eyeing my progress along the riverbank, plopping for safety under the water if I come too close. No dew-laden spider webs strung between the purple loosestrife, glinting in the rising sun, as an eager arachnid crabs with intent across the translucent filament harvesting the victims of the night. Even the rabbits have gone, and as for the lolloping hares, no chance of any of those until spring. But even if it is all quiet along the banks, in the ever-clear water of the chalkstream the game is on to create the next generation of trout and salmon.

Trout and salmon are often spoken of in the same breath, but they are in many respects as close to each other in genetic terms as a horse is to a zebra. For a fly-fisherman they define what you are on a river. As salmon and trout are two distinct breeds, so are the men that fish for them. Not to announce which you are, even though you might fish for both, is like saying you support the Manchester football team. United or City? Salmon or trout? Both are equally tribal.

For fish whose subsequent lives will diverge so totally they begin life in the same gravel beds, of the same rivers, at precisely the same time of year. In lives that will span five to seven years some brown trout will travel no more than a few hundred yards from their birthplace, whereas the salmon has a round trip of some 4,000 miles to complete its life cycle. While we may think of a salmon as a river fish, in fact the greatest proportion of its life is spent at sea. These salmon are Atlantic salmon – Salmo salar. Defined as anadromous, their natural habitat is the sea, but they must return to the river of their birth to spawn. The eggs are laid in a river and that first year of life, as they grow from fry to parr and then smolt, is all spent in fresh water. But no chalkstream could ever provide enough food for a salmon to grow to maturity, so at a year old, measuring no more than 6 inches long, they head for the ocean and the food-rich waters off Greenland. It is an epic journey that begins and ends in a stream no more than 15 yards wide and a few feet deep.

The spawning grounds created by salmon and trout in the gravel riverbed are known as redds, and the sight of the first redds, be it in October or November, is something of a red-letter day for us chalkstream watchers. Indeed, redd-spotting becomes something of an obsession from around October time. I say ‘around’ because rivers don’t obey the Gregorian calendar. Like the snowdrops in your garden that appear in January one year and February the next, the creatures of the river adapt their habits according to what’s happening around them, which is in turn dictated by the climate. And not only the weather of now; the effects of a dry summer or harsh winter for instance, may linger many months or years to come.

I’ll get excited text messages from river keepers: Seen a redd today. First of the year!!!!!!!!!!!

. It is exciting because amid the gloom of late autumn and the winding down of a fishing season, it is a small ray of hope for things to come, however distant. It is also proof that as a river keeper you are doing something right. Your river is so damn perfect that fish want to breed in it. How good is that?

Walking beside the river, you will find the redds are easy to spot once you know what you are looking for: pale lozenge-shaped indentations on the river bottom, with a mound of gravel at the downstream end. Brushed clean of silt and debris, they shine out like lights compared with the surrounding gravel. Sometimes there is just one, sometimes a cluster, but it is the size that immediately marks out the difference between a trout and a salmon redd: the former about the size of a snowshoe, the latter a good-sized door mat. And there is more latent intent about the salmon redd; it will be dug deeper, down to the hard base beneath the gravel. Random gravel stones from the digging will be scattered far and wide across the riverbed. The mound of stones at the end will be much higher and more pronounced. Redds are, of course, made by the fish themselves to harness the flow of well-oxygenated water through the loose gravel to incubate their eggs, and oftentimes the hen will lay in more than one redd. Laying in a single redd is quite literally putting your eggs in one basket, and that basic instinct to perpetuate the species drives the hen to hedge her bets by laying in a series of redds, maybe with other hens. But we have to track back in time to appreciate how and why we have arrived at this point.

From my daily walks up and down the river the progress of the trout from an everyday Salmo trutta to a body quivering as if electrocuted whilst he releases his milt over the eggs is far easier to track than that of Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon. It is in September that I start to see the first signs of spawning in the trout, who start to change in appearance in the weeks before they start the actual process of cutting redds and spawning. Suddenly that headlong pursuit of every item of food to feed on in preparation for the winter ahead slackens off. The fish are just as active, but not for food. Somewhere in their fishy brain the search for food is replaced by the search for a mate. The change sweeps over their body and suddenly that golden-brown complexion is replaced by a fierce red blush along both flanks. The males sprout a vicious-looking hook – a kype – on their jaw. The kype is largely for show, but it does make an otherwise innocuous-looking trout look like someone you would not want to mess with.

