THE CHALK STREAMS
Particular distinction may be fairly ascribed to what is commonly known
as the Chalk Streams. There are not many of them in the world, and
nearly all of them are in England, being even here the possession of but
a few counties. For Wilts, Hants, Dorset, and Berks, with Bucks, Kent,
and Herts in a less degree, contain practically all the rivers of this
type, and of these the two first-mentioned are more exclusively the home
of the chalk stream. Wiltshire gives birth to the Kennet, the
Christchurch or Salisbury, Avon, and the Wiley--all notable rivers of
this class; the upper part of the first, most of the second, and the
whole of the third being within the county, while Hampshire has the
Itchen and the Test, of the same class and rank. The quality of the
chalk stream lies in its exceeding clarity. The water filtering
through
[Illustration: THE THAMES, LOOKING TOWARDS HENLEY]
[Illustration]
the great masses of dry chalk upland, where it meets the clay or
greensand on which they lie, breaks out of the base of the hills as
pellucid in texture as the springs that rise in the limestone countries
of the north and west, and form their more rocky streams. In the valleys
of the chalk counties, too, the beds of the rivers are apt to wash out
hard and clean, and set off to great advantage the crystal currents that
glide or ripple over them.
They combine the clearness of a mountain stream with only a degree more
current than the slow-running rivers of central or eastern England. They
savour, in short, of the unexpected. There is no stir nor movement of
water on the hillsides, as in Wales or Devonshire, to suggest the
natural corollary of a clear torrent in the valley below. The hills
here, though graceful and delightful in their peculiar way, are more
waterless than any clay ridge in Northamptonshire or Suffolk, for
reasons already given. Nor does the chalk stream usually run like a
western river. It moves at most times but little faster than the rivers
on which men go boating or float-fishing for roach. Its environment is
smooth, its course is peaceful, and its fall gradual. It is all this
that gives the flavour and charm of the unexpected, when you arrive at
the bank and find a stream gliding past your feet as translucent as if
it had just gushed out from a limestone mountain in Cumberland.
The Chalk Stream gives best evidence of its quality in being the natural
home of the trout and grayling, fish that do not often flourish in, and
are never indigenous to, slow-running streams of other than chalk
origin. There are two Avons in Wiltshire which illustrate the contrast
to perfection: the one which runs westward through the fat pastoral
regions, the clays and greensands of north-west Wilts towards Bath and
Bristol; the other, which rises in the Marlborough Downs, and cuts
through the heart of Salisbury Plain, as translucent as a mountain
stream. The last alive with lusty trout; the other, which moves slowly
with murkier current over a muddier bottom, breeding only coarser fish
and belonging to another family of rivers.
The Kennet is assuredly of noble birth; for it is the offspring of the
once sacred upland pastures of Avebury, where stand the uncanny
fragments of the great prehistoric temple of the sun, and twines its
infant arms around the mighty and mysterious mound of Silbury: the
child, in fact, of one of the
[Illustration: THE AVON, NEAR SALISBURY]
[Illustration]
three great wonders of Britain, leaving Stonehenge to its rival the
southern Avon.
The head of the Kennet, like that of most chalk streams, however, is a
winter bourne--a fact sufficiently proclaimed by the names of two
villages about its source, as in many similar cases throughout the chalk
counties. Its upper channels, that is to say, relapse into a dry bed
through the summer months above the point where some strong unfailing
springs, welling up beneath the chalk, mark the commencement of the
perennial flow. After laving with thin and feeble streams the skirts of
some half-dozen downland villages, keeping company in the meantime with
the London and Bath road, the Kennet, with a rapid accession of vigour
from subterranean sources, approaches Marlborough as quite a well-grown
little river. Brushing the walls of the little Norman Church at
Preshute, and skirting its chestnut-shaded graveyard, it now coils
through the level meads, beyond which spring the stately groves that
half conceal the ancient Queen Anne mansion of the Seymours, with its
wide lawns and terraces and clipped yew-trees and lime walks, where the
College has been so felicitously seated for nearly seventy years.
Hugging the foot of Granham Hill, where one of the five white horses of
Wiltshire, cut large upon the chalk, is conspicuously displayed, it
plunges into a mill pool, and then soon afterwards, stealing beneath an
old brick bridge, disappears into a maze of orchards, gardens, and
foliage, which spread back from the old High Street of Marlborough.
