A weekend away in North Norfolk in the sunshine. Good beer and food, and some wildlife and stuff we don’t see that much of at home……
Water vole dead centre, best photo I could get.
A water vole nibbling reed stems in the diminutive river Stiffkey. Haven’t seen one close like this for years, I’d forgotten how big they are! We stood and watched it for some minutes, you could clearly hear the nibbling…….
Hummingbird Hawk Moth on the Valerian, lots of these about again this year.
Pyramidal Orchids and maybe some others at a chalky Iron Age fort.
And a brown trout of a surprising size, in the Stiffkey again, just downstream from the excellent new project “re-wiggling” the river. My guess was a pound and a half in old money…….
The project on the Stiffkey is detailed by Charles Rangeley-Wilson here:
Lovely field edges on the approach to our fishery in the Wensum valley courtesy of our brilliant landlord! Masses of poppies in amongst the barley as well, not sure if that’s intentional. If anyone can ID some of those plants I’d be most grateful.
Sadly life and work have been getting in the way of the odd blog. Hope things will settle down a bit to put that right. Also need to go fishing!
This winter in Norfolk has been a bit more of a struggle than usual I’m finding, long dry and warm autumn, followed by extreme cold, followed by floods and now the river has shrunk back into itself, terribly low and clear.
Several blank trips in, I finally managed to catch a nice chub in a brief few hours fishing on the 2nd of February.
I was using a rod formerly owned by the late great Arthur “Nobby” Clarke, who I knew a bit from Tom Boultons old tackle shop and also through involvement with NACA when we ran Ringland Lakes way back. An old style Plain-Jane Harrison Gti, it was let go a few years ago when Nobby became unable to fish through poor health and found its way into my hands via another friend.
So this one is for you Nobby. Thumbs up emoji etc as appropriate.
On a recent weekend in the Peak District, we had a day walking around some less-visited Dales. Lathkill and Bradford Dales to be precise. I was prepared for low water levels after the summer we’ve just had, but shocked with what we actually found. A huge length of the upper Lathkill is dry, or at least any water was underground and invisible to us on the surface. Admittedly it’s a small watercourse up there, and known for problems with flows due in part to old mine workings etc. But as we made our way down, there was still no water for miles – where brown trout usually swim, and dippers and water voles proliferate, the bed was either dry rock rubble or full of rank vegetation.
Low levels on the Lathkill at Alport
Water finally appeared way down as we approached Over Haddon, just puddles in the stream bed at first and eventually some sort of flow between the many little weirs. At Alport it was starting to look like a proper little river again, but very low still. No trout or dippers around, a couple of grey wagtails was about all we saw.
Video still of the paddling dipper!
Making our way back via Bradford Dale, the little river Bradford was equally low. A dipper actually appeared near the confluence with the Lathkill, feeding in ankle deep water (dipper ankle-depth!) and catching caddis larvae or something similar. These birds usually hunt totally submerged, walking on the bottom and using the current to keep themselves down! That was it, nothing more, as we walked upstream the little stream shrunk and became choked with rush and grasses and I tried to picture it full of trout as I had seen it described. I failed.
After the usual ten hours at work an early evening walk was definitely in order, after a steaming cup of the old Rooibos we headed out through the quiet village and up Harefen lane. On the way back Tanya commented that she’d just put two and two together and realised it was the tenth anniversary of my dear old Dads passing.
As we walked on I caught a skirl of bagpipes on the breeze, getting louder as we approached the village. “Must be something on at the village hall” I said. We crossed the Acle road and there was a young guy standing looking over the wall into the beautiful garden of the big house there. A lone piper was playing his heart out on the sun terrace at the back, and as we approached the lad said “Hi, have you heard, Queen Elizabeth has died?” Obviously we hadn’t. It all became clear, the piper was playing a lament, we stopped and listened and chatted quietly amongst ourselves about the sad news and the pipes for a short while then said goodbye to the lad and headed home.
By no stretch of the imagination am I an ardent Royalist, however it just felt right and I’m so glad we heard the news in such an appropriate way, preceded by the lone piper. It was not lost on me either that later on after our evening meal a wee glass of Bowmores 15 year old appeared………RIP
An interesting morning on Friday the 19th. Due to meet up with Liam from NNNSI on our fisheries for a continuation of the Himalayan Balsam Bash (henceforth HBB!) at 10 am, I had time for a quick recce on something else. A breach in the bank up at Bintree, which the EA and company have managed to avoid fixing for TWO YEARS(!) exacerbated by the drought has led to no flow over Paul Seamons weir at the Mill nor even much over the bypass apparently for SIX WEEKS.
