WHY I LOVE
Chalk streams by Neill Stephen
GROWING up with the spate rivers of Cumbria and the Scottish Highlands, the UK’s chalk streams always seemed a bit elitist to me.
To my mind, they were all about manicured grass, fat buttery trout, and anglers with expensive breeches and a hang-up about upstream dry flies. Of course, I was wrong! There are 160 chalk streams in the UK, with fishing on many of these rivers available via club and day tickets (there are even quite a few free stretches).
They can be found in Hertfordshire (the Lea), Norfolk (the Wensum), Yorkshire (Driffield Beck), Lincolnshire (the Bain), Kent (the Darent) and Berkshire (the Kennet), and provide homes for all our freshwater species… even carp, tench and bream!
So they’re not just about Dorset and trout. Interestingly, the UK has more than 80 per cent of the world’s designated chalk streams, making them a unique national heritage, and an attraction to anglers from all over the world.
What all chalk streams have in common is that their water comes primarily from chalk aquifers. Water flows more easily through chalk to water tables, creating a natural reservoir effect that means the rivers receive comparatively little surface run-off. This tends to result in clearer water, less sediment, steadier flow rates and temperatures, and dissolved calcium. This last factor allows invertebrates such as shrimps to build their cases more easily, which helps account for the prolific insect life so often associated with this type of watercourse. Incredibly, many chalk streams only deviate slightly from the temperature of 100C all year round (as many have discovered the hard way when jumping into a chalk stream pool on a summer’s day!). This is how they can fish so well on boiling summer days and freezing winter days alike.
All this helps to create a very special environment for fish. For us anglers, it creates the crystal water clarity, lush bright green weed, glittering gravels and upwinged insect hatches that we typically associate with chalk streams.
When I moved to the south of England in the late 1980s, it didn’t take me long to visit my first chalk stream (the River
“The UK has more than 80 per cent of the world’s chalk streams”
Test), and I’ve been in love with their beauty ever since.
For me, a river is always better when I can watch the fish, and I’m never happier than when walking a chalk stream on a sunny day, peering into every corner and losing myself in the glassy underwater world. You learn so much about fish when you can see them, and in finding and approaching fish you learn so much about watercraft.
Over the past 10 years I’ve enjoyed a wonderful relationship with the grayling of the River Frome, but there’s always another chalk stream challenge. I’d love to track down a truly wild big brownie on a dry fly from a smaller Dorset carrier, and I’ve never caught a 3lb river roach either. Both these dreams could be granted by a chalk stream, and both could happily occupy me for the rest of my fishing life!
Sadly, an alarming 37 of our chalk streams are currently designated as endangered, largely due to over-abstraction.
These problems and their solutions are never simple, but realistic proposals have been recently made via the ‘Chalk Streams First’ charter. I pray we find an appropriate way to safeguard these gems – our own magical and unique contribution to global ecology.