Chess Champions

Jon Beer explains how an owner’s vision and the Wild Trout Trust’s expertise is transforming one of the surviving Chilterns chalkstreams

- Jon Beer

IT BEGAN WITH a phone call from Nick. He would be away from home for a week, working in Chesham – but he had Tuesday free. Did I know of any trout fishing around Chesham?

I had a think. Chesham is an ancient market town at the heart of the rolling chalk hills of the Chilterns. To look at me now, festooned with Black Pennells, Endrick Spiders and Golden Olive Bumbles, you would hardly take me for a child of the chalk but I spent my first 20 years within half a dozen miles of Chesham. We drew wickets on the playground wall with lumps of chalk picked up from the ground and we paddled in the clear waters of the little stream at the bottom of the hill. And later, I caught the 301 to school from the bus garage at Two Waters, the eponymous spot where the little River Bulbourne met the little River Gade. Later still, I watched my friend Paul take a chunky brown trout on a spinner from the waters of the Gade in Gadebridge Park.