This is my second year in the hot seat as editor of the Wild Trout Trust’s annual journal Salmo Trutta. And once again it’s been an astonishing privilege to work with so many talented experts to produce 94 pages of trouty, rivery gorgeousness, including…

• Six pages of rod licence artwork (and the glorious front cover image shown above) from David Miller
• Interspecies meetings on the stream with Avi Shanker and Robin Canniford
• Heavy metal trout in hard rock rivers with Dan Osmond
• Martin Salter marking the new(ish) UK government’s homework
• Chalk stream mapping and restoration with Mike Blackmore
• An extract from Michelle Werrett’s beautiful Song of the Streams

And lots more besides…

Wild Trout Trust members should now have received their copies of Salmo Trutta 2025: membership costs just £49 (or £26 if you’ve retired) and comes with a complimentary copy as soon as we can get it into the post to you.
Sign up via the charity’s website or phone +44 (0) 23 9257 0985 if you haven’t already!

The Wild Trout Trust has enjoyed a close and beneficial relationship with fishing tackle retailers Farlows and Sportfish for years (if you’ve ever used their mail order services, you may have found a WTT flyer or membership form tucked in amongst your shiny new merchandise!)

Both of these leading brands have also been hugely supportive around my own past book launches in years gone by. So it’s been a particular pleasure to write another couple of guest blogs for them recently, building on the ones I wrote last year, and profiling even more of WTT’s work to make a better world for wild trout and all the other species that share river space with them.

• Farlows: Trout live in trees
• Sportfish: Helping rivers flow freely again

Please do click through to read (and watch!) when you have a moment…

(Image: Wild Trout Trust / Sportfish)

Salmo Trutta is the Wild Trout Trust’s prestigious annual journal, now in its 27th issue, and after several years of helping the brilliant Denise Ashton with commissioning, proof reading and other matters, 2024 has been my first year fully ensconced in the editor’s chair.

Of course, like most publications of this kind, Salmo Trutta is much more of a team production than an individual effort, and I’ve really enjoyed working with the whole roster of world-class writers and deeply knowledgeable scientists listed over on the WTT website. Not to mention, too, our ‘ace designer’ Rebecca Hawtrey!

(Whisper it softly, but this year’s overall theme, restoring our rivers’ physical habitat, also gave me a chance to evoke a beautifully dynamic stretch of the Usk which I’ve loved since the very first time I fished it – illicitly, as it turned out, but that’s all part of the story).

WTT members should now have received their copies of Salmo Trutta 2024, and membership costs just £44 (or £23 for retired folks) and comes with a complimentary copy as soon as we can get it into the post to you. Sign up here if you haven’t already!

I knew all those years of working in charity marketing agencies would come in handy some day…

This autumn – apart from editing the latest issue of the Flyfishers’ Journal and hitting a really important new publisher’s deadline of my own (announcement coming soon!) – I’ve also been pulling together the Wild Trout Trust’s autumn newsletter, which is now available to download as a pdf from the WTT website.

The newsletter includes my own feature on recent practical urban river restoration work on the Somerset Frome, and a summary of why river restorationists like to put whole trees into rivers, often in the form of ‘tree kickers’ which mimic all the benefits of naturally-fallen or beaver-deposited timber…

It’s a little-known fact that most of the UK’s rivers are functionally starved of the wood which they’d naturally contain. Together with historic channel simplification for agriculture, industry and urbanisation, this severely inhibits their ability to create (or recreate) complex, dynamic hydromorphology and associated high quality in-channel habitats.

‘Tree kickers’ are a low-cost, commonly-used river restoration technique for carefully adding and retaining large quantities of wood in river channels, so as to mimic biological processes including natural tree fall, as well as wood which might be introduced by keystone species like beavers. They’re especially useful for improving habitat in high-energy rivers like the Frome – generating complex currents around their trunks and branches, adding woody diversity to the channel, and producing localised areas of bed scour and sediment deposition.