Parallel with the river, and lying back on the gentle slope that rises
from it, the quaint, wide, tilted-up street runs a long straight course
from church tower to church tower. Of Roundhead proclivities in the
Civil War, but much battered and held for the King through most of it,
and burned nearly to the ground soon afterwards, Marlborough is beyond
question the most characteristic and interesting of the Kennet towns. It
was a great coaching place, of course, but of more than ordinary
Bath-road notoriety, since for a long time the Seymour mansion and
grounds, the present College, was the finest hostelry in England, and
extremely popular with fashionable travellers for what we should now
call "week ends." During the Middle Ages a royal castle stood on its
site, and was constantly the abode of kings and queens.
Upon the ridge, just across the river from the town, which commands a
fine view of the Kennet valley, the poet Thomson, when a guest of Lady
Hertford at the Seymour house, wrote his "Spring," the first of the
_Seasons_; and, farther on, the spreading beeches of Savernake Forest
look down on the stream as it comes coiling out into the meadows again
below Marlborough. Increased considerably just below the town by the Og,
another winter bourne which issues from the heart of the downland to the
north, the Kennet slips down through narrow water-meadows from mill to
mill, till it enters Ramsbury chase. Here, held back by a weir, it
expands into a broad sheet of water before the lawns of another Queen
Anne mansion, that of the Burdett family. Indeed, by the banks of Kennet
in this part of its course great things have been done; for in the
predecessor of this house Cromwell stopped on that famous march to
Ireland which resulted in the sanguinary affairs of Drogheda and
Wexford. In the same house forty years later, when Dutch William was
marching to London, King James's Commissioners under Halifax, who came
out to treat with him, tarried for several days, while William himself
lay at Littlecote, whose beautiful Tudor gables and chimneys stand on
the opposite bank of the stream 3 miles below. Who again has not heard
of Wild Darrell of Littlecote, who flung his base-born child into the
fire, and, as uncritical locals have it, bought his life from Judge
Popham, who tried him for murder, with the reversion of the estate, even
yet held by his name and lineage. On these same pleasant river-banks,
too, at Ramsbury, in Saxon times, were seated Bishops, their diocese
covering most of Wiltshire. And altogether, throughout the 20 miles or
so of its course within the county, the Kennet, in all these natural
features that gather round such a one as this, is not merely a clear,
wholesome, and well-favoured stream, but from its cradle at Avebury and
Silbury, by Marlborough, Savernake, Ramsbury, and Littlecote, it has
constantly watered scenes not only of more than ordinary beauty, but of
more than ordinary fame in their several degrees.
A river too, above all a chalk stream, cannot possibly be dissociated
from its fish. It is perhaps hardly too much to say that the waters of
Ramsbury and Littlecote, always, however, most strictly preserved, have
enjoyed for all time that matters a reputation for trout in point of
numbers, quality, and undoubtedly size unsurpassed in England. A trout
of 19 lbs. was once taken from the Kennet, and several have been
registered of from 14 lbs. to 17 lbs.
[Illustration: THE THAMES, THE BELLS OF OUSELEY, OLD WINDSOR]
[Illustration]
A fish of 10 lbs. to 12 lbs. is discovered almost annually, and very
occasionally caught with a rod between here and Hungerford. One curious
natural phenomenon is incidental to the Kennet, namely, that the
May-fly, not merely the joy of fish and fishermen, but one of the most
graceful in form and flight of all Nature's creations, though abounding,
as in other chalk streams, as far up as the Ramsbury water, there
suddenly ceases to breed. At Hungerford the Kennet passes into
Berkshire, where the grayling begin to put in an appearance, and, a
little later, that ravager of trouting streams, the pike. Flowing
through gradually widening water-meadows between low hills, the river
flows by Kintbury and Newbury to the Thames at Reading.
