What does the birth of an urban river restoration project look like? In the case of the little River Cale in Wincanton, everything seems to have started with a few beers in somebody’s garage, swiftly followed by a suitable acronym (CATCH: Community Action to Transform Cale Habitat) and one of the Wild Trout Trust’s famous […]
Archive for the tag 'Trout'
April 15 2013
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 15 April
Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s new landscape classic Silt Road gets reviewed by Caught by the River, the Telegraph, the Financial Times, Vertigo (Reader in the Rucksack), Some Landscapes and the Wandle Piscators (visit Charles’ website for a list of readings on site in High Wycombe and elsewhere…) Now that’s what we call corporate environmental responsibility: Orvis doubles commitment […]
April 11 2013
Breaking news: Burnley URES wins HLF funding for urban river restoration and public engagement
Great news just in: the Ribble Rivers Trust’s Urban River Enhancement Scheme (URES) in Burnley (which we previously blogged about here and here) has been awarded £674,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Since October 2011, the 18-month development phase of the project, led by Victoria Dewhurst, has already produced a wide range of investigative studies […]
April 7 2013
Urban fly-fishing report (angling celebrity edition): Frome and Nailsworth Stream, Stroud
Having just reviewed Trout in Dirty Places in glowing terms for Trout & Salmon magazine this time last year… … Wild Trout Trust vice-president and all-round great angling writer Jon Beer lost little time in grabbing his fishing gear (and his river restorationist fishing pal Vaughan Lewis) to head for urban-fishy water not too far […]
March 25 2013
Guided urban fly-fishing fundraiser: Your chance to crack the Yorkshire Calder?
Readers of Trout in Dirty Places may recall that the Yorkshire Calder has a reputation as a difficult, enigmatic, big-fish river – a place where guides go fishing on their days off. Now, in aid of the Calder & Colne Rivers Trust’s riverfly monitoring training programme, local guide Gary Hyde is teaming up with Nick […]
March 18 2013
Urban fly-fishing report: River Tame, Saddleworth
In bitterly cold conditions that he could only describe afterwards as raining, snowing, sleeting, absolutely everything… … Urbantrout editor-at-large (and key consultant on Trout in Dirty Places) Richard Baker spent his northern opening day fly-fishing the urban upper reaches of the Mersey system controlled by Saddleworth Angling Society. When his fingers had thawed enough to […]
January 9 2013
Challenge Buxton 2013: Who’s up for restoring the top of the Derbyshire Wye?
Even the smartest towns sometimes have dirty places, down the inaccessible backs of car parks and petrol stations… and in those places you’ll often find trout! In truth, this particular dirty place was hard to miss when I visited the top of the Derbyshire Wye at the start of last season: an outsize plunge pool […]
October 24 2012
Urban river restoration: LWD on the Chess
Urban fly-fishers familiar with the River Chess above Scotsbridge Mill in Rickmansworth will know it can prove a spooky stretch to fish successfully. Historically canalised and perched above its floodplain to provide constant power for corn- and paper-milling, this lovely little outer-London chalkstream is now a popular circuit for local dog walkers (whilst tackling up […]
October 13 2012
Urban fly-fishing: Discovering Dublin
Flipping through the pages of this month’s Trout & Salmon magazine, the headline hit us first: yes, it’s a totally-urban-fishing-themed advertorial for the Irish Tourist Board! Here’s a flavour of the copy (alternatively, click the image above for the full hi-res version): Less well known (than the Liffey) are those local urban waters the Dodder and the Tolka, which […]
October 5 2012
Urban river restoration: Restocking Yorkshire’s Colne
Here’s one we missed earlier: news of the latest very welcome stocking of 4,000 juvenile grayling into Yorkshire’s River Colne between Marsden and Milnsbridge. Readers of Trout in Dirty Places will probably remember that this is the stretch of the Colne which has been hit by an almost unbelievable sequence of pollution incidents in the […]