During this time the salmon are absent from this river, still making their way along the English Channel from the Atlantic to pick up the scent of their birth river somewhere on the south coast. How salmon navigate the entire journey to the far side of the Atlantic to the waters off Greenland and back again remains something of a mystery. The position of the sun, the stars and the gravitational pull of the earth are all cited as guides, but it is certain that the final leg of the journey is determined by smell.

Salmon never look to me like creatures that depend on smell for survival – their incredible ability to leap huge waterfalls or swim unceasingly for months on end seem more important – but smell is the thing. Early on in their lives they imprint the odour of their birth river onto a hormone that is secreted in the thyroid gland; it stays with them for evermore. Their hormonal library of smells is highly selective; only the ones that really matter make it onto the data bank. Likewise they will log the odour of their brothers and sisters in the river, picking up their scent in later years when the shoals are travelling across the ocean.

By the time our salmon sniffs the first scent of home, he or she has surmounted incredible odds to make it thus far. Of those 5,000 eggs laid three years ago in the River Evitt, our salar is probably the sole survivor, or at best one of two. And the dangers are far from over. Ravenous seals are gathering for an autumn feast and the drift nets in the estuary are laid in wait. It is the misfortune of salmon that they make such good eating, though it should be of no surprise. They are super-fit and have spent the past two to three years in the beautifully clean water of the Greenland Sea eating nothing but squid, shrimp, crustaceans, small cod and mackerel.

As far back as medieval times salmon has commanded a premium price, so the ever-resourceful coastal communities around Britain developed the highly efficient drift net to capture the salmon returning from the sea. There are all manner of types of drift netting, each of which has evolved for the particular locality, but the principle holds good for them all: wait for the tide to go out and then set your nets in such a way that they intercept the salmon travelling towards the estuary bottleneck on the inbound tide.

Travelling around the coastline of Britain you will see all sorts of weird and wonderful nets rigged up to capture salmon, though they are becoming fewer. Declining runs of salmon, fierce campaigning by conservation groups to have the nets removed and the harsh demands of a truly hard and difficult job are all contributing to the decline.

The simplest form of drift netting is a long net, anything from 30 yards to a few hundred, and 5 to 10 feet deep, that is slung across the tide, supported by floats along the upper edge. In shallow water it will be held in place at each end by a man holding a pole; in deeper water by boats. As the tide races through, the salmon follow, to get caught in the mesh of the net. The netsmen gather the ends of the net into a circle, capturing the salmon by hand as the circle gets smaller.

Not surprisingly this fast, efficient method is the one most favoured by poachers, but it is the fixed nets that are more typical of traditional salmon netting in the estuaries: wooden posts supporting nets that face the incoming tide. Sometimes the nets will be shaped like giant boxes as large as a van, 10 to 15 feet above the beach level, open on one side. Other times they are funnel-shaped. Or most simply, nets loosely slung between posts like a garden fence. One way or another they are doing the same job of entangling the salmon, which become more trapped the more they struggle. As the tide ebbs some of the fish will escape, but once the nets are exposed to the air the salmon don’t have long to last and the netsmen will appear to complete the harvest.

Fortunately for our salmon heading for the Evitt, these dangers are slight. The seal population along the south coast is sparse compared with say the northwest of Scotland and the estuary netting is now less common than it once was. Ahead is the brackish water of the estuary and beyond that the purity of the chalkstream water, although this change from seawater to fresh will quickly change our salmon’s physiology as the body cells, body and organs adapt for the months to come. Such problems do not trouble our brown trout, whose sole mission at this point is to find a mate. No swimming over thousands of miles for him. His potential partner may be one of the other trout that have lived within a few hundred yards of him for all their lives. There never seems to me any great logic or grand plan to the way trout choose their partners. There will be a bit of swimming around, occasionally another male will sidle up beside a paired female to be promptly chased away, but on the whole it all seems to happen at random. Or that is how it looks to me with my bank-down view, but scientists think there is more to it than this, and that even fish have that ‘eyes across a crowded room’ moment when the right mate comes into view. Nobody knows exactly what is going on in and around those redds, but somehow skin colour, conformation, size, pheromones or possibly a mix of these and other factors combine to make their choice a complex matter.

You would think that the trout at Gavelwood would get used to me – after all, they must see me just about every day. But they never seem to. The only time they are oblivious to my presence is at spawning. Every other time they will bolt for cover if I disturb them. But at spawning I can stand on the bank almost directly above them and wave my arms about like a lunatic and they will carry on with their business. If I am in the river I can damn nearly step over them in my waders as they fin away one side or another to let me pass, to return to the same spot in my wake. The creation of the redd and the spawning to follow is all-consuming, but in their enthusiasm for each other the trout also forget about their most dangerous predator, the otter.

