Writing an article isn’t just writing an article. It’s also writing the right article, and then finding the right place to get it published. Sometimes this can feel a lot like the painstaking process of fishing itself…

Three casts later, as I tracked the nymph round and felt it lifting through the currents, just as I’ve fished so many times for deep-water grayling in the Alps, the salmon took. 

Unlike that moment when you stick a big trout, and it’s all fireworks and kick-bollock-scramble, the world actually seemed to slow down, and there was lots of time to think. The salmon stayed slow and deep, except when it pulled unstoppably and crashed three times on the surface, and I knew I had to stop it working down to deeper water…

So, I reckon I finally got the right article written about a fish which I may have mentioned once or twice already on this blog, and I’m really thrilled that it’s now been published in issue 8 of Fallon’s Angler.

Apart from telling the story of that unsolicited salmon from the River Ken in Galloway, I’ve also included some unavoidable discussion of the effects of industrial-scale hydropower and blanket coniferous forestry on Scotland’s landscape and rivers, and by extension many other parts of the British uplands. (Spoiler alert: not so good, but if we look hard enough, we can still see some reasons for hope).

Copies of Fallon’s Angler are always available direct from the magazine’s website, or from a few independent outlets. Go on, get yours today…

Just in case you missed all the social media chatter a few weeks ago, I thought it’d be worth mentioning again that my review of Mark Everard’s important new book River Habitats for Coarse Fish has now been published on the Fallon’s Angler website.

As I said in my introduction…

In these days when all the funky river menders are talking about catchment-scale processes, natural flood management, and even rewilding with beavers, it’s feeling rather rare to find a book that’s just about fish. More to the point, it’s even rarer to find a book that’s just about coarse fish, and that’s exactly the point of this one.

Here in the UK, I think we can fairly say that river restoration for the benefit of salmonid species has made most of the running for the last 20-plus years.

There’s probably a whole tangle of reasons for this. Many coarse fish do use habitat in similar ways to trout and salmon, but they grow more slowly, so it can take a discouragingly long time to see results – and anyway, the Environment Agency has always been liberal with annual stockings of little chub, dace, roach and barbel from Calverton fish farm.

Maybe, too, it’s because lots of the problems affecting the barbel and bream zones of our rivers are actually much more systemic and culturally ingrained than problems in the troutier headwaters. As Mark writes in River Habitats for Coarse Fish:

Even classic art from the nineteenth century portraying idyllic river scenes often depicts destructive forces. One such well-known example is John Constable’s 1819 painting, The Hay Wain, in which the wagon that gives the painting its title is being driven along the bed of a river, cottages and roads are built right up to the bank top, wooden-shuttered banks displace the natural riparian habitat, the floodplain is converted for agriculture, and the banks are excessively trampled by stock. 

In fact, many classic English landscape paintings depict bucolic vistas in which rivers are disconnected from their floodplains (often with some bank reinforcement or trampling) and the river channel is plied by heavy boats, blocked by weirs, mills or locks, or is otherwise in a condition that may be culturally meaningful yet is very far from natural. Our modern perception of rivers, even in such classically idyllic depictions, differs substantially from the truly natural environments in which fish evolved.

Today, thanks to the modern catchment-based approach to river management (spawned by the European Water Framework Directive) everyone’s looking at our waterways in a much more holistic way, and scientists and anglers alike are starting to apply the knowledge that coarse fish often want to move around river systems just as much as better-known migratory game species.

For instance, I’ve just read this timely article by my colleague Chris Gardner at the South East Rivers Trust, in which he reveals his research on a school of bream that clearly wanted to migrate staggeringly long distances in very short spaces of time:

During my PhD in 2006, I tracked the movements of 80+ adult common bream (4-7lb) over four years in a long 40 km reach of the Lower River Witham, a very uniform fenland river in Lincolnshire. My bream were tightly shoaled and relatively immobile in a deep tributary off the main river at the upstream extent of the reach during the winter, moving short distances of, on average, about <5 km a month, up and downstream.