A number of us felt this should be kept on the boil, and have tried to get drone footage of the breach as it is now but had difficulty actually locating it. So in the window before meeting Liam and others I shot up to Bintree for a quiet look around. The day was warm as is usual at the moment, though some light rain misted over as I drove up and was with me most of the way. I even pulled on a hat and light fleece as I left the car on the roadside and continued on foot. I didn’t know then who owned what land up there, but felt the worst event would be I got chucked off but there was no-one about as I crossed some rough meadows and located the IDB drain which was carrying most of the flow from the breach. As I walked further in everything just closed in and got wilder and woolier, turning from rough damp grassland to very wild wet meadow, full of water mint, head high sedges and nettles and eventually I was halted at another drainage ditch. By now I was well stung and scratched (shorts didn’t help) and having seen two roe deer ahead on the faint path I was using there was every chance of picking up deer ticks.
So I abandoned that approach and returned to look at the mill and surrounds. After some rain, there was finally water flowing over the weir sill and quite a bit in the bypass sluice. Lovely spot, no cars passing and no-one about, until Paul Seamon the mill owner came out to see who was poking around his mill. We quickly established I wasn’t some clown from officialdom, (I couldn’t be could I, no clipboard, no hi-viz!) and he kindly explained exactly what had been going on in the last two years.
It seems the breach I was looking for was not far from my search area, but was actually on the opposite bank, and the water was flowing back UNDER the river through an IDB drain culvert and this was acting as a bypass to the entire mill complex. Paul is clearly a guy with a deep love of the river and it’s surrounds, particularly his patch, and was good enough to show me on an ancient Min. of Ag. Fish and Food map in his kitchen exactly where everything was, including the breach. He also gave me his take on the politics of the situation, obviously quite bemused that nothing had been done to achieve what should have been an easy fix in his words when it first happened, literally “with a couple of sandbags”.
Armed with this fresh information, I was soon on my way again and we had a productive morning bashing HB along the river bank further downstream, before I headed off to my day job for the afternoon.
Hopefully now we have the breach location better pinpointed we can get some footage of it and maybe even some action. Interesting though as Paul said “it’s an ill wind……the IDB drain carrying all the flow is now cleaned out of years of silt etc and running fast over a gravel bottom is proving ideal habitat for the Wensum trout, bullheads, gudgeon, stone loach etc”
One of the guests at my landmark birthday party on Saturday was old mate Colin Howlett. Colin was kind enough to bring along something rather special to lend me, along with a very welcome gift (something nice in a bottle if I remember rightly!)
The special item is an historic folder of press cuttings mainly from the 1970’s. Colin’s dearest mate, the late Terry Houseago, put together the cuttings etc from his own appearances in print in the angling papers etc at the time, mostly related to legendary catches of Wensum roach.
The pictures alone tell a tale, the catches Terry and others enjoyed were indeed amazing, and absolutely unrepeatable in the river today. This is the river which produced two pounders in such numbers that the late great Ivan Marks, a match angler of national repute, stated at times he could have caught great bags of fish on bits of his hat!
Today, witness the results only a week ago of a highly skilled electro fishing team, the river is a poor shadow of what it was then. The Fishtrak team, tasked to catch a number of roach for analysis in the lab in the search for answers to this sorry state of affairs, struggled to catch roach at all in some sections, and in others found only relatively small numbers of fish of no great size, in fact of the thirty odd they caught relatively easily in my Association waters only two would have needed a landing net if caught on rod and line! Further downstream the story was worse, with the few fish captured showing clear signs of ill health, including parasite infestation and major organ damage.
Hopefully something will come of this.
Meantime, I am going to do my best to get what I see as Terrys legacy scanned or at least photographed digitally for future reference.
It stands as a record of a once-great roach river, now reduced to a shadow of what it once was, but still loved by many of us who grew up near it, or came to know it as anglers later in life. I believe we could take it as something to aspire towards. Ok we know the sheer lack of water in the system these days and the other ills inflicted by man and his activities make it unlikely in the extreme that we will ever get anywhere near – however, I remain hopeful that with continued research into potential causes and more work to help the fish and the river itself recover we can continue to make some progress.
There is a glimmer of some hope at least, although the government bodies responsible, (Environment Agency and Natural England) are seemingly at least doing somewhat less than we would like, “citizen science” in various forms is on hand nowadays. We have involvement from a plethora of angling and non-angling groups: historically the mighty NACA, now WACA; WWG; Wensum Catchment Partnership; Riverfly; Wensum Farming Cluster Group; the aforementioned roach study which is being undertaken by students from Nottingham Uni, even a small so far informal band of “Wensum Roach Project” volunteers and surely others I have not mentioned.
Thanks Colin and special thanks of course to dear old Terry!
Yesterday, May 6, 2022, I was way up the Wensum scouting for roach spawning sites. Sculthorpe Mill was where I started. That place is just gorgeous, the old mill building sits astride the river, as they do, nowadays it has been repurposed as a fine place to eat, drink and stay. The road over the bridge in front has been blocked off so there is absolutely no passing traffic, though you can cross over on foot. I rolled up early morning, the place was closed for passing business until lunchtime and the only disturbance was a small gang of builder blokes doing something round the back.
