Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain, by Tom Fort Charles Keen
CHARLES KEEN Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain
Can a non-fisherman enjoy a book about fish and fishing?
As a fisherman myself, I can assure anyone of the same persuasion that this is a first-class read. For freaks who do not fish, I would draw a parallel with Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Walton beguiles the reader with his songs and the idyllic rural scene he inhabits. It’s a bit affected, but it has charm.
Tom Fort, without the songs, leads us into all sorts of fishy places, with their delightful sights and smells, and introduces us to rough-hewn, fishy characters – and we love it.
Walton’s alternative title to his book is The Contemplative Man’s Recreation. He is concerned mostly with ‘coarse’ fish, which can be caught while one is sitting on the river bank, watching a float: that provides endless scope for contemplation. Fort surveys fishing of all kinds, including netting and trapping, and, of course, energetic pursuit of salmon and trout; but when he stops to contemplate, we too enjoy the scenery.
His book covers the whole range of freshwater and migrant fish, but his speciality is salmon and eels – both migrants. There is a wealth of facts and figures. In 1820, he tells us, the catch of salmon from the Tweed and its estuary was 120,000 in a year. That’s a lot of fish.
Demand seems to have been insatiable. Supply must have been assumed to be inexhaustible, as new techniques of netting and trapping after about 1700 gave rise to escalating catches of fish. It was a free for all, until order began to be restored by the gentrification of angling and the wealth that this brought to the powerful estate-owners. The nouveaux fishers, with their splitcane rods and tweed knickerbockers, were able to impose legal restrictions on the netting industry, saving the lives of homing fish and damaging the livelihoods of their captors.
Now the conflict between money and nature’s bounty is reignited by the growth of salmon-farming, breeding them and keeping them in captivity like battery chickens. It is profitable, but has had deleterious effects on both wild salmon and sea trout. Finally, the great populations of salmon and eels have slumped for unexplained reasons.
Tom Fort suggests that a warmer Atlantic, the result of climate change, may have altered the currents that led salmon and eels to their feeding and breeding grounds – mankind at fault again.
The tale of coarse fish has had a happier outcome, but in this case thanks to humans’ getting out of the way. The rivers of industrial England, the Trent, the Don and the Irwell, have been transformed by the era of deindustrialisation. Rivers that were poisoned by the filth of Manchester,