The Salisbury Avon rises hard by the foot of Martinsell, that fine,
upstanding, camp-crowned headland of turf down that drops almost
perpendicularly for 600 or 700 feet into the vale of Pewsey, near
Marlborough. While still but a brook it crosses the village street of
Pewsey and ripples westward through withy beds and by plough land and
meadow. Turning a mill-wheel here and there on its way, it passes
Manningford Bruce with its notable little Norman church, and so onward
to a junction with the Upper Avon brook, after which the united waters,
making something more of a stream, turn southward and head for a gap in
the long rampart of Salisbury Plain close at hand. It is a narrow
trough, and for that very reason perhaps an interesting and picturesque
one, that carries the Avon to Salisbury by way of its famous plain. A
succession of picturesque, old-world thatched-roofed villages,
clustering around their ancient churches of flint or stone, follow one
another at every bend of the valley: Upavon, Chisenbury, Enford,
Netheravon, Figheldean, Durrington, and so to Amesbury. Amid its narrow
belt of meadow the clear little stream gleams brightly in its sinuous
course, now jumping over a hatchway into a churning pool, now brushing
an osier bed noisy with the splash and cries of water-fowl, now rippling
merrily over gravelly bottoms, or held up betimes by the dam of some old
mill, to disappear below into the lush foliage enveloping some homestead
or hamlet. Mighty, rook-haunted elms, which flourish greatly in the
chalk valleys, strike here and there a fine contrasting note, with the
silvery thread of the river twisting about their feet, and the
broad-backed down rising upon either hand and spreading away into
solitude. Cobbett in his racy and delightful _Rural Rides_, pays much
attention to this valley of the Upper Avon. As poet and farmer he
declares with enthusiasm that no journey ever gave him so much pleasure
in his life as one he made along its banks. As reformer, in those days
when in truth there was much to reform, he finds unlimited scope for
that strenuous invective in which his honest soul but unbridled tongue
delighted.
The bursting stackyards in the ample homesteads of the vale, the sheep
clamouring in their hurdled folds upon the lower slopes, the strange
silence of the vast unchanging downs above, green escarpments notching
their crests, and the low burial mounds dimpling the skyline, each
eloquent of prehistoric strife and the mysterious dead,--all the
generous abundance gathered in fold and stackyard in this thinly-peopled
land, stirred the perfervid but observant and much-travelled democrat to
admiring periods. Then the other side of the picture, as witnessed in
the 'twenties of the last century, lashed Cobbett to fury. "Where are
the small country gentry?" he cries, that once lived in these snug
little manor houses perched here and there by the river-bank. A question
he promptly answers himself in unmeasured indictments of the "great and
grasping landlords who have gobbled them all up." Then he turns to the
labourer, as indeed he could well turn in that day with much oratorical
effect, and demands what share of the abundance falls to the men who
through storm and sunshine have been mainly instrumental in producing
it. Here again the answer was simple enough in the sum total of 8s. a
week, and it had only been a shilling more when the wheat they were
producing was fetching from 80s. to 100s. a quarter!
But times have changed on the banks of the Avon, and not merely in these
matters in which all rural England has changed. For though the river
steals as of old from mill to mill by grey old church towers, thatched
hamlets, and homesteads, private ownership has nearly all been swept
away and the Crown has entered into possession. Netheravon, formerly the
seat of the Hicks-Beach family, the most notable place of recent abode
on the Upper Avon, is now the quarters of colonels and majors. At any
moment, too, you may meet on the uplifted highway above the stream a
group of cavalry scouts, watching for a distant glimpse of imaginary
Teutonic invaders, or a train of military waggons rumbling northward to
the Pewsey vale and the Great Western railroad. Every one knows that the
Crown has recently purchased a portion of Salisbury Plain for the
better prosecution of military manoeuvres, and it is this Avon and
eastern district that they have preëmpted. The small, unsightly
"Aldershot" of brick and corrugated iron is in the south-east corner in
the Tidworth country, and does not as yet greatly affect the Avon even
between Netheravon and Amesbury. The larger farmers are still there upon
its banks as tenants of the Crown, under special conditions. And in the
seasons for mimic warfare, cavalry and infantry sweep over the stubbles
and pastures, and sheep and cattle are shifted for the time being. The
little trout stream of former days, though still almost everywhere in
the full enjoyment of its pristine simplicity, has acquired a quite
curious notoriety through its strategetic importance in the national
military manoeuvres. Indeed the topography of this little corner of
the world is on every breakfast-table, in rough maps and big letters,
for two or three weeks of most autumns. The "fords of the Avon" are
fought for by contending armies, and become for the moment places of
renown. Sometimes the whole course of the little river from Salisbury to
its source is proclaimed by the makers of the great war game to be the
coast of England, while Marlborough is constituted its chief seaport,
and crowded with the troops and transport of an army that is supposed to
be invading Britain.
