Hogsmill holiday
Somewhere in the depths of this apparently endless winter (cue another wild nor’easter kicking snow in the face of casting practice and trying to tune a recalcitrant switch rod to throw big intruders, never mind actual fishing) …
… Adrian and I grabbed a window in the weather and headed out for a day on a nearby river that wasn’t the Wandle.
The Hogsmill really is the Wandle’s pretty little chalkstream sister, rising from the same block of chalk to fill ornamental ponds in Ewell before flowing 11km via a sewage treatment works down to the Thames at Kingston.
But while the Wandle got completely engulfed by factories and mansions of industrial tycoons, the Hogsmill managed to retain a wide green corridor of ancient meadows for much of its length – not to mention a few Pre-Raphaelite artistic aspirations.
Even as the Wandle’s Arthur Lasenby Liberty was chuckling about sending all his dirty water down to William Morris at Merton Abbey Mills, and John Ruskin was agonising over cleanup work never given and lining Carshalton’s headwater pools with rocks from the Lake District…
… John Everett Millais was using the streamy upper Hogsmill to pose Lizzie Siddal as Ophelia in a setting that still presents an ideal of chalkstream biodiversity.
Meanwhile, William Holman Hunt let his Hireling Shepherd loiter on the same deep, alder-hung meanders, and set his Light of the World in a picturesquely-decaying doorway of the gunpowder mills a few miles downstream.
This chilly midwinter day, Adrian and I got off the train just above the sewage treatment works and took a long march up the Hogsmill to Ewell, spying out chubby holes, plumbing likely-looking runs for future reference, and spotting some of the 9 weirs where the Wandle Trust will be tackling total-catchment fish passage problems with CRF funding later this year.
Being urban fly-fishers through and through, we found no good excuse not to wade up and under the echoing culvert where traffic roared overhead on the A3…
… and took time to notice subtle installations of modern urban art including a decapitated doll’s head ironically trampled into the muddy path beside the stream.
And finally, somewhere near Ophelia’s Pool, we found a couple of pods of authentically rising dace, and landed three of them on our ultralight rigs.
We’d started the new year right.
Hi Theo,
I trust all is well! Love reading your blogs especially after being introduced to the Wandle late this season by Damon Valentine (London Flyfisher) along with Chris Rat. Along with Wandle I have been taking a keen interest in the work down on the Hogsmill as I currently live in Kingston but about to move to Ewell so very close tot he source of the river. With all the amazing work being done on the river do you know if there is any plan to release trout into the Hogsmill like has been done for the Wandle?
Also I am very keen to help out where possible so will definitely be signing up to the Wandle Project and get along to the clean up days. And want to try help with the trout stocks so have been looking into the idea of raising some brown trout from eggs or fry in my home aquarium with the idea to release them in the Wandle or even Hogsmill. Before I started such thing however I wanted to perhaps get further information of where they sourced the eggs for the Trout in the Classroom projects to ensure that this wouldn’t damage the fishery.
Hopefully run into you one day on the Wandle next year!
Tight lines and bring on the 2017 season.
Regards,
Jason Crang
Jason, many thanks for all this, and thank you for your interest in the Wandle and Hogsmill – they’re both very close to my heart.
Wrt trout stocking: in fact the Wandle Trout in the Classroom programme has now evolved into a wider education programme – partly because of the EA’s Trout and Grayling Strategy which has a strong regulatory presumption against stocking fertile / diploid fish into any river where they didn’t originate (and might thus be able to dilute the strains of fish which have evolved to handle that river’s own requirements and challenges).
The Wandle’s TiTC eggs came from Sparsholt College, so they’re Itchen strain. They will already have started to adapt to everything the Wandle can throw at them, and we’ve agreed with the EA to stop putting any more trout in the Wandle at all, and focus intently on habitat restoration, to allow this process to continue.
Some level of jacuzzi box stocking is still permitted by the EA in a few rivers, I think, stripping fish from each river in question, but the experts seem to think that even this is usually less effective than sorting out water quality and habitat, and letting the fish do their own thing.
Obviously the T&G Strategy isn’t geared to re-establishing populations in rivers where everything has been completely wiped out(!), however, so I’d still never say never wrt the Hogsmill, and at some future point it may be possible to re-introduce trout (an urban adapted strain?) when all the conditions are right. The South East Rivers Trust (SERT – which includes the Wandle Trust) has been working hard for the last few years on fish passage work, with the result that most of the river should be passable by the end of this year, from the Thames up to Ewell, and in fact we think trout may already have been seen in the Kingston area. Water quality is almost more of a challenge – lots of misconnections throughout the catchment, and potentially the effect of sewage from CSO storm tanks in Ewell itself.
Monitoring and citizen science will be a key part of getting on top of these issues, so I’d really encourage you to contact Polly at SERT if you’d like to get involved in some way.
In the meantime, the Hogsmill should still fish well for coarse fish on the fly – though do wash your hands after fishing and / or before eating or drinking. In fact I’m very keen to have another look soon – see you on the banks or at a Wandle cleanup!
Many thanks again…
Theo