In the spring, they became highly mobile moving on average 30 km a month utilising the entire length of the river available to them, with one individual moving over 120 km in a single month! At this time they were visiting shallow tributaries off the main river, before using these for spawning in late May / early June. Once they had spawned, they spread out and spent the rest of the summer in the main river foraging, again moving on average 20-30 km a month up and downstream. In the autumn they moved back upstream to the deep tributary for the winter. This same yearly pattern was observed throughout the study.

As we spend more time studying more species, in river catchments which are increasingly friendly to the free flow of fish, I’ve no doubt that we’ll discover even more stuff like this to astonish us. And in the meantime…

Just like most of those the trout-focused manuals that came before it, River Habitats for Coarse Fish is designed to empower ordinary anglers with the knowledge and confidence to start making a real difference to their own river, and thus to their own fishing. If you have any interest in either of these, it’s my strong recommendation to get hold of your own copy today… and maybe buy a few for your fishing pals as well.

As some of the dust starts to settle (or not…) on the results of last week’s referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, I’m clearly not the only environmental writer who’s been thinking day and night about the implications.

Readers of my chapter in Chalk Stream Fly Fishing (2012) may recall that I’m very much in favour of a system of supranational checks and balances on issues as fundamental as the health of the environment which transcends national boundaries yet still supports every aspect of our lives. When properly implemented into national law, the EU’s environmental directives have proved an excellent mechanism for identifying objective benefits, turning short-term political footballs into helpful long-term strategies, and keeping national governments honest, on both sides of the political spectrum.

For instance, the Water Framework Directive has enabled the clear public benefit of healthy rivers (and bugs, and birds, and fish) to be enshrined in UK law, with deadlines for meeting measurable quality improvements, and fines for not achieving these. It also mandates active involvement of stakeholders, and has given interested NGOs the right to challenge government for not taking these requirements seriously enough in their River Basin Management Plans. This has already resulted in several rounds of small but significant government funding for third sector organisations, mainly Rivers Trusts and Wildlife Trusts, to deliver river-related improvements with very high cost efficiencies in every catchment in the UK.

In these new times of great uncertainty, almost the only sure bet is that environmental issues and ecosystem services won’t be at the top of most politicians’ to-do lists or budget spreadsheets. Yet, now more than ever, the natural world really does matter. It will underpin every part of our future national policies – on farming, flood defence, clean air and water supplies, even religious and cultural inspiration – for generations to come. And it’s our responsibility to make sure that this message is heard.

So, leaving personal shock aside, what can we do as calm environmental professionals to help a smoother transition into the brave new world of post-Brexit Britain? I’ve started compiling this short aide-memoire of my own, and hope to add to it as our situation becomes clearer and our national conversation develops…

1: Be clear that environmental protection must remain enshrined in law

As Tony Juniper wrote before the referendum, EU directives have created the context for most of the UK’s most valuable environmental protections.

SSSIs, SACs, the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981) and recent regulations on the sale and import of invasive non-native species – all of these (and many more) provide clear benefits for everyone in our society and transnational ecosystem. As environmentalists, we must be very clear in our messaging to our elected representatives that WFD and other targets should be remain in place. Existing high standards of protection should be retained, enhanced (indeed perhaps shadowing future best practice as the EU’s environmental regulations continue to develop) and certainly not discarded as ‘green crap’ in some future cost-saving ‘bonfire of the directives’.

Further reading:

• Tony Juniper: Europe, the environment, and the smell of 1973
• Mark Lloyd: What does the EU referendum mean for fish, fishing and much more?

2: Maintain the Catchment Based Approach to river management

Our natural world knows no political borders – indeed the transnational nature of great European rivers like the Rhine and Danube provided the inspiration for many of the EU’s highest environmental standards.

Here in the UK, the Catchment Based Approach has proved to be a practical and intuitive framework for managing the health not just of our waterways, but all our urban and rural surroundings. As a grassroots mechanism for delivering the Water Framework Directive, it empowers local stakeholders to take real ownership of the health of the places where they live. So this highly democratic partnership working has already harnessed startling reserves of local support and goodwill, producing tangible results year on year.

