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Pub Waters

Our May 2001 contribution from Jon Beer

I am late writing this month but not nearly as late as I had hoped to be. There is something seriously wrong with May if I have time and inclination to sit down and write anything at all. May is just about the best time to go trout fishing in this country. Actually, May is about the best time to anything that doesn’t involve snow – and conkers, I suppose.

I have a ritual in May. Every year I make a pilgrimage to the Cotswolds to see my favourite landlady at the Bull Hotel in the little town of Fairford. The Bull is one of those chocolate boxy, rambling, higgledy-piggledy sort of places, along one side of the market square. It is cool and dark when I step inside from the May sunshine and I stop for a pint and a hug and a kiss from Judy Dudley who owns the Bull. Refreshed, you step out of the back door and across the road, and come across the bright waters of the River Coln which sparkle below a low bridge and sweep down towards the Thames.

The Coln is as near as you get to a chalkstream in this part of the world and this one is unique. The pub does not stock the water and the fish are all returned so that the population of this lovely stream is more or less as nature intended. There are large trout but many more smaller ones everywhere you look, wafting across the pale gravel between the dark weeds. There are grayling too and certainly some chub and doubtless a few pike because that is what a natural Cotswold stream is like. It is always a delight to fish there but it is at its very best in May. Today, in fact. And I should be there but I am not because the river is still closed because of the dreaded lurgy.

So I am sitting here in frustration and wallowing in an English Idyll of running water and bright sunshine on cascades of wisteria around doors into dark, cosy pubs and generally coming over all unnecessary. These are not fishing hotels. They are fishing pubs. There is a huge difference although I am hard pushed to say exactly what the difference is. But I know it when I see it and so will you. The Highlands of Scotland has many a fishing hotel: it has no fishing pubs. It isn’t that sort of place. A proper fishing pub in May is like a big fluffy bath-towel: it is not supposed to be bracing. It is pure pleasure. You fish a bit until the sun becomes too soporific: you retreat to the cool bar for a cooler drink and a little something to eat and then out into the sunshine for another gentle fish. And so on. I have given you the Bull at Fairford (01285 712 535). I will give you some others. These should be taken with a drink, before and after meals.

The Riverside Inn (01568 708 440) at Aymestrey sits on the River Lugg. It is black and white, half-timbered and cosy and Steve Bowen, the landlord fishes and brews his own beer. The River Lugg is a fine little stream of the Marches. It runs through meadows, scouring deep runs on the bends and there are some big grayling in these pools. The inn has about a mile of this on both banks, free if you stay at the inn and £10 if you don’t.

A few miles north you will find another old inn beside the bridge over the River Tanat at Llan-y-Blodwel, which sounds about as Welsh as you can get and isn’t: the Horseshoe Inn (01691 828 969) is in Shropshire but only just. The water you will fish here was Welsh an hour or so before. Both these lovely pubs have trout and grayling which means you can fish all year round.

Another little pub by a bridge is the Crown Inn at Llanfihangel Glyn Myfyr (01490 420 209). The Bridge spans the little River Alwen and a church on the other side of the river shows, by a mark on its wall, the height the little river got to in 1781. It is unlikely to do anything like that again as the headwaters have been impounded into two large reservoirs. I fished here on a boiling day in May and the pint at the end of that day I can still taste as along with the smell of hot waders. Magical stuff. And fishing was under a fiver.

The Sandford Arms (01768 351121) sits beside the River Eden in Cumbria. This may not be the May to visit the Sandford Arms but if, in August, Cumbria has returned to the land of the living, this is the place to try Bustard fishing. It is done in the middle of the night when the large trout of the Eden come to the surface for the huge sedges and moths of the night. You make your way into the river when “last orders” are called in the pub. Stick to gin and tonic if you intend to wear chest waders.

I am liable to get a brick heaved through my window for trumpeting The Falcon (01756 770 205) in Arncliffe on the banks of the Skirfare. Folk who know it try to keep it to themselves. I don’t really blame them. It is the quintessential fishing pub on a lovely tributary of the Wharfe.

All these pubs are small and cosy and fisherman-friendly. They all have their own fishing, available over the bar. And I have just heard of a new one but I haven’t tried it yet. I have passed the Nantyffin Cider Mill many times on my way to fish the Usk, one of the loveliest of rivers. It is hard to miss the Cider Mill. It is pink. The Glanusk Estate above Crickhowell has some of the tastiest bits of the middle reaches of the river. I have just heard that they are making four rods available to the Cider Mill, as day-tickets. This fishing has yet to open but I’ll let you know what I find when it does. And if you have a favourite pub water, perhaps you will let me know about it.

Jon Beer contributes regularly to publications including Trout & Salmon and The Telegraph. If you have any comments, do not hesitate to get in touch or use the message board.