Amesbury, not touched happily by the new camps, which as yet all lie
away to the eastward, is an ancient spot, something better than a
village, and always, as now, the little metropolis of Salisbury Plain.
Beneath its sombre but stately and minster-like cruciform church, part
Gothic and part Norman, the Avon, expanding somewhat, sweeps with smooth
swift current under the road to Stonehenge, and curves away in graceful
loops through the meadows below the village. It has already flowed
through the woods of Amesbury Abbey, a country-house, standing on the
site of a nunnery which was founded by the Saxon Queen Elfrida, and
flourished greatly till the Dissolution. The daughter of Edward I. among
many noble dames was a nun here, and here also that king's mother took
the veil, died, and left her dust. Katherine of Arragon, too, was lodged
at Amesbury on her arrival in England, and we have, of course, the
authority of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Tennyson that
Queen Guinevere had fled the court, and sat
There in the holy house at Amesbury.
Rural, village-like, and till lately a long coach-drive out of the
world, a great deal, nevertheless, has happened at Amesbury. It was
granted at the Dissolution to the Protector Somerset, and his descendant
Lord Hertford, on bringing his third wife here as a bride, unwittingly
provided the neighbourhood with an unforgettable tragedy; for poor Sir
George Rodney, whom this third Lady Hertford, fickle and beautiful, had
thrown over for the greater match, went out with the crowd as if to
greet the home-coming of the happy pair, and fell on his sword a dead
man at the very feet of his fickle sweetheart, the affrighted bride.
Later on the Duke and Duchess of Queensbury were in possession, and as
the Kennet at Marlborough watered the elaborate grottos and gardens of a
great Early Georgian hostess and patroness of poets, and inspired the
muse of Thomson, so at Amesbury, too, a duchess maintained a rival
Arcadia and another poet, in the person of Gay. In the Jacobean period,
too, and later, this then sequestered spot was famous throughout England
for its clay pipes. In short, they were the fashion, and a gentleman was
not properly equipped unless he had a pipe bearing the magic brand of
"Amesbury."
Amesbury is now, as always, the objective point for Stonehenge, a mile
and a half distant. It is 8 miles from here to Salisbury, and the river
continues to plough its deep furrow through the plain. But the
atmosphere by this time is a less aloof and more populous one, the
river-side road more travelled, for British, American, and foreign
pilgrims from Salisbury to Stonehenge will in summer time be frequently
in evidence upon it. The villages are still thatch-roofed, and
flint-walled after the chess-board pattern common to Wiltshire, and the
cult of flowers, that generations of low wages have not extinguished in
the Wiltshire peasant, add to their charm. The high downs on either hand
no longer suggest such a solitary hinterland. A thicker foliage mantles
from time to time in the vale. The river skirts the lawns of some
country-seat such as Lake House, one of the best Tudor buildings in
Wiltshire, and a little below, again, of Heale, where Charles II. on his
flight from Worcester lay concealed by its then owner, Mrs. Hyde, for
nearly a week.
Often performed twice a season and generally by men wading in with
scythes, weed cutting is a regular operation in the life of such streams
as this; nowadays, particularly, since trout fishing has become so
valuable, these rivers for the most part are kept assiduously clean. Nor
is any aspect of a chalk stream perhaps more beautiful than where some
swift-gliding current is running a couple of feet over the growing
water-weed, all swaying and flickering in green streamers with every
motion of the pellucid and wayward current. The Avon, too, is a prolific
and notable trout river, where the disciples of the modern cult of the
dry-fly leave no half-mile of water going begging for a lessee, and the
May-fly here hatches out right up to the river's source.
But Salisbury is, of course, the place with which the Avon for the best
of reasons is chiefly identified; for here the river races clear and
buoyant over a gravelly bed through the very heart of the picturesque
old town. The big trout can be seen sucking in flies beside its busiest
streets, as well as later, where its lively streams wash the ivied walls
and woody banks of the Cathedral precincts. Here beneath the shadow of
the loftiest spire in England, in a wide sweep of water-meadow lying
amid encircling downs, and interlaced with silvery threads of clear
bubbling waters, is a famous meeting-place of streams. The "Sink of the
Plain" was the designation bestowed by ancient writers on the capital
of Wiltshire. From every quarter of Salisbury Plain, using the term in
the wider and physical sense, come the limpid chalk waters hurrying to
meet the Avon. From the bounds of Dorset, and familiar to all habitual
travellers on the south-western main line, comes the Nadder. Born upon
the edge of Wiltshire, watering in infancy the glades of Wardour and the
ancient House of Arundel, and fed by affluents from the wooded heights
of Font Hill of notorious association, it runs, a now lusty trout
stream, through mellow lowlands where Penruddocks and Windhams have sat
for centuries. Past Dinton, where the great Lord Clarendon and Lawes the
musician and friend of Milton were both born, the Nadder completes its
existence as a separate river in the gardens of Wilton House.