As the terms of Brexit take shape, river restorationists must ask Defra and the Environment Agency to commit to the future of local catchment partnerships, with secure long-term funding to enable cost-effective management of flooding, invasive non-native species, healthy soils and many other urgent issues.  Failure to maintain this strategic investment in our river catchments will almost certainly prove to be a false economy in a world where the effects of climate change are already becoming clear. As many commentators have rightly pointed out, it’s exponentially cheaper to invest in a healthy environment now, than to have to pay for picking up the pieces when everything goes wrong at some inconvenient time in the future.

Further reading:

• Laurence Couldrick, WRT: Moving forward as one
• WaterLIFE: Enhancing the impact of local community groups through catchment partnerships

3: Devise robust new environmental mechanisms for the future

It’s true to say that not all European legislation has resulted in the best possible outcomes – Common Agricultural Policy subsidies, for example, a situation which George Monbiot has addressed in this article, among many others. Similarly, as S&TC’s recent work on aquatic invertebrates has shown, SSSI and SAC designation has spectacularly failed to protect the health of some of our most iconic rivers (if you can find more freshwater shrimp in the urban Wandle than the rural upper Itchen, something has clearly gone badly wrong).

Despite the risks, Brexit could provide us with an astonishing chance to examine our whole suite of environmental funding and designation mechanisms for fitness for purpose, and perhaps enhance or revision them with even better approaches for the future (for instance, the principles of rewilding could offer real economic benefits).

If properly handled, there’s every chance that this could represent an incredible creative opportunity – an inspiring new hope for our common environment, and a possibility which we must all be prepared to grasp.

Further reading:

• S&TC’s Riverfly Census
• Wildlife and Countryside Link: The UK Government’s 25 Year Plan for Nature
• Rory Stewart: Realism, humility, honesty, confidence and identity (a new land ethic for post-Brexit Britain?) (Full Hansard report here)
• National Trust: A call for major reform of farming subsidies
• The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee: The Future of the Natural Environment after the EU Referendum (disappointingly “within existing comfort zones” according to Monbiot – read his full submission here)
• People Need Nature: A Pebble in the Pond: Opportunities for farming, food and nature after Brexit
• Patrick Begg: How a new Natural Infrastructure Scheme could work

Update: March 2017: Now that the crucial Article 50 has been invoked, environmental NGOs and concerned citizens must continue to do everything possible to ensure that the natural world takes its rightfully central place in negotiations about the future of our country.

Because as the dust settles (or not…) one thing is certain: sometime, somehow, a new environmental settlement will also eventually be needed.

(Photo: South East Rivers Trust)

Where has this summer gone? Between publication of my Balsam Bashing book, a few freelance copywriting gigs up in London, helping to recruit new staff for the Wandle and South East Rivers Trust and watching over the Wandle’s biggest river restoration projects yet, experimenting with a radical new approach to ultralight fly-fishing, and exploring new stretches of the Exe, Usk and Wiltshire Avon, several months have suddenly disappeared downstream.

Fish were caught (sometimes quite unexpectedly – maybe more on that soon), the bank balance looks a little healthier, and I took a few good photos, but what else happened in that time?

Well… I did get some other writing done.

First up, I’ve been highly honoured to have my work included in the launch issue of a new magazine that takes a robust and novel approach to niche publication. Publisher and designer Garrett Fallon believes (not without reason, and not unlike many other genres) that angling literature has become debased, devalued and even economically unviable in this still-young age of the internet. So he’s set out to swim against that current with a new print magazine, Fallon’s Angler, which aims to commission proper long-copy articles and recompense their authors properly for their time and effort.

Particularly in this context, it’s quite a thrill to see my biography (and my article on a wildwood stretch of the River Meon) appearing alongside fishing-writing superstars like Tom Fort, Chris Yates, Jeff Hatt and Dom Garnett, and I hope there’ll be plenty more opportunities in the future. If you’d like to see this noble experiment survive and thrive, copies of Fallon’s Angler are available here for just £8 each.

By contrast, both of my other pieces of fishing and environmental writing this summer have been published in almost-conventional ezines. Apart from the club blogs which I used to edit, electronic publishing is a new departure for the Wandle Piscators, but the first issue of my local fishing club’s ezine is a real cracker, a 58-page blockbuster including my own article on the Fish Where You Live philosophy which seems to underpin the whole human angle of urban river restoration:

For me, as I’m sure for many members of the Wandle Piscators, the phrase Fish Where You Live means the simple luxury of being able to wander out of my own front door on a summer’s evening, strung-up rod in hand, for an hour or two of headspace and fishing on a river that’s preferably no more than an easy walk away, even in the middle of one of the world’s great cities. 