Kick-starting these geomorphological processes is beneficial because they make microhabitats for a wide range of insects, fish, birds, animals and plants: for example, scouring out pools for fish to shelter from very low or very high flows (increasingly important for climate change resilience) while simultaneously providing shade, refuge from predators, feeding, spawning and nursery habitats. LWM also provides a diversity of complex surfaces for algae and invertebrates to colonise, boosting the lower levels of the aquatic food web.

Eventually, many tree kickers end up being pushed parallel to the bank, accumulating permanent deposits of silt, and becoming entrained and vegetated as a new low-level bank line. At this point, we can come back and remove the steel cables – and perhaps re-use them for new tree kickers somewhere else!

Click here to explore the rest of the Wild Trout Trust’s autumn newsletter.

As part of my busy and newly-expanded role with the Wild Trout Trust, where I’m now leading comms activity as well as continuing to develop urban river projects across the south of England, I’ve recently written a couple of articles for the Sportfish website…

… describing how WTT’s river restoration projects are focused on improving habitat – which really means habitat complexity – on waters all over the country:

• Making our rivers healthy again: Why put the wiggles back?
• Better connections: Some of the Wild Trout Trust’s recent river projects

I’ve also written a similar article for the Farlows website:

• Making chalkstreams messy again – for fish, birds and insects

So, if you’re even slightly interested in the idea of how structural complexity is just as important to rivers as the quantity and quality of water that flows along them (or doesn’t…?) please click on the links above and enjoy finding out more. 

As I’ve recently written in the Wild Trout Trust’s autumn newsletter, this is the kind of story that many of us know…

A spring, or a line of them, bubbling and gushing out of a rocky hillside. Tumbling downhill, meandering through an upland meadow where trout and bullheads dart above the gravel, and human huts are built beside the clear water. Then over and down the contours again, gathering force, carving a valley that curves and steepens before bursting out onto the plains and wetlands below.

Centuries pass, and the huts get bigger, growing into mills that tame the river’s flow. Quarrymen’s fire and dynamite shatter the faces of the gorge, gouging out freestone and rubble for the construction of dams, diversions, roads and even more buildings that loom over the river and turn its currents dark with pollution.

Eventually the mills fall derelict, and the water runs clear again. Here and there, the banks of the leats and millponds are tidied and gardened for the ornamental value they add to old mill houses and new loft apartments; more often, the river flows unnoticed except in times of flood, or unusually noxious discharge from one of the factories that still stand upstream. Sometimes a curious angler leans over a bridge and asks where the trout went: the authorities shrug and say “too many weirs, we’ll never get them back…”

This is a story that many of us do know well – and in this case it’s all about the River Sheppey.

Rising at St Aldhelm’s Well near Doulting, the Sheppey flows down from the Mendips to meet the main River Brue on the Somerset Levels through a pretty, winding limestone valley that often reminds me of somewhere in Slovenia.

The area’s long history of cloth and cider milling has left a complicated legacy, including at least 35 weirs and other barriers to fish passage; channel simplification and straightening, to deliver a smooth and consistent flow of water to the mills, and make room for the road down the valley, have also steepened the gradient of the river and shortened the length of its channel. Most of the river’s course through Shepton Mallet was built over by pre-Victorian developers, and now, when heavy rainfall and runoff overcharge the old culverts (such as during Storm Alex in October 2020), modern residents sometimes find the Sheppey coming up to see them through their floors. Pollution has always been a nagging problem – most recently when something knocked out the sewage works between Shepton and Croscombe in August 2019, and caused a 15km fish kill that reached all the way out into the Somerset Levels. Local people were outraged, and we’re still waiting for the results of the EA’s investigation, and maybe an eventual prosecution.