Its hitherto untrammelled moods now curbed and bent to the needs of some
former landscape gardener of the House of Pembroke, it here laves the
lawns on which Philip Sidney is confidently said to have written much of
his _Arcadia_, and then almost immediately joins the Wiley, the
confluence occurring just below the ancient town of Wilton, once the
capital of Wiltshire and of Wessex. Thence a couple of uneventful miles
save for their passage by the little Church and Rectory of Bemerton,
where George Herbert spent his latter days, brings them to the greater
meeting with the Avon beneath Salisbury Spire.
But what of the Wiley, or Wylye? for this by no means insignificant
little river has never yet achieved finality in the matter of spelling!
Unquestionably it gave the county its name, being quite obviously
responsible for Wilton, which lies on its banks, and is most certainly
in its turn the god-parent of Wiltshire. If we were to believe Cobbett,
who was no native, the Wiley valley is the most beautiful in the world!
I am myself inclined to think it is perhaps the most engaging of all the
chalk-stream vales. Coming down from Warminster and Heytesbury, it cuts
its way, like the Avon, in a deep trough where charming old-world
villages nestle, through the wild downland. It divides what is more
definitely known as Salisbury Plain from the south-western block of the
same vast tract, still spoken of sometimes as the South Plain. The
camp-crowned heights stand up on either side of the vale with even more
significant distinction than those which guard the Avon. No disturbing
element has yet intruded upon the perfect peace which reigns for miles
upon the high chalk uplands whose heart the tortuous valley cleaves;
nor is there any place the world wots much of between Warminster and
Wilton, or, in other words, upon the river's whole course.
But hoary villages, half muffled in stately elms and rich as any in
England in thatched eave and gable and in bright cottage gardens, look
over to one another across the rich carpet of meadowland upon which the
Wiley lays its shining coils. Grey old churches lift their towers or
spires along the vale, and cover many a sculptured tomb and many an
effigy of the men and women who ruled long ago in the small Tudor
manor-houses that still in many cases survive to fill a lowlier rôle.
Perhaps what greatly helps in giving some especial charm to the Wiley
valley are the fine unimpeded vistas all up and down it, which it
affords the traveller at each little rise he mounts on one or other of
the valley roads that lie along the toes of the down. Nor is any other
stream coming out of the Wiltshire chalk quite so translucent, I think,
as the Wiley. Most of the river, so far as the fishing is concerned, is
held by a famous Angling Club that many years ago migrated here from the
Kennet at Hungerford, and whose fortunate members hail from every part
of the south of England.
[Illustration: STAPLEFORD ON THE WILEY]
[Illustration]
What they have achieved by care and constant stocking in a naturally
fine trout stream can be seen by any strollers upon the bank. The
smaller trout of wild rapid streams, who take the fly so much more
readily, rush madly for safety the moment you show yourself upon the
bank above a pool. But the big chalk-stream trout, so much more wary of
the deadly fly, is comparatively indifferent to the mere spectator.
Possibly the superior education that has quickened his perception in the
matter of artificial flies and their method of presentation has also
taught him that in them alone danger lurks, and in mere man as such
there is none whatever. So it comes about that in the Wiley you may look
down in places through three or four feet of crystal water, and at quite
close quarters watch every movement of a score or so of great trout or
grayling of from 1 to 2 lbs. weight, as they lie poised above the clear
gravelly bottom; a beautiful and interesting spectacle only possible in
the chalk streams, and, one might almost add, only in those that modern
fish-culture and science have been busy with. So between the banks of
what is still called the Avon, all these chalk streams and a few others
of less size and note pour their united waters in broader and more
chastened current from Salisbury towards the sea. They have a long and
pleasant journey yet, however, before they meet the tide at
Christchurch. By the great seats of Longford, Clarendon, and Trafalgar
the Avon makes its way down a rich valley to Fordingbridge. Thence, with
the skirts of the New Forest rising above its narrow opulent valley upon
one side and the high country of Dorset upon the other, this whole
burden of clear Wiltshire water, every drop curiously enough that the
county produces south of the Thames or the Bristol Avon watersheds,
urges its now chastened course to Ringwood and Christchurch. It has
often struck me, when standing by one or other of the great surging
mill-pools which make such delightful interludes in this pleasant valley
between Fordingbridge and Ringwood, as a curious and pretty thought that
the entire overflow of the most romantic and famous chalk region in
England should be thus chafing in a single Hampshire pool beneath one's
feet; that not a drop from all this vast wild Wiltshire upland should
have escaped elsewhere, but that every welling spring beneath the downs
from Savernake Forest to Cranborne Chase, from Warminster to
Ludgershall, should here find its inevitable destiny.