Even if we didn’t fully recognise it at the time, I think this was the original vision of the Wandle restoration project: to get this former sewer back to a state where it could once again be a place for people to fish where they lived…

The full article starts on page 19 of the Piscators’ Chronicle, and there are plenty of articles by other club members too: mountaineering in Slovenia, fly tying and riverfly monitoring on the Wandle, barbel fishing on the Severn, chub on the little-known Beverley Brook…

Finally, for now, do you remember all that rain at the start of this year? Since 2005 I’ve been contributing very occasional environmental articles to the Redstone Review, a locally-based but globally-interested paper edited on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains by Susan De Castro McCann.

For obvious reasons, flooding is still a big topic along Colorado’s St Vrain River, and my article on the UK perspective appears on page 17 of the May/June issue of the Redstone. At the end of the driest September since records began, and only a few months after I wrote this piece, it already feels oddly dated (floods of chalk groundwater in Kenley High Street, anyone?). But I guess that was exactly my closing argument:

Like it or not, human memories have always been desperately short, and what we like to rationalise as a comfortable temperate zone can sometimes throw a spectacular tantrum, even without wild cards like climate change and all the other things we still don’t know about our little blue planet. 

Maybe the best we can hope for is courage to do what the scientists tell us, and find a house on a hill, but still not too far from a trout stream, on the odds that they’ll be right.

(Photo 1: Fallon’s Angler)

I’ve spent most of the last few weeks taking a break from writing books and advertising copy to work on another kind of big writing job: pulling together the final draft of the Wandle Catchment Plan.

It’s involved a lot of thinking about water, and how to meet the challenges of balancing too much against not enough…

… especially in a chalkstream catchment as highly urbanised yet horribly over-abstracted as the Wandle.

With the water rising noticeably in the river over the road, as well as up-catchment, this work has provided an excellent personal context for the recent national debate about water management and mitigating some of the most immediate effects of anthropogenic climate change.

Just in case you’ve missed any of it, here are some of the best (read: scientifically robust and rational) links I’ve noticed in the last month or so.

Keep checking this blog if you find them interesting. I’ll try to add more as they appear…

• George Monbiot’s opening salvo: Deep thoughts about catchment management and keeping water in the hills
• The Parrett catchment flood management plan
• Lord Smith’s robust defence of the heroic Environment Agency
• The River Management Blog: Scrambling to blame someone else helps no-one
• Would dredging have stopped the Somerset flooding? Three hydromorphology experts believe not…
• Charles Clover’s guest blog for the Angling Trust: Let’s not unlearn the lessons about dredging
• Floods and dredging: A reality check from CIWEM
• How intensive maize farming is contributing to massive soil loss in the upper Parrett catchment (and presumably gravel-smothering siltation lower down)… and what Monbiot found by digging deeper into soil management issues
• Tony Juniper says this could still be our finest hour…
• … and Charles Rangeley-Wilson gives twitter a maths class:

River Parrett is 60km long. R4 says 65 sq km is flooded. Anyone got a calculator?

— Rangeley-Wilson (@CharlesRangeley) January 28, 2014

My own call on this? There’ll be no overnight solutions to our current mess of sheepwrecked uplands, maize-silted rivers and concrete-covered floodplains, not to mention the perched-and-canalised problems epitomised by the photo at the top of this blog.

But if this winter’s jetstream propels us as a nation towards working in harmony with natural processes, rather than wilfully opposing them and actually believing we can conquer nature (nice deconstruction of the old-school Soviet Olympic strapline right there, Matt!) without getting properly slapped for our pains…

… I think that’ll  be a start.

(Photo: Daily Telegraph)

Between bursts of freelance copywriting and other life interruptions like running the launch of the new South East Rivers Trust, the last couple of months have had a kinda bookish flavour in and around south London…

First there was the very enjoyable task of reading and reviewing a proof copy of my good pal Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s superb forthcoming Silt Road: the Story of a Lost River for Salmo Trutta, the Wild Trout Trust’s annual journal which should be hitting doorsteps right about now.

