That big fat Pike in the room is politics.

Sweet Chestnut coppice is only produced in the chalky soils of the south of the country and small pockets in Wales, but as a material for wet areas it is superior to local sourced hard woods and more suitable than the steel Re-bar we were first using, A huge truck delivery carrying several large pallets was organised, and the contents stored in a members field nearby to keep this contracted labour fully stocked and supplied.  

We are still using up the last of them. How I wished I had those resources offered to me when I first started on the habitat works, when most of my time was spent procuring materials, it would have been fan-bloody-tastic and saved me a packet! Not that I’m at all jealous!

I was impressed by his work, I have spoken before about a narrative of the Brook carried through its series of flows and features. In this context, I couldn't understand some of the changes, or the point of them in terms of the expected effect and result, but he knew what he was up to and had got on with many areas that I’d been dying to put some features in and add some relief. And, for one man working alone he’d achieved a lot, and made many valuable improvements. A lot more than I could manage in many winters of toil down there.

There was a new technique he had used for adjusting flow in deeper waters that I’d never seen or thought of. Driving a pair of stakes high in the bank, and then securing the flow deflectors down into the flow at an angle to narrow the streams width and divert the flow from the bankside. I assume this was the intent, unfortunately all that remained was the pairs of posts and a bit of attached debris to make a forensic evaluation. The winter flows had destroyed most of the evidence.

Apparently he had had some form of machine to drive the posts in, I wished I had seen it in action, and how he was managing moving all the materials around on the banksides that due to the rules on set-aside grants, were restricted from vehicle usage. More than the sheer amount of posts driven in, it was this logistics of materials movement that really impressed. Damn shame I could have learned a lot down there helping him out.

Had his methods provided this new wealth of gravel gathered down just up stream of the bridge itself? The mystery remained.

No one in the club seems to have much to say about it, or had watched him in action which seemed strange, but they had evidently been distracted elsewhere. And I guess, as he was hired in as an experienced contractor of this specialist sort of work, it was accepted he knew what he was doing. Bill the treasurer had gone down occasionally to chat with him and see what he was doing and if he needed anything, but It seems he was left pretty much to get on with it un-directed.

One of the benefits of not stocking, was that  the cash was now available from membership funds to finance these habitat projects to an extent, but as this was still pre-Brexit; rivers were not only protected, but the directive was there to improve them and the funding and grants were available to finance projects should they be for the improving river quality.

The Environment agency still had the man power , resources and resolve to manage and respond to requests, while having the bite to keep a check on the behaviour of the privatised water companies, who were pocketing proceeds, instead of investing it back into the old creaking overloaded systems that they were supposed manage and improve. That was the reason given, and had been the point of privatisation when sold as a concept to the past owners; the British public themselves. Who soon found that instead of profiting and benefiting from this sale, they were having to bail it out of trouble, while servicing the obligations to the share holders and the bonuses to the owners. Had it not been a government legislated scheme, in normal society, it would have been labelled as a scam and the incoming new labour were just as culpable as the old tories in the deception.

As the midnight hour of Brexit tolled, the funding for water course protection and improvement, though given a shiny new name, was practically cut off by the present government. The environment agency was muzzled over-night, and its rations reduced to the minimum required for it to function in name only, now virtually powerless.  While the tethers and halters on the private Water companies and farmers were loosened,  unleashed  to despoil the waters and yet in the case of the private utilities, reap the harvest of dividend and bonuses while running up unimaginably ridiculous levels of debt to be passed on to the public, and whichever government it is who will eventually have to pick up the tab.

Up to this point. After decades of industrialisation and abuse,the rivers, lakes and water ways of Europe had been brought back to life and were again resembling clear un-blocked veins and arteries carrying life around the countries and nurturing the needs of the living. It was becoming a bright and optimistic future for that part of the environment, and us actively trying to do our small bit, despite the growing energy levels in the climate, threatening the rest of our local ecology.

One evening in England, the sun set over those cleaner fresher waters and their healthier futures, and the next morning when it rose, the whole of the United kingdoms waterways were then heading for a slow choking death, and the water companies, granted legislation to use them now as overloads for their failing under invested systems.

To all intent and purpose Britain’s waterways and coastal waters became legally, an integral part of the sewage system.

The target day for cleaner UK waterways  was shifted from a few years away to 30 years somewhere down the track, many changes of government and responsibilities later. Hence someone, far in the future, could inconveniently pick up our bill, or simply kick it further down the track.