Otters are an ever-present but rarely glimpsed part of the Gavelwood family, about whom I have mixed feelings. On the one hand I should celebrate their existence, having come back in great numbers from the brink of extinction. But on the other they are one of the best fish-eating machines invented by Mother Nature. In ten months out of twelve it will be rare for me to see an otter, though most days I will be able to tell they have passed through. They are nocturnal creatures, using the river as their highway, travelling as much as 20 or 30 miles in a night. A paw print in a muddy bank, crushed grass where they slide into the river, and spraints, or dung, are all telltale signs, as is the corpse of a fish. In winter the latter will be barely recognizable as a fish: a few bits of fin, skin and scale in an area of flattened grass where the otter will have settled down to eat. If it is, or was, a gravid female trout there will be a scattering of eggs to add to the mix of body parts, which is sad in its own way, though they will rarely go to waste as the moorhens and water voles, or maybe a passing fox, are more than happy to feast on this unexpected bounty.

Every time I see the dog otter – I think we must have just the one – I am struck by his size and lithe movement. He is around twenty pounds in weight; put in context that is about twice the weight of a domestic cat. And like a cat he is incredibly supple; he doesn’t dive or jump into the river, he pours himself in, barely making a ripple. Once in the water, despite his bulk, he is hard to spot, but I’ll be able to track his underwater progress by the surge he creates on the surface. Some yards downstream he will pop his head out of the water, swivel around to check he has put sufficient distance between us and continue on his way at a more leisurely pace.

It is that bulk that makes the otter a deadly predator, because the bulk requires constant nutrition. It is reckoned that an adult male has to consume 10 per cent of his body weight each day to survive the winter. That is a two-pound fish, which is a big fish for the Evitt. More realistically we are talking about a whole bunch of smaller fish from trout, grayling and eels right down to the tiniest, like bullheads. Of course my otter’s diet is not pescatarian – frogs, crayfish, birds and water voles are all fair game – but in winter there are meagre pickings, so a careless spawning trout is a tempting prospect.

Come the summer things are very different; food abounds and so do the otters, which often become my evening companions when I stay late to fish the evening rise. I always hear them before I see them. Otters have this high-pitched ‘eek’ noise that they ping across the meadows like sonar to keep in touch with each other; it is the mother’s way of tracking the pups. As night falls the parents seem perfectly content to let the young ones range all over Gavelwood. I can become caught in this crossfire of constant eeking, and it is not a noise you have to strain to hear. It is incredibly insistent and frequent, though the frequency is a good indicator of how well things are going. I reckon that a contented otter eeks every thirty seconds; if one becomes distressed the frequency escalates until it becomes almost continuous. And it lasts all night or until the family move on to another part of the river.

These long, light summer nights are part of the growing-up phase for the pups, when the parents bring them out from the birthing holt to learn how to explore and hunt. Strangely, unlike most other species that become fiercely protective of their young, otters are more playful. They will often swim and hunt together in the river, just keeping a weather eye out for me. Otters are pretty well the top of the food chain and they regard humans as more of an oddity than a threat. However, lower down the chain the poor fish truly suffer.

Two fit adult otters, plus three or four ravenous, growing pups, seem to be the usual summer contingent that I will see in the twilight and on into the early hours of the morning. The solitary otter I see in the winter is a stealthy hunter, but in the summer the pack instinct takes over. Pike Pool, about halfway down the main river, is our deepest part of the Evitt and is the favourite place for the family to gather for a hunting lesson. The pool, which starts when the river makes an abrupt 90-degree turn, goes down to about 15 feet, constantly eroded by the water as it hits the opposite bank and swirls in back eddies before the gradient reasserts the natural order of things and the water heads downstream as it should. Along the bank stands a line of alder trees and the roots grow down into the water. Beneath the roots is a huge undercut, the perfect refuge for the fish and eels, or so they think.

The family will not so much hunt in a pack, but they do hunt collectively – rapidly diving and surfacing across the pool with their wet, brown fur glinting in the moonlight. They pause for just a moment to catch their breath before diving again. One can only imagine the massive panic in the fish community as they flee for safety in the dark recesses under the tree roots. And safe it is from every predator other than the otter. For herons and cormorants the fish are protected once out of sight. For mink they are too deep. Pike usually give up after a single attack. But otters are persistent. Once they have the fish cornered, they will dive and dive again. As the hunt becomes more frantic and the effort greater, they will emit a sharp cough when they surface to grab a breath. Inevitably they succeed and the victorious otters will slither out of the water onto the base of the tree to start devouring their catch. They sit back on their haunches, holding the fish in front of them using the sharp claws of their webbed feet for purchase, and then tear at the body, starting with the head. It is violent and fast. From the other side of the river I can hear the flesh being torn apart. Strangely they are not competitive about the catch; they wait their turn. When one has had enough he or she will lay what is left down for another to pick it up.