Clear as the waters of the Avon for this reason still remain, the trout
by now have gradually yielded to the pike and perch, which for their
size and quality have made these lower reaches of the river somewhat
celebrated among anglers who follow that branch of the craft.
But at the old-fashioned market-town of Ringwood, where the last
ten-mile stretch of the river begins, is a famous hostelry known as "The
White Hart." I use the epithet advisedly, for near Ringwood the Avon
having degenerated in the matter of its inhabitants from trout to pike,
now aspires to greater honours than ever, and ends its days as a salmon
river, and one, too, with a reputation for harbouring the largest of the
royal race of almost any river in England, though in no great numbers to
be sure. The "White Hart" has been the immemorial trysting-place of the
few anglers who assemble here to catch the Avon salmon, a fish more
notable, as I have said, for weight than numbers, and not infrequently
running over 40 lbs. The blind Cambridge tutor and Postmaster-General of
a generation ago, Professor Fawcett, a native of South Wilts, was in his
day a well-known member of this band. The Avon and the Test, also in
Hampshire, are, I think, the only two chalk streams up which the salmon
runs, though in both, of course, but for a limited distance, and rises
to the fly. This fact has naturally always given the final stretch of
the Avon, below Ringwood, peculiar interest among those concerned not
merely with angling but with the natural history of rivers, which might
almost be accounted, however, a branch of the craft. So, leaving the
great fir-sprinkled heaths, a continuation, as it were, of the New
Forest, to spread westward towards Bournemouth, our river flows
uneventfully onward through meadow flats to Christchurch and the sea.
Christchurch Abbey, at the Avon's mouth, is, of course, the goal of
innumerable excursionists from the neighbouring Bournemouth; but
Salisbury, a beautiful old town in itself, and a Cathedral matchless of
its kind and Cathedral precincts matchless for their beauty, without any
reservation is, of course, the Avon's glory. Usually called the
"Hampshire," sometimes the "Christchurch" Avon, it should, of course, by
rights be called the Salisbury Avon, for it is pre-eminently a Wiltshire
river, bearing, as we have seen, the waters of half that county to the
sea through a strip of Hampshire without receiving any contribution of
consequence from that fair county. But there is, one must remember,
another Wiltshire Avon, which runs through the lower-lying greensand and
dairy country of North Wilts, and curiously enough, like its southern
chalk-stream namesake, gathers all the waters of North Wilts that the
Kennet or infant streams do not bear away eastward, into its bed. This
Avon, of quite another quality, and one more akin to that of
Shakespeare's farther north again, finds a world of fame and consequence
in its lower reaches at Bath and Bristol, far different from such as
Ringwood and Christchurch with their 40 lb. salmon can lend to the mouth
of the purer and otherwise more beautiful stream.