No growing urgency was factored in, considering the increasingly warmer waters from the climates now undeniable change. With the already depleting oxygen levels linked to temperature, suffocating the lives within the waters and transforming the biological make up. Nor it seems considered, the extra effect of burdening and accelerating this trend with increased nitrates, phosphates, ammonium and electrical conductivity levels. That, it seems was also now a problem to be dealt with, a human generation or two down the line.

Until then, these waterway’s were to be the collateral damageof what is frankly, unsustainable finance and farming practices, the policies seemed to be steered soley by the figures of yearly finance reports and election cycles. These three agencies who legislate, find exemptions, and profitunder the moniker; “Guardians of the countryside and waters”, the farmers; the water utility companies; and the government; all are wilfully destroying the resources they claim to protect.

The English people whom voted for Brexit, had specifically voted to stop a feared deluge of people they were told were flooding over the waters in small boats from Europe. Braced to expect almost the entire population of Bulgaria. “6 million Bulgarians expected”  were the Newspaper headlines ( Bulgarias population was at the time 6.75 million) such was the level of propaganda.  

If we remained linked to Europe, Bulgaria would almost empty apparently, to join all the souls who had escaped war, famine and cruel oppression. Risking life, while deserting homes and communities, on a treacherous journey to escape and find sanctuary and a future. Some of whom, who’d survived this desperate and arduous plight, ended up on our shores.

But these poor souls were dismissed by politicians and the press, as mere leeches popping over here, to live in comparative luxury while sucking dry our social services.

Thus Brexit happened ,and yet still those small boats came in ever increasing numbers , and the magic funding for the NHS that was promised, and the pledge of extra care for the environment, vanished in a slight of hand.

The people of little England were sold a lemon, the whole of the UK and Europe now had to suck up, the sour aftertaste!

Willow Brook was feeling unbeknownst, the last of the benefits of pre Brexit, while I was brooding away.  Our mysterious river man was doing a sterling job on bank revetment, driving in posts along the eroded banks, then weaving in poles of Hazel and back filling, and the members were  not idle either.

The cattle drinkers, those areas of bankside erosion that caused so much siltation and diffuse pollution, as the  cattle came into the stream to drink, were finally fenced, and where needed solid stone was put down to protect the bankside and exposed river bed. Not as effective as putting cattle drinker troughs in the fields remote from the brook, which was also done in a few places, but for some reason, the beasts still had some limited access to the water when needed.

One area that was particularly bad was on a u-shaped bend, within a series of meanders. It became a major project for the members of the club to do, and seemed to have captured their imagination. The shallow sloping, badly puddled ground, was  portioned off with revetment and logs, and marginal plants like irises encouraged to make stable the often boggy ground, creating for the  Brook, a defined bank edge again.  A new fence cut this large U off from the paddock and the land acquired was planted with trees. A lot of man hours were invested, and it stopped a lot of siltation constantly spreading downstream. All well and good and tickety boo!

The trees are nice and some of them do actually shade the water, the area is not a source of siltation any more , but nothing was done downstream of here to address the silt. The channels are still wide, too wide, and the bottom sludgy, as nothing was done to speed up the flow, cut a new stream bed,or lock the silt up in the banks.  The stream is basically too wide on the  bend and too shallow. Despite spending much time hoping and expecting, I have never, even in Mayfly time,seen a Trout using it as habitat, or found that the deep water used as adult habitat. Either side is unfishable due to the trees, too close to back cast, too low to roll cast, dropping a downstream wet or streamer  being the only options, (which for a club that has a culture of upstream dryfly is perplexing). While negotiating a path through these dense trees to get  to the water, is now, nigh on impossible. If anything this area is a testament to what happens when habitat work goes awry. Some element in its execution was not considered, nor were the consequences of these actions.

But I don’t want to say much at the club, nor get in there and start remodelling the area, many people it seems used a lot of spare time up creating this feature and it seems unnecessarily cruel undermining the efforts and goodwill….. just yet!

Above here, in the Village beat. This volunteer army got to work clearing some trees, adding some large woody debris and apparently, I am told, adding some gravels for redds. I say apparently as little evidence remains.

Instead of concentrating on a few areas with imported gravel, as we had before, and learned the lessons of instream modelling to keep it in the area it was wanted.( by anchoring large woody debris and driving posts down before hand to help hold the new beds), They scattered it around in small pockets here and there, where it was soon dispersed and shifted away.

One place in the village beat I used to find very special.

You needed to cross a barb wire fence on the edge of a steep drop to the water, lowering yourself deep in the stream, while grasping the fence post, and then wade crouched under some low trees, until the stream bed rose up to a shallow riffle under some high Hawthorns, banked with rich marginal planting.

