Western Morning News (Saturday)
End of the mud-horse fishermen
ATHREE-THOUSAND-YEAROLD way of life came to an end on the West Somerset coast this week, after the death of well known Stolford mud-horse fisherman, Brendan Sellick, was announced.
The unique Bridgwater Bay fishery, which relied for centuries on a particular design of wooden sledge known as a mud-horse, once supported dozens of families living in remote hamlets around the vast mud-flats of the Parrett estuary. But the fishery fell into a decline in the Second World War and continued to shrink until only the Sellick family continued wending their way out across the dangerous expanse of mud to the shingle banks more than a mile from the foreshore.
Often described by the countless journalists who interviewed him as the “world’s last mud-horse” fisherman, Brendan (who died aged 86 this week) was in fact succeeded by his son, but on Wednesday Adrian Sellick announced he’d be giving up professional fishing with immediate effect.
“I bounced off Father, and he bounced off me. Without him I just cannot do it any more,” said Adrian, effectively bringing to an end a fishery which dates back to the Bronze Age.
Archaeologists have found the wellpreserved remains of an ancient mudhorse buried deep in the peat near Glastonbury, on the nearby Somerset Levels. It shared a design almost identical to the wooden sleds built and used by Brendan Sellick during his lifetime.
The long curving plank, mounted with a trestle structure, allowed mudhorse fishermen to carry their heavy dripping baskets of fish as well as any nets which needed to be replaced or repaired. Forward motion was provided by the fisherman himself, who was required to lean the weight of his upper body over the trestle while his legs churned through the mud.
It was tough and potentially dangerous work. The incoming rate of the second-highest tide-fall in the world could overtake a person who did not have the support of the gliding mud-horse. But the all-important forward motion had to be maintained at around trotting speed as the fisherman negotiated the treacherous mud-flats.
“We tried to replace the mud-horse once with a ski-mobile,” Brendan once told me. “And we worked it for two seasons to keep us poor. The trouble was that the fine silt in the mud kept getting into it and messing up all the bearings.”
So, like his father, great grandfather and great, great grandfathers before him, Brendan stuck to Bronze Age technology – and, in his rich Somerset dialect, was glad to share his family’s salty history with anyone who had time to listen in the ramshackle shed near Stolford’s breakwater where he sold the fish.
“Great great grandad was a stonemason from up Nether Stowey, who came down here courting a fisher-girl. ‘Look ’ere,’ she says to ’im, ‘there’s plenty of stonemasons but there’s only a few mud-horse fishermen.’ And that’s how we started down here.
“There was six or seven families involved with it on this side of Bridgwater Bay when I was a boy, but one by one they’ve all dropped away and now I’m the only one left. I really am the world’s last mud-horse fisherman,” said Brendan at a time just before Adrian agreed to come in with the fishing.
“I’ve done mud-horse fishing man and boy. My father, William Henry Sellick, did it –and his father Jack, and his, called Thomas. The first year I went out would have been about 1939 – pushed out as a three year old in the basket.”
Brendan started going out on the mud as a professional at the age of 14. “I was doing it before, then I took it on myself and haven’t stopped since. Yes it’s hard – cold enough to skin you alive sometimes. I remember one February my father took a big rake out for the cod and coddling – you couldn’t use your hands they were so cold.”
As for the strangest fish ever to fetch up in the Sellick family nets, Brendan recalled: “It was a 90-pound sturgeon. My father had seen it feeding up and down for a day or two, breaking his nets as it went. But the day he caught it – I can see him now – hauling the gurt thing up the beach on his shoulder, as wide as a couple of farm gate posts.
“Then he brought it in the shed and asked me and another boy to sit on its side so he could deal with it. But it was still breathing and it’s gills going in and out and we were too scared.”
Brendan’s livelihood depended upon a number of what used to be called “fixed engines” – or long sock-like nets located on a spit of shingle on the outer edge of the mud-flats. All manner of fish were caught including sea-bass, grey mullet, sole and skate, cod, plaice, dog-fish, sprats, hake and octopus.
“Even I can get frightened out there,” Brendan once told me. “In fog it’s very difficult – everything looks the same. You don’t know if you’re in the tide or in the mud, or where you are.
“What I really don’t like is being caught in thunder and lightning. The flash goes off and you can look for miles and all of a sudden it’s pitch black.
You’re out there, wet through, drenched to the skin, and the whole place vibrates so much it’s like you’re in the bowels of the earth.
“There were two brothers who used to go out from here. One night one of them slipped and drowned. The other brother was looking for him, but it was no good. That other brother never went out ever again.”
Another potential danger that has threatened this most historic of fisheries has been the invisible menace lurking in the vast nuclear reactors nearby.
“We thought Hinkley Point might do for us,” admitted Brendan. “The scientists have been coming since it was built. They buy samples of our fish and they’ve never ever found anything detrimental. And it’s not only the nuclear people, the county council environment department does the same.
“But they’ve never found a thing wrong.” Brendan Sellick lived and breathed his tough hard mud-horse fishing work in a way in which is rare today.
I bounced off Father, and he bounced off me. Without him I just cannot do it any more ADRIAN SELLICK