Reinventing Arcady

With chalkstreams coming under increasing pressure, it's time to step away from the traditional and manicured and let our rivers breathe

- Charles Rangeley-Wilson

FOR A host of reasons chalkstreams capture people's attention and affections. They are globally unique, freshwater marvels, and important habitat to iconic species such as salmon, native crayfish, otters and mayfly. But generally you learn these things after the chalkstream has already caught you in its spell. I fell for them when I was a boy and before I had any idea they were chalkstreams. The creeks of North Norfolk fascinated me with their impossible, blowsy clarity, their gentle hurry, their aura of peace and all the little fish that swam in them, which I failed to catch.

Later, and more consciously, I fell for the chalkstreams in Wessex, where I moved to teach art in 1987. I met the late Richard Slocock, a pioneer of catch-and-release wild trout fishing at a time when many chalkstream fisheries relied heavily on stocking. Richard was a thorn in the side of the water company that over-abstracted his river. And he practised a slightly scruffier, rougher-edged style of riverkeeping than existed on the classic chalkstreams of Hampshire, where the banks were mown hard and weed was cut vigorously and often. Richard became a good friend. I loved escaping to his watery wildernesses to join him on working days, trimming branches and weed, always with an eye to favouring the wild trout over the angler. In return I got to fish his wild river.

But it wasn't just the wildness that enthralled me: it was the wildness set within a homely landscape. Those streams flowed through the traces of Hardy's Wessex, turning mill wheels, chattering through hatch pools and Over weirs. The remnants of the many ways that chalkstreams have served us are part of their beauty and the layered archaeology of England: they have been used to protect Anglo-Saxon hill forts; to float stone upriver for the construction of abbeys; to float wool downriver to market towns; to grow hay, grind corn; to water grandiose displays of wealth and status in Palladian ponds and lakes.