This area, completely obscured from the nearby field and eyes of passing fishermen on the bank behind fencing, trees; weeds; and Brambles. Here the Brook tumbled over rock;bedrock, the actual limestone material connected to the planet. This parent material exposed, and down-stream of it, those riffles are beds of natural crushed limestone gravel, not the ground, round pebbles deposited by an ancient glacier, that seems to make up the beds of the rest of the Stream.

This was a teeny weeny, little patch, of untamed Willowbrook. A small precious oasis of the natural stream, and one of two places in the village section that I had seen evidence of Trout breeding. In this particular spot, it was just above an area of ideal habitat for the hatchlings to shelter and grow.

In a landscape blanketed with deep glacial deposits, this scrape back to bed rock, was a rare insight into an older age.

The other place they would spawn , first spotted by the Wild Trout Trust, and previously oblivious to us members, was on a gravel bed just up stream of the Woodnewton road bridge and the bottom end of this beat. Looking over the bridge when we first called the organisation in to survey the stream, Tim Jacklin pointed out a trout Redd on the gravel and all the classic shape and size of the fresh disturbance.

Until that moment I, and I guess no one in the club, would have known what we were looking for, or even imagined wild fish were breeding here, in what I considered at the time the stock fish waters. Here though, on a small patch of gravel rising above a deeper ride of mostly silt deposit, just downstream of a heavily used open cattle drinker area, as the water accelerated into the squeeze of the stone bridge structure it would have flushed through these gravels and been a ‘text-book’ choice. A bad one however, as the cattle drinker added plumes of milky colouration in to the stream and those gravels, which would choke many of the eggs deposited there. And downstream of it was  only a few pockets of potential shelter for the hatchlings as the water entered a quite deep glide, before tumbling into a few deep fast pools. 

This again had been dealt with in my absence, fencing the cattle back with four strand  barbed wire fence. Allowing them now a minimum access to the edge of the running water and providing here a compacted hard rock bottom for their hoofs. This new stone area though  sloped down into the Brook. Still manure and soil could run off into the brook but it was an improvement.

We had spent time looking long and hard at various types of cattle drinkers, troughs and tubs to be put in the fields away from the Brook, there were grants available, why had they not gone down this route instead?

Over time these rough brick sized rocks that had been crushed down, became in habited with weeds, and the roots helped to bind the soil and silt , capturing it on the slope.

Another thing about these works puzzled me. When I had gone guerilla early on in the habitat improvements, I was always wary of the potential criticism that this was a fishing club and its primary objective was providing Fly fishing for its members.

Whatever I did on the banksides or in the flows, I did keeping two objectives in mind; creating better habitat for Trout, and creating better fishing opportunity. While increasing the Trout holding capacity of part of the stream I was increasing or at least preserving the fishermen’s access to it. Such considerations were made hand in hand.

These two Projects considering the group of people involved, the old chairman and secretary, two of my fiercest critics in the past. And the old FBA scientist, the old Doc, and half a dozen others whom regularly had helped on habitat work and attended the workshops, seemed to be reading a different hymn sheet in reverence of a completely different deity.

That cattle drinker on the bends, had been terribly poached by hooves and badly needed  a change in use and major remodelling. But even when at its worst, it did, at all points around its winding meander hold a number of Trout, who could be seen actively feeding tight in the banks and also out in the middle of some open water.

From in the stream and crouched aside the banks, it provided some interesting and often dexterous challenges to achieve a drag-free drift over half a dozen or more targets. Maybe a quarter of all the fish encountered on an evening in the Meadows beat, were in this area.

Now due to this ‘habitat’ project, the siltation source had ceased, but so had the fishing access in that area and it did not seem to increase the fish holding capacity. It had become a no-go zone for both man and Trout now it seemed.

Above the Woodnewton bridge, in a stretch that has barbedwire running virtually the whole bankside, backed up now,with impenetrable brambles, the cattle drinker opening for all its faults, was the first access to the initial 100 yards of fishing that you would walk towards and wade up, before a deep pool forced you back up onto the bankside.

The river bed  above the drinker was mostly made of quite big stones for our Brook, too big for redds, but providing respite and cover for juvenile trout, the mostly shallow depth and bankside  herbage made ideal fry habitat, and some deeper undercut banks for bigger adults to ambush from….And also there was fishing up into the pool itself to be enjoyed in this stretch of wading.

Again on a good night you would see half a dozen or more targets in this area to attempt to cover. With only a few trees to bother your back cast, it was a good warm up in an evening, before you got into the trickier fishing.