I have never yet seen the otters catch a salmon; maybe they are too big or simply swim away fast rather than hide. Trout are the most common, eels not far behind, and grayling the most prized – in winter they devour every last morsel of the latter. In the summer part-eaten fish or eels, too big for the otter pups to finish, are common. With the eels the head seems to be the only bit they like to eat; decapitated eels are a common sight in the morning dew. I usually kick them back into the river for the crayfish. I used to throw the part-eaten fish into the field – dead fish on the riverbed can look alarming to visitors – but since I have discovered that otters are partial to a five-day-old, decomposed trout I also kick them back in on the grounds that it might save the life of another fish.

It is something of a fallacy that trout love the fastest water in a section of a river to live out their lives; in fact almost the reverse is true. The older and bigger a trout becomes, the more he or she gravitates to the deeper, slower parts, so autumn is the only time we get to have a good look at the long-term residents who are the brood stock for the next generation. If you are a tiny little juvenile trout the fast, shallow water is a great place to grow up because you have the place to yourself. For the bigger trout the effort of holding station in the riffles, the fast-flowing shallow water that separates the pools, is too much for any possible rewards and the risk from predators like herons very high. But for the little, tiny trout even a good-sized pebble will provide shelter from the flow whilst waiting for a tasty nymph to come tumbling by. Predators? Well, when you are small it is all about the lesser of evils. Yes, you could be plucked from the stream by a kingfisher, but in truth your greatest danger lies from the very adult trout that probably spawned you. The one thing all fish love to eat is other fish.

The trout I hoped would gather on the gravel beds in North Stream would be fast developers to do so at three years; four is more common and it is the females who first seek out the ideal patch to set up the nursery. It is true that fish often head upstream to spawn to seek out the purest water and best laying gravel, but unlike say Pacific salmon that congregate in the uppermost point of a river in a giant, swirling pink mass, brown trout are smarter than that. Quite frankly they travel only as far as they need to travel, be it a metre or a mile, which is why I had high hopes for our newly restored stream. Brown trout are eminently practical when it comes to spawning; if they have to travel 20 miles upstream to find the perfect place and mate they will do it, but if both are within a few yards, why bother? I was hoping North Stream would be that place, the breeding ground for the trout that inhabited Gavelwood already. The main river was fine, but the stream would be better with more places for redds and a better nursery for the eggs once hatched. From my point of view, it was all about making it easy for the female, because creating a redd is tough work. She positions herself over the chosen spot and then with flicks of the tail or a sideways movement of the body gradually dislodges a few pieces of gravel at a time. With thousands of movements, executed thousands of times over a period of days, gradually an indentation is cut in the gravel of the riverbed. Some of the stones get carried away on the current, but others gradually pile up in a mound at the downstream end of the cut. This mound, seemingly an unimportant by-product of the excavation, will in fact be vitally important when the females come to lay their eggs. But for now our female has to seek out the right location for her redd. The main river is just too fast in most places, as no sooner will she start to dig a hole than the rapid flow will scour it flat again, and even if she succeeded, when it comes to mating the eggs would be whipped away in the current before fertilization had had a chance to take place. So in the search for the ideal spot I am hoping that the trout moving upstream will turn right into the relative calm of North Stream to check it out.

Every action in a river causes some sort of reaction, so digging up the riverbed, however well intentioned, causes all sorts of commotion for other river creatures, and in this particular case the tiny ones. The gravel riverbed is home to millions of invertebrates, animals like snails, bloodworms, nymphs and shrimps, which thrive in the constant temperature of the chalkstream water. While 10ºC might be a very cold bath for humans, for this group it is perfect. And if they thrive, so do the creatures that eat them, namely the fish. Fish are opportunists. Unlike people they don’t have a routine that tells them it will be lunch at such and such a time. If food comes along they eat it and the moment that the redd cutting begins I will see the yearlings – fish under twelve months old – gathering below the cutting area to start hoovering up the unfortunate invertebrates, who can only drift helpless on the current until they either get caught in some weed, float down to the bottom or get swallowed. It must also be said that the yearlings, or parr, are not just there for the food; as eager adolescents they are standing by to add their bit to the spawning process. These ‘sneakers’ as they are called will slip between the adults at the crucial moment. Whether they contribute much in a normal year is debatable, but nature brings them to sexual maturity early as a back-up plan. In a bad year, maybe caused by low water or some other natural disaster that prevents enough males making it to the redds, there will at least be someone there to complete the job.

