BEFORE WE WENT TO THE WEDDING IN Herefordshire I looked up "Wye: record fish" in Fred Buller's Domesday Book of Giant Salmon.
And behold, just up river from The Sun at Winforton, where we were booked in for supper the night before – lasagne for 18 ordered in advance, so no um-ing and er-ing over the menu – a Miss Davey had landed what is purported to be the largest spring r
un salmon ever caught in Britain. It weighed 591/2 lb and she caught it in March 1923 on a spinner. There is a picture of a very large salmon and a rather dazed-looking Miss Davey.
Typically, the day before the wedding our eldest son's future father-in-law announced that he had just flogged off several hundred yards of the Wye on behalf of the village church, which had somehow acquired a stretch several centuries ago. So bang went the fishing dowry.
The Wye used to be one of the best salmon rivers in Britain and the middle section around Bredwardine, between Hereford and Hay-on-Wye, was one of the best bits. Needless to say, everything that could go wrong for Wye salmon went wrong, and in precisely the same way it went wrong on Scottish rivers.
In 1988 the river produced 6,000 fish, by the 2002 nadir it was 370. The last nets were eventually bought out. But all the usual problems were evident – the spawning streams were blocked with old trees and redundant weirs, the head waters were heavily acidified by forestry, cattle broke down the banks and literally muddied the waters and banks were badly overgrown. A familiar story. It is now coming back.
By mid-August it was up to 670 fish and 90 per cent are being put back, allegedly. "How is the fishing?" I asked Pru Cartwright of Brobury House, whose spectacularly smart B&B sported not only a garden room like a latter-day Alexandra Palace, but fishing on the river.
"Barbel mainly," she said. "Full of bones, really quite inedible." This is rather disappointing. The other week I was wondering aloud about recipes for the Andalucian barbel, only to find there are precious few. We now know why.
But the two cottages Mrs Cartwright lets are constantly taken by barbel fishermen. The men go fishing and the women and children are sent off to find improving reading in Hay-on-Wye, second-hand book capital of the world, and one-time home, I happen to know, of April Ashley who changed sex and married a Lord Rowallan (but not for long).
If you are into barbel the Wye is the river. I am sorry to say that I really cannot get excited about catching fish for the sake of catching them. It seems an entirely pointless exercise. I'd almost prefer to catch nothing than have to put back sacks of bruised, inedible fish.
But the Wye grayling takes a fly, wet or dry, and fights and eats like a brown trout. Grayling are always said to smell of thyme but I have never got anything other than faint fishy whiff.
As for the wedding, it was quite magical. The sun shone, all the flowers in the church and at the reception were sunflowers, the bride looked fantastic, the groom was nearly overcome with emotion, which started everyone else off, and Uncle Edward from Australia sent a brilliantly contrived ode (he is a Coleridge, after all), read out in a pronounced Australian accent so that his son's name, Alexander, rhymed perfectly with "the Wye's meander".
The full article contains 602 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