But Hampshire need not quarrel about terms, nor resent the suggestion
that she merely gives right of way to the waters of half Wiltshire, for
has she not the Itchen and the Test? Now, what measure of importance
their names suggest to the ear of those unconcerned with such things I
do not know. But among the great army of disciples of old Izaak these
names, with that of the Kennet, form a classic trio, which of their kind
have no equivalent. They do not clash with the rivers of the North, of
Wales, or of the west country in any one's ears when their names are
sounded. But I venture to think that to thousands of persons who never
even threw a line these names vaguely suggest, as does Leicestershire to
those who do not hunt, the headquarters, as it were, of one of the three
principal field-sports of England. The outsider, indeed, has probably a
more exaggerated view of the supremacy of these rivers in this
particular than the fisherman himself who knows his southern counties,
but, nevertheless, would not hesitate to give priority to the Itchen and
the Test if it came to the point; while in general reputation,
bracketed, as I have said, with the Kennet, they stand as a type quite
alone. Some readers may resent my taking this aspect of a stream so
seriously, but if they were on intimate terms with such rivers they
would understand what a part the trout and grayling play in riparian
life. For it is not merely the privileged few who pay high prices for
casting their flies upon these sacred waters that are interested; but
every rustic in the villages along the bank talks trout and takes a sort
of second-hand interest in the doings of fishermen, and can tell as tall
stories of bygone performances as the performers themselves, or even
taller ones. The beautiful purling streams of the Itchen, as they sweep
in broad current over the gravelly shallows of Itchen Abbas, beloved by
Charles Kingsley, or slide under
[Illustration: THE ITCHEN, ST. CROSS, WINCHESTER]
[Illustration]
Twyford Bridge into the shade of the Shawford chestnuts below, one half
fancies to be sounding an almost self-conscious note of the fame they
have acquired in the past thirty years. For when, nearly half a century
ago, the present writer as a diminutive schoolboy at this same Twyford
on Itchen--from a home oddly enough on the banks of the Kennet--used to
behold his tutor sallying forth on a half holiday with long wobbly rod
to cast two wet-flies on these now sacred waters, it is quite certain
that few outsiders save an occasional angler ever heard of the
Itchen--unless some glimmer from their school-room days reminded them
that it was the river upon which Winchester stood. In those days local
proprietors up and down the river gave their neighbours a day or two's
fishing, no doubt, when they asked for it, as men do to-day upon obscure
rivers. And the old-time sportsman, with no sense of a priceless favour
conferred, went to work and cast his two wet-flies across and down the
swifter streams, and took his chance of cut or uncut weeds and his
modest share of trout, pure-blooded lineal descendants of those the
monks of Winchester netted for their stew ponds in the days of old. But
Heaven knows what might be the ancestry of a modern Itchen trout! Then
came the great revolution, the Art of the dry-fly with a big A, which
first developed itself on this very Itchen and its neighbour the Test.
The elderly angler needs no telling what a revolution was this, breaking
the tradition of centuries, and sending its echoes all over the world
wherever men angle for trout; changing the method of thousands,
upsetting old standards--fruitful, too, of much misunderstanding, of
recrimination even, and a good deal of foolishness which still prevails.
But the great fact remains that it exalted the chalk stream from a
rather dull field for the angler's operations compared to the mountain
river, into a valuable heritage ranking almost with the deer forest and
the grouse moor. This inevitably brought in its train a certain amount
of vulgarity as well as a good deal of pose and affectation, vices from
which the honest sport of angling alone had hitherto been absolutely
free. In short, it came perilously near to one of those essentials that
a would-be sporting parvenu thought he ought to possess. This, however,
is a trifle. The chalk-stream trout became all at once an Epicurean of
the first degree, and in time such a mixture of selected stocks it would
puzzle him to know his own father, handsome fellow though he be. His
habits, indeed, have undergone within easy memory an absolute
transformation. He will now very often look you steadily in the face for
half an hour at close quarters, but when it comes to business will only
consider an oiled and floating fly placed above him in thoroughly
up-to-date fashion. Most of us really know that he cannot always
maintain this high standard that is expected of him--but it is not the
thing to say so. To fish for him now in the old wet-fly way would be
regarded much as the shooting of pheasants rising at your feet, since
Mr. Chalk-stream trout is assumed to regard as a positive insult the
offer of a fly after the fashion in which the trout of Tweed or Usk like
it offered, and as his own ancestors, or at any rate predecessors, used
themselves to be content with. This sounds paradoxical. The whole thing,
indeed, savours somewhat of contradiction, but not so much so as these
over-frank and irreverently enumerated truisms might suggest to the
uninitiated. I have, however, seen myself, from the overlooking
vantage-point of a highway traversing the Kennet valley, three partners
in an angling syndicate well out of sight of one another, flogging a
noted dry-fly water down and across with a wet-fly before a light
breeze, and probably not without success. It was delightful to the
wayfaring angler to watch these furtive and guilty souls, each thinking
no eye but that of some unconscious waggoner could peradventure behold
their crooked deeds, and safe at least from one another. Alas, weak
human nature! It was delicious to think how differently any fish that
might take those draggled "chuck-and-chance-it" flies would be killed
again in the smoking-room that night. But we are now on the Itchen, and
of course such things are never done here.