Fish are not beyond digging into the gravel themselves to find food. Watch a grayling in a river and you will see him go tail up, push his snout down into the gravel and with a puff of silt around his head suck up a shrimp. But why go to all that effort when a redd-making trout does the work for you? This is a winter feast that will only be bettered by the trout eggs themselves. And in the hot summer days, when anglers start to feel the heat and the fish get lazy, there are opportunities for both to capitalize on the dislodged food sites. At four or five spots across Gavelwood water meadows I have places where the cattle can either wade across the river or get into it to drink. As your average bovine drinks around seven gallons a day, maybe twice as much in hot weather, that is a lot of getting in and out of the river. And every time they do it stirs up the riverbed, uprooting the inhabitants. Trout get to know this, so they wait downstream, only moving out from the shade when the muddied water gives them notice of food to come. I do the same, and a well-cast shrimp imitation as the clouded water starts to clear will often turn a dead afternoon into a successful one.

The gravel of North Stream was abundant, but the decades of neglect had left it rock-hard, without the winter floods to break up the surface and sweep away the silt that had formed a crust. Within a week of reopening the Stream the worst of the silt and mud had been washed away to reveal plenty of potential spawning grounds, but when I tested them out the reality was depressing. Jabbing a garden fork into random sections of the riverbed I was mostly rewarded with a bruised hand. The tines would barely penetrate more than an inch or two. This was bad news. If I could not break through with a steel fork then the trout would find the same and keep moving on upstream to abandon North Stream. There were two options – do nothing or intervene.

Do nothing is not so bad if you don’t mind waiting for years. Gradually, nature, in the form of exceptionally heavy winter flows, would break up the surface into the loose gravel that a trout might easily dislodge. But I didn’t feel inclined to wait for years, so intervention, in the form of gravel-blasting, was the remedy. Gravel-blasting is not the nuclear solution it might at first sound. You take a high-pressure water pump with a steel probe on the end, stand yourself in the river, press the probe down into the gravel to a depth of about 6 inches and then wait while the water from the pump does the work, washing away the decades of silt that was binding together the gravel stones. When the water starts to run clear, you pull the probe out and push it back into the gravel a foot or so away. For the first ten minutes this is a fun job, but after a while the novelty palls. It is effective, however, and when you stand on the bank to admire your handiwork there is always a certain amount of satisfaction – the riverbed looks like a freshly plumped pillow and the gravel will positively glisten.

While the trout are starting to weigh up the options of North Stream, our salmon pick up the pace as the scent of the home river gets stronger. Past Land’s End they start to hug the coastline, the beaches of Cornwall then Devon almost in sight. Gradually the pack thins out as one by one they peel off for rivers like the Dart, Exe and Camel. For the remainder the chalk cliffs of the Jurassic Coast are the marker that these salmon are heading for the chalkstream rivers of Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. Yet the salmon might be less eager to make the transition from salt water to fresh if they knew that the change signals the end for most of them: nineteen out of every twenty salmon are certain to be dead within a few months. The odds are much worse for the males than females, but they know nothing of this, so the urge to procreate impels them forward.

Why do they die? From the very moment our salmon enters the fresh water he or she stops feeding. And this cessation is absolute. Not a single calorie of nutrition will be consumed until the salmon returns to the sea or more probably dies. During the time of its life when food is most needed there is none. Day after day the fish swims upstream against the current, navigating weirs, dams and obstacles whilst the body adapts to the change from salt to fresh water, losing weight and condition. In the confines of the river a new raft of predators awaits; otters, pike, herons, cormorants and even fishermen line up for a piece of the action. These are not good odds, and at the head of the river the body-sapping ritual of mating will deliver the death blow to nearly all who make it that far. At Gavelwood we are about 35 miles up from the coast, more or less two-thirds of the way up the river system. For a salmon, a chalkstream like our Evitt is an easy run: no massive waterfalls to leap over or fierce currents to swim against. The greatest point of difficulty is Middle Mill, 5 miles up from the sea. At one time this was the biggest flour-grinding mill in the county, capturing the entire river flow to drive two enormous waterwheels. Below the mill races is the mill pool, a huge expanse of swirling water, which is the first place the salmon rest up on their run inland.