If you think all this sounds like perfect territory for a Trout in the Town project, you’re right. Thanks to some well-timed funding from the EA and Somerset Catchment Partnership for the new TWIST (Transforming Waterways in Somerset Towns) project, I spent several weeks last winter assessing the urban reaches of the Sheppey and Axe catchments, documenting the results in a suite of reports, and starting to recruit local people as riverfly monitors to keep an informed eye on areas where no current data seems to exist at all.

Trained in July this year, these keen volunteers have already started to produce some interesting findings (including, too late for the WTT newsletter, at least 5 different point sources of pollution in the Shepton Mallet area, which the Environment Agency and Wessex Water have been duly investigating). And all this revival of interest in the Sheppey has led to a new project partnership of the EA, WTT, FWAG, Westcountry Rivers Trust and Mendip District Council’s flood consultants, to focus on the river’s multiple challenges.

A recent site meeting with the owner of one of the valley’s redundant weirs suggests that we’ve already found a possibility for restoring fish passage whilst also protecting vulnerable infrastructure. After that, with useful lengths of habitat properly reconnected, we might even be able to talk about translocating a new population of wild trout into this area – crucially, well upstream from the constant threat of Shepton Mallet’s sewage works.

After such a lot of twists and turns, can we dare to dream of a happy ending for the Sheppey’s story?

We’ve only just started writing this new chapter for the river… but yes, maybe I think we can…

In the past few months I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading about geology, as well as thinking about ways of helping urban rivers now and in the future. So I guess it was slightly inevitable that these themes might emerge in some of my own current writing too…

For the latest issue of Fallon’s Angler (red-ragged by a brief from editor Garrett Fallon which emphasised ‘abandonment, fishing in remote, forgotten places… the inexorable marching on of time and the cycles nature creates in man’s wake… where we come from and where we are going’) I’ve written a piece called When we’re gone on the subject of rocks, time, entropy, industrial ruins, the span of human consciousness, and how a little brown trout may actually know more about all of this than I do.

Meanwhile, I’ve also contributed my own unusual wildlife encounter, in this case approximately 150 million years in the making, to the Wild Trout Trust’s latest publication.

Not Really Fishing: A Little Book of Riverside Moments is a collection of short stories and fascinating facts about river wildlife from a wide range of contributors including Garrett himself, Jon Beer, Michelle Werrett, Andrew Griffiths, Kevin Parr and Fred Scourse, and I’m very proud to have been involved in the editing and design process alongside my colleague Denise Ashton and talented designer Rebecca Hawtrey.

Click on the links below to buy both of these new publications online… and enjoy!

Issue 23 of Fallon’s Angler is available from the Fallon’s Angler website, and Not Really Fishing can be found in the Wild Trout Trust’s web shop, or by print on demand from Amazon.

Four years ago, give or take a few days, Sally and I took our final walk up the Wandle to hand over our keys to the estate agent who’d (mostly) been helping us to sell our house by the river in Carshalton.

As much out of habit as conscious farewell, we stopped and peered over the bridge at Papermill Close… and yes, there was a trout, finning gently below us, suspended in our little urban chalkstream’s characteristically crystal-clear water. That moment told us, just as clearly, that our work in south London was done.

Or almost done. Transitions can take time to do right, and it’s now two weeks since I finally stepped down from my 13-year role as chair of the South East Rivers Trust. This week, I’ve just been helping to train the first volunteer riverfly monitors for the towns in the hills around the Somerset Levels: giving residents of Cheddar, Wookey, Wookey Hole, Wells, Shepton Mallet and Croscombe the tools they need to keep a knowledgeable eye on their local rivers as part of my TWIST (Transforming Waterways In Somerset Towns) project with the Wild Trout Trust.

Trout in the Town forever. Onwards and upwards (and westwards!)

Throughout the Covid-19 lockdown and subsequent restrictions here in the UK, lots of brands have made a special effort to stay connected with their customers through digital channels – and fishing shops have been no exception to this trend.

Early in the lockdown, Farlows’ Jonny Muir took the opportunity to start a series of in-depth interviews with fly-fishing people on the store’s Facebook platform.

