After this year’s CLA Game Fair at Ragley Hall, the Urbantrout team went on the road for a week in a heatwave in the Welsh Marches…
… fishing the Teme with publisher Merlin Unwin in a spectacular gorge near Leintwardine, vainly scanning the steaming surface of the same river further downstream in Ludlow for any sign of fish, chilling out on one or two small-stream beats on the Wye & Usk Foundation’s passport scheme…
… and of course returning to the lovely little urban Lugg in Leominster. (For the full lowdown on this river and the Angling Trust‘s and Wye & Usk Foundation‘s joint efforts to look after it, check out chapter 18 of Trout in Dirty Places!)
Strictly speaking, this short side-branch of the Lugg is known as the Kenwater: a channel created by the local monastery to power its mills, since turned thoroughly feral and indisputably urban, complete with banks of unbuffered surface water drains and plenty of ankle-wrenching builders’ waste lurking under picture-perfect rafts of ranunculus.
Despite this luxuriant weed growth, water levels were painfully low, and local residents displayed understandable degrees of tetchiness in conditions of blasting sun and near-30-degree heat.
Little pods of trout and grayling scattered derisively before you’d even cast towards them, while an elderly lady living in a van beside the fire station clearly didn’t like fishermen any more than they did, and taught us several new swear words to boot.
Under the rippled surface of one weed-and-gravel riffle, however, a larger shoal of fishy shadows shifted sideways without ever fully spooking, and a meticulously guided nymph finally steered an almost-unbelievable trophy to the net.
Did you ever see such freckles and beauty spots on a grayling?
No, us neither…
Are you using Trout in Dirty Places as your reason for taking to the road this summer? If so, contact us afterwards and let us know how you got on!
What a cracking fish !!