There’s been a second signing session for Chalk Stream Fly Fishing, this time joining all my fellow contributors to inscribe pre-printed labels which will be pasted into the leather-bound collector’s edition. Reviews have been appearing too, and one of my favourites so far, from Graham Mole in January’s Trout & Salmon magazine, says:

Chalk Stream Fly Fishing: A 21st Century Anthology is a goldmine of wisdom and information for trout fishers.

This book has been written by members of the renowned Salisbury Angling Club. Chapters include a contribution on fly-life by highly respected entomologist Dr Cyril Bennett and there are explanations of chalkstream ecology and seasonal tactics.

Other chapters reveal how to present the fly, nymph-fishing, grayling expeditions and even fly-fishing for coarse-fish. And the final chapter is a must-read – a scholarly look at the future from River Wandle expert Theo Pike…

And then here was the pleasant shock of ducking into Waterstones on Piccadilly to shelter from one of this month’s sudden hailstorms, on the way back from a client meeting in the West End – and being confronted with a whole stack of books entitled Lost in London.

Hang on, I thought, I’m sure that rings a bell.

So I flicked through the pages… and sure enough, there were two double-page spreads on the Wandle, one of them quoting me as a local conservationist and angler on how we’ve developed the Wandle Trust and Piscators over all these years (something I’d talked about with Lost in London editor Lucy Scott almost a year ago, and then mostly forgotten).

What with Caught by the River, last year’s River Wandle Companion, and now Lost in London, the lineup of books on my shelf quoting things I’ve said to their authors is suddenly looking longer than the row I’ve actually written… but I’m working on this.

Next up is another exciting and possibly even groundbreaking environmental writing project I’m developing with my very inspiring publishers at Merlin Unwin Books.

More news when I can reveal it. In the meantime, that’s my summer’s writing sorted…

Scotland in September was soundtracked with falling water…

Saturated by months of rain, every knee-high tussock on the Isle of Mull gurgled with a thousand tiny rivulets, and every rocky lochside path through the rhododendron thickets chattered inches-deep like a living stream.

Mares’ tails billowed white from every crag, pouring over precipitous shelves of volcanic rock and crashing in heavy veils across waves of bracken and myrtle, while hanging bogs and hillsides belched water into rivers that overtopped their low autumn meanders with startling, sterile clarity, rushing unfishably to the sea.

My latest guest blog has just gone live on the Financial Times’ How To Spend It ezine. Art writer and culture blogger Beatrice Hodgkin has recently taken over as my commissioning editor, so please do click on over to read the full text and make her day!

Update: an extended version of this piece has now been published in the Wild Trout Trust‘s annual journal Salmo Trutta.

Eagerly anticipated is a term that probably gets overworked in the publishing business… but it really is true of the Salisbury & District Angling Club’s new addition to the chalkstreams’ literary canon.

As befits an anthology written by members of the most democratic club on the chalkstreams (well, almost) and edited by the eminent Graham Chalmers, this is a book that looks likely to set the tone of chalkstream fishing and thinking for at least the next hundred years.

So I’ve been particularly honoured to contribute Chalk Stream Fly Fishing’s concluding chapter: 7,000-and-something words of river-related futurology including wise water use, the limitations of our legal system, supranational environmental policy, ecosystem services, and native and non-native species. (Earlier chapters written by Malcolm Anderson, Cyril Bennett, Peter McLeod, Dennis Shaw and others are almost guaranteed to keep you awake, but a strong coffee might not go amiss before you try tackling this coda…)

Hardback copies priced at £28.95 can now be bought online, and a limited edition of 100 leather-bound collectors’ volumes, signed by all contributors, will be available for £180 at the official launch at Sportfish in Theale, between 4.00 and 5.30pm on 26 January 2013.

Raw sewage and London’s Thames Tunnel?  Crunchable data on the social and community benefits of angling, from the banks of the Wandle to the wild hills of Assynt?

You’re right, it could only be my latest guest blog for the Financial Times’ How To Spend It lifestyle ezine… click on over to read and enjoy!