Guests have included internationally-recognised fly-fishers like Paul Procter, Charles Jardine, Pete Tyjas, Simon Gawesworth and Henry Gilbey…

… which meant it was quite a surprise (not to mention a massive honour) that he asked me to join him for a chat about urban river restoration on Friday 17 July.

That afternoon, we spent more than an hour talking about Trout in Dirty Places, the Wild Trout Trust’s Trout in the Town project, and reflecting on all the stages of restoring a stretch of urban river like the Wandle at Hackbridge.

We reckoned we got a live audience of a consistent couple of dozen at least (pretty good for furlough Friday pub time as lockdown was easing, we agreed). And of course another benefit of the Farlows LIVE format is that the recorded interview is still sitting up there on Facebook, waiting to be replayed any time that’s convenient: click here to go straight to it.

Thanks if you tuned in to take part a few days ago. And thanks in advance if you haven’t yet, but you’re just about to click that link and watch it now!

During these strange days of lockdown (in the course of which I’ve been temporarily furloughed from my Wild Trout Trust urban river role), we’ve all started adapting to new ways of working.

Formal meetings and family gatherings alike have moved onto digital platforms, where it’s likely that many of them will stay for the foreseeable future – and some of them maybe forever, saving lots of time, cost and carbon emissions on roads and public transport.

Other changes have been felt too, and this includes WTT’s decision to delay printing this year’s issue of the membership magazine Salmo Trutta until later in 2020, meanwhile publishing it online for the very first time.

I’ve already written about my speaking trip to Maryland last September, here and on the WTT website. Now, thanks to Salmo’s editor Tim Jacklin, I’ve been able to go into more detail on some of these themes – getting to know the amazing Maryland chapter of Trout Unlimited, and exchanging knowledge and insights from our shared enthusiasm for restoring urban rivers as assets for their local communities. And, of course, the unrivalled experience of hunting wild, native brook trout with some of these guys in the Appalachian mountains:

True to form for urban river restorationists, we finally sniffed out a proper Dirty Place: a long double-barrelled culvert under a highway, where the shrunken creek ran thinly over a refrigerated concrete sill before sliding into the deepest pool we’d located all day. There, an astonishing shoal of twenty or thirty trout were facing downstream in an eddy scoured along one wall, where they kept their mouths zipped firmly shut in what we later decided must have been a pre-spawn sulk, pointedly ignoring an escalating sequence of midges, caddis, shrimps, and finally streamers (which I found the five-foot loaner rod lobbed into the head of the eddy with surprising efficiency).

Up on the bank, an ankle-twisting berm of rubble and slag from Civil War furnaces, I could hear Tom and Scott asking each other why they’d never fished this pool before, and arguing about the dark shape in the water that had to be a log. “It hasn’t moved since we got here… it’s way too big for a brookie!” Eventually, none of us could stand the suspense any longer, and I waded up slowly into the scour to see what was really in there. Small fish exploded in puffs of silt around my ankles, and the dark log resolved itself clearly into a brook trout no less than sixteen inches long, black as night apart from the diagnostic bright white edges on its fins.

Jet-lagged or not, that’s a real-life hallucination that will stay with me for years to come.

In many ways, this goodwill visit already feels like a relic from a previous age of innocence – it may be a very long time before many people feel able to squeeze themselves into sealed tubes flying between continents again – and a good thing, too, for the health of the planet. None of us can afford to emerge from lockdown and carry on doing everything exactly as we’ve always done it before, and this is a truth that applies equally to those of us who have already been rationing our travel carefully.

All this means that my personal mantra of Fish Where You Live feels even more like the way of the future. But I’ll always be grateful to have experienced how Maryland’s river restorationists fish where they live, in the course of this epic little trip of a lifetime.

Jet Lag and Brook Trout is published in the 2020 issue of Salmo Trutta on the WTT website: click here to read it (and much more!)