Disembarking at the tiny Mottisfont and Dunbridge station, I’m met by cheery painted cutouts of grayling and trout, schooling along the platform fence: avatars of a celebrated river. But the welcome fades fast as I join the Test Way and encounter a plethora of fences and signage designed to keep walkers away from the very thing most people come here for. I meet an agitated elderly man struggling to clean his hands because he’d inadvertently touched a gate daubed with black anti-climb paint. By the time I manage to (briefly) encounter the famously clear, bright chalk water from a bridge, I’m starting to regret coming.
The estate upstream is Mottisfont, owned by the National Trust. There I meet Alex Olejnik for a tour of the four river beats immortalised by the father of dry fly fishing, FM Halford. Alex is not what you might expect a head river keeper on this hallowed water to be. She’s been in post for 18 months, during which time her boss, Dylan Everett, recommended she learn all she could about traditional fishery management, then forget it, because things are changing here.
Last year they stopped stocking fish, mowing banks, cutting waterweed and removing fallen trees. In March, fishing was paused while the river restored, and wild fish grew in number and size. Alex no longer spends time gardening, provisioning huts with water and charcoal, or cleaning up fishy barbecues. The only grass she’s mowed today was for a yoga group, and they’re looking into opening up some stretches for swimming.
The banks are now thick with loosestrife, forget-me-not, great willowherb, watermint, yarrow, hemp agrimony and vetch, and there’s movement everywhere: clouded yellow, peacock, red admiral and gatekeeper butterflies, tiny moths and beetles, dragonflies and damselflies. New reedbeds have established. Bees nest in one of the thatched fishing huts. There are tiddlers in the shallows and trout flickering faster than the eye can follow over golden gravels between thick tresses of water crowfoot.
“It’s a challenge to find the right balance, but we’re supposed to be a conservation and access organisation,” says Alex. “Fishing is an important part of local heritage, and we hope there will be anglers here again. But they’ll be sharing the river with more wildlife and more people.”
I’m glad I came, after all.
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