A soggy (non-)start

Saturday, 25 March 2023 at 13:45

There's a tradition in the Club that the technical opening of the trout season - 25th March, these days - begins with a communal breakfast, followed by a meeting by the river to bless its bridges. Although it was a long way to go for a bacon sandwich, I did go for breakfast and thoroughly enjoyed the company and the craic. I had no intention of fishing, and domestic duties called me away mid-morning in any case, but I stopped briefly on the way home to have a short walk by the stream, which was running high and fairly coloured. There's been much recent rain, so the soil and subsoil are (thank goodness) soggy. The moors still looked brown and bleak, though lambing has been underway for some time now, and in these upland pastures the lapwings blew about like scraps of ash from a spring bonfire. They tend to spend the winters on the dale floors, so the return of pewits to these northern slopes always means spring, however uncertain the coming of spring can seem.

The River of All the Goodbyes

Saturday, 11 March 2023 at 21:22

I've spent some time of late dealing with the final proofs of The River of All the Goodbyes, which will appear from Medlar fairly soon (we hope). The last job, completed on Friday, was the preparation of an index. You can find a link to the title on the Medlar website here: https://www.medlarpress.com/code/bookshop?store-page=The-River-of-All-the-Goodbyes-p414978798

  The cover image, incidentally, shows a stylised representation of the bridge at Grassington.

Alders

Friday, 3 March 2023 at 20:30

There's an important spawning beck which runs into our water in the Dales. The environment is pristine and the stream hosts small fish, crustacean and insect life of great variety. The Club is part of an ongoing project designed to maintain and develop both the stream and its banks. Maintaining the banks in turn means planting trees. Trees will provide shade for the watercourse; trees will host terrestrial insects; the roots of trees will help stabilise bits of banking (once the sheep have been kept away from the channel). In addition, any brash from the trees - twigs, dead branches - will get into the edges of the flow and provide additional cover for fish and insect life. And so it was that a large half-dozen of us gave up a couple of hours this morning to inspect saplings that had already been planted (which among other things meant removing the protective plastic spirals you can see in the image) and to set out around 200 alder whips. It was a grand morning's work - one of the best antidotes I know to computer screens and the racket of the quotidian world.