Bakewell or bust!
When the authoritative history of whole-river restoration comes to be written, Derbyshire’s Haddon estate will probably deserve a chapter of its own. The Peak District’s limestone River Wye has been legendary for dry fly only rules since 1865, but modern river management took one of its greatest leaps of faith in 2004, when Haddon’s head keeper Warren Slaney launched the award-winning Going Wild project – stopping stocking for good, and diverting all those fish-breeding funds and energies into river restoration and catchment management instead.
Today, the estate’s rivers have a well-earned reputation for their bucolic English character. By most accounts, fishing the Wye, Lathkill and Bradford for their unique wild rainbow trout at mayfly time is as close as you’ll come to an authentic hallucinatory experience without getting stuck on the hard stuff: a narcotic hit of lush meadows, limestone crags, rushing water and rising fish that’s so intense it’s almost painful.
On the other hand, it’s also an open secret that a long stretch of the Peacock Fly Fishing Club’s water flows through the beating heart of Bakewell, complete with flood walls and concrete weirs, footbridges thronged with tourists, and white vans drawn up on the showground for Sunday morning car boot fairs. No prizes, then, for guessing where three reprobate Wandle Piscators chose to spend the first hour of the Wild Trout Trust’s annual grayling-fishing fundraiser last weekend…
A full six months from their breeding season, the legendary Wye rainbows were fit and eager to feed, rounding voraciously on flies intended for more fastidious grayling. If you hooked up, there wasn’t much you could do except play the game fast and hard: team effort landed a 6-pound street-fighter for Adrian…
… while local tackle shop owner Peter Arfield stopped to chat about Trout in Dirty Places and helped me bank a kebab-fed bruiser of my own:
Still, more than enough grayling came out to play with unaccustomed tungsten nymphs to make our Bakewell expedition worthwhile…
… before the real hordes of walkers started crowding the paths behind us, and we agreed we’d find quieter fishing elsewhere, with a little less likelihood of a lawsuit at the end of the line!
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