I hung over the parapet and ogled a crystal clear (for once) river Wensum and drank it all in. No roach, no Fontinalis (preferred spawning substrate) but a few nice trout and apart from odd snatches of ribald chat from the builders, blessed peace and quiet and birdsong. A few quick photo’s and off downstream to look at Fakenham Mill.
This was where it all started to go wrong, business completed (another blank but some potential) I wandered downstream for a general look around. One of the first things I came across just above a little concrete bridge was a horrible swirling grey cloud of filth churning down the far side of the river, and affecting around half its width. I traced it back upstream to a dodgy looking pipe with a clapper valve on the end. Took a what3words reference of the spot where I stood (tape.speech.headrest) rang it in to EA hotline. Though helpful and they took details, they left me feeling a bit empty, you can’t even get feedback from them now, they are supposedly so underfunded. Gawd.
So I have pushed it towards Ursula at Rivers Trust Norfolk, and the tireless Kelvin Allen (Angling Trust, BASG and other hats!)
Kelvin informed me very quickly that it was in fact a permitted Storm Overflow (park that for a moment!) no. AEENF15448, and that last year it spilled 79 times for 1642 hrs!
That all seems so bloody wrong! You can see on the pictures the river is running low and clear, no significant rainfall for days, yet it seems somehow something is still creeping through from residential and/or industrial parks and pouring into the supposedly cherished SSSI, SAC river Wensum. So little was actually coming out that the valve appeared closed, yet as stated just a little way downstream fully half the width of the river was full of muck, what on earth must it be like when we get rain? I’m pretty sure there are many more of these up and down the river. And the word storm rings in my ears, there was no storm!
Flow considerably diminished by the time this shot was taken. However, it still affected nearly half the rivers width just downstream as it spread across.
And just out of interest, I know it gets treated beforehand but we do drink this water of course, it’s abstracted down at the Norwich end…….
One little ray of hope! Yesterday I got a report that the roach commenced spawning way downstream at our only definite known active site on the river.
On a recent mini backpacking trip (60+ miles Easter Weekend, Walsingham Way, then up to the coast at Stiffkey before finishing at Cromer for fish and chips!) we spent some time along various bits of the Wensum valley.
As usual, getting away from the usual haunts opens up your eyes a bit……..
A lovely Wensum Millpool.Plenty of fry basking in sunny margins at Burgh Common, Swanton Morley. Probably this years early spawners, typically dace. The odd minnow in there too.Nice shoal of fish in a nearby trib. Mainly small chub I think, but I’m betting on the biggest, guesstimated at least 10 oz, being a dace. The brownish back and lack of black tail certainly seems to point that way.Butterbur next to the bypass channel at Gt Ryburgh. Timely, this reminded me of the last time I stood here, almost to the day last year, looking for roach spawning sites. Relating seasonal cycles of plants etc to other natural events is called Phenology – I remember reading about it in an excellent John Gierach book, in which he used the appearance of specific plant blossom to predict when to use particular trout flies.
As a follow-up attempt to locate new roach spawning sites after failing (mostly!) in 2021, Tim Ellis and Kevin Powell are looking to set up an informal river-wide watch for spawning roach at the appropriate time this year. This is early May, only definite recent record from previous years is May 7, 2020. Info from Avon Roach Project (ARP) indicates they nearly all commence spawning simultaneously in a given river, and usually almost to the day year on year.
Suitable locations:
Anywhere with good flow of water, reasonable depth, (typically near a weir or hatch) and suitable substrate (Fontinalis, possibly fibrous tree roots etc). Usually at the head ie furthest accessible point upstream in any section. This makes the mill structures and associated pools, bypass streams etc prime locations.
Candidate mill sites with easy, public access for observation: Sculthorpe, Fakenham, Bintree, Swanton Morley, Lyng, Taverham, Costessey and Hellesdon. Of these Lyng and Taverham definitely have Fontinalis, Lyng has a positive recent history of Roach spawning, anecdotally so does Taverham.
Further sites with less easy access, ie private, include mills at Billingford, Elsing, Gt Ryburgh and Lenwade. Obviously these could be better sites for future spawning raft work, as they are less prone to disturbance by the general public.
There may be some suitable areas apart from these mill complexes, the need for good flows though, actually described by Trev Harrop of ARP as a good “flush”, probably means they will be very few and far between.
This is a bit of a long term thing, if we can identify current spawning sites, it opens up possibilities for the future. For instance, spawning boards might be practical. These in themselves can help, even without spawn removal and hatching elsewhere. Signal Crayfish find it more difficult to access the eggs on a board as they can’t crawl or swim up to it! Simples……
If anyone is able to offer help with this, ie physically going and looking for gathering or spawning roach at suitable sites around the suggested times, please let us know. There is only so much a handful of busy folk can do! It would be helpful if anyone interested could let us know where they can look, so we can try to get as many sites covered as possible.
It might be worth scouting sites any time now over the next couple of weeks. As mentioned earlier, the magic date from previous experience was May 7, but there could well be some variation around that, and spawning seems to continue for a few days, also gathering will start sometime beforehand……..
Floodplain Meander 