When the team fenced off the cattle drinker they provided no stile to cross the barbed wire anywhere near it, and did nothing about the encroaching brambles, the first access to the water now was after that first pool. They had bi-passed the most fishable 100 yards of the beat, and with the lack of attention now the brambles had really taken hold. From within the stream, if you did venture over the barbed wire and risk your dangly bits and your waders, there was no escape left before the pool , you had to wade back the 100yards to get out, playing risk again, attempting to get your leg over tight swinging strands of  Barbed wire.

So mostly people chose to preserve their waders and their remaining manhood, starting their fishing above the pool, and now by-passed this section

Soon people found it too much of a faff to fish this Village beat, it became a low priority for bank work, and winter clearing. The available water for fishing reduced considerablyas the wander between fishable stretches increased, it became hard work. Much easier to dip down to the Nassington road bridge where everything was close and wade-able and nothing threatened to puncture you or your waders.

And what of those new gravels bought from the quarry? The ones they dropped in pockets along the likely spots, a bit here and a bit there? They have washed down stream as the Brooks velocity and volume has reclaimed its original profile in those areas, and they seem to have settled in two spots  where they’ve jammed and backed up over time.

One place, my little natural Oasis, is now swamped with this quarried gravel and no natural bed rock can be seen and the natural gravel bed smothered with these round pebbles And against the redds above the stone bridge it has settled in a thin long mat covering the siltation  and stretching back to the rocks, too thin to be useful redds,  and restricting the natural flows into the gravel that was a good spawning  ground.

The village beat is still great Trout habitat especially adult and juvenile and there’s plenty of fine fish there. I spent many winters days a few years back cutting into thick drifts of Blackberries and taking them to ground level, hoping to come back and kill the regrowth. Opening up the fence and uncovering the old stiles, I reclaimed about a third of the section.

The frost however each weekend, was relentless, and it was toiling in a winter wonderland. The new chairman, Old doc, provided occasional company and flasks of coffee. As the Stihl power source for the tools kept failing, a hidden blessing for me ; everything was done by hand. This certainly warmed me up, better than endlessly pulling a string of an engine that continued to cough and occasionally splutter suggestively, in a way that it was about to start with one more yank, but was actually just teasing me.  I wondered who was winding who up here?

In any case when working in the great outdoors, there’s nothing that dulls my mood and gets my grumpy face on quite like the whining background din, from a noisy Stihl 2 stroke engine in my hands. While if it’s in somebody else’s hands, it makes me positively murderous!

I got no volunteers willing to come and help, with the Village section. Possibly because it was the midst of a bitterly cold winter, but I think it was because people had written off the village, it was too hard to access and become too much of a faff for an evening.

The good intentions of the habitat work had back fired for the fishermen themselves and the few natural spawning areas had been ruined for the Trout population. I think the decline in fishing these two areas and the shift to the lower beats has a lot to do with the habitat work which has broken up the fishing experience and made access considerably harder to find.

I think it’s only fair that I must add at this point, for balance,the consequences of my own poor decisions and practice.

Where we put in the original gravel spawning areas, it was mostly open sky and I thought it would be desirable to have some cover and shade. Casually, in some adjacent flat springy ground, I shoved down into the soil a couple of dozen twigs snapped off a nearby Willow tree. I expected a few of them to take root. I had no idea at the time, that I wouldn’t be back to tend them.

During my absence from the Brook, I bumped into the old secretary who almost gleefully informed me they were becoming a problem and a bad mistake, that ‘I’ personally,should go back and deal with.

I dismissed this as him being a bit of a drama queen, and imagined a few hours coppicing at most would do it.

When I finally saw the area, I couldn’t see the Brook, a tall screen of Willow had arisen like in a fairy tale. All of those twigs it seems had taken root and prospered, and boy in the damp ground, how they prospered!

Tall, impressive, and impenetrable from the bankside path, they also stretched out densely and low across the watersurface almost to the far bank, the area could not be entered by wading either.

When I did hack my way in, it was worse, the trunks by the water were sending up shoots from roots in the stream itself choking the flow. And those branches low over the water, with added weight of years of stranded flood water debris, had eventually been pushed under the surface touching the shallow gravel’s. They subsequently had sent out shoots that had become roots and now were colonising and choking across the stream as new Willows.

What had been a bright idea, and fifteen minutes of idle fancy on an autumn afternoon. became three long Sunday mornings work for a team of 5 men to rectify and it’s still not right.

I am perfectly capable of stuffing up, just like anyone else, none of us are immune and habitat work is not an exact science. We are it seems, constantly learning from our ‘stuff ups’ and howlers!

All the best to all out in sexyloops land.  Tight lines,  dry waders and intact dangly bits!

Chris Avery