No reader with any sense of humour or proportion will, I presume, look
here for a boiled-down treatise on the oldest and historically the most
famous city in England next to London. As we left the shyer charms of
Salisbury, with its wealth of Mediæval and Tudor architecture, lawn and
towers, elms and glistering waters, with its fine flavour of those
Trollopian chronicles of Barset which it inspired, to the unaided
intelligence of the wanderer by the Avon, so, much more in these brief
pages, must we leave alone the kindred but more voluminous subject of
Winchester. Unlike Salisbury, however, where the Avon tumbles through
the heart of the town before skirting the sacred groves where Mrs.
Proudie once reigned, the Itchen only skirts the older city, which lies
like Salisbury in the lap of downs. It is near enough, however, to
associate itself in the landscape with the great Cathedral, lately in
such peril of collapse, with the famous school whose domain actually
touches its banks, with the beautiful old fabric of St. Cross and its
Norman tower lying in the meadows beyond. The life of the Itchen is
singularly short, considering the volume of water and the measure of
fame it at once gathers in so brief a space. Twenty minutes in a motor,
or forty on a cycle, up its banks from Winchester would bring you to the
head of it; for above Alresford, where three streams unite, fortified by
many independent springs, the Itchen is hardly worth considering. Down
the river again from Winchester, to continue this form of reckoning,
about the same expenditure of time would bring you to Bishopstoke, after
which the buoyant stream soon begins to feel the influence of the tide
from Southampton Water, which it then approaches. Twenty miles by road
along the valley would easily cover all that counts of the famous
Itchen. The prettiest half, undoubtedly, is that above Winchester, and
the road practically follows the river for several miles to Alresford,
through the successive hamlets of Headbourne and Abbots Worthy, Itchen
Abbas and Itchen Stoke. Out in the wide water-meadows the crystal
streams of the river, flowing often in two or three separate channels,
pursue their twisting courses. Below Winchester the slopes of the vale
are somewhat marred by the natural desire of Southampton citizens and
others to perch themselves where delectable scenery and a good
train-service co-exist. In these upper reaches there is little of this,
but the immediate slopes of the valley wear, nevertheless, not only an
air of physical luxuriance but of rural opulence, so significant not
merely of the presence of great landlords but of a popular
neighbourhood, where in lodges and granges and other attractive
snuggeries prosperous aliens, with fishing proclivities in most cases,
spend a part at least of their days. It is in this feature that the
scenery and atmosphere of the Itchen, though naturally very similar,
differs from that of the Wiltshire rivers, which are for the most part
severely local. But here, after all, we are more in the world, and
though the high downs, as in Wiltshire, rise above the luxuriant
foregrounds, save for St. Catherine's Hill, of Wykhamist traditions,
which drops bare and abrupt right into the Itchen valley, they lie more
aloof and remote.
[Illustration: THE ITCHEN, AND ST. GILES' HILL, WINCHESTER]
[Illustration]
In travelling up the Alresford road on the west banks of the river, past
the gates of pleasant residences and the thatched cottages of typical
Hampshire hamlets, one might pause under other conditions to make
acquaintance with the interesting old churches of Headbournworthy and
Itchen Abbas. But, as it is, one would rather, I think, take every
opportunity of following the short lanes that at intervals run down from
the highway to the meadows and to the banks of the brimming buoyant
stream. It is almost as captivating, I think, to watch the gurgling
sweep of a chalk stream as the more boisterous humours of her wilder
sister of the mountain. The Itchen, having regard merely to the water
between its banks, is singularly beautiful. As pellucid as the Wiley,
there is a life and movement and rush over the gravel greater even than
in that engaging stream, whose surroundings, however, like those of the
Upper Avon, are far more natural and characteristic than the slightly
conventional atmosphere of the Itchen. But the almost constant stir and
the melodious voice of the latter river are infinitely pleasing: singing
now over a pebbly bottom whose water-polished stones show varied and
almost radiant colours upon a gleaming chalk-bed, now swishing silently
over streaming green weeds that in another month will fall beneath the
cutter's scythe lest they choke the stream. And as to the fat trout,
they are everywhere in evidence, splashing perhaps at the iron blues or
olive duns as they fall before the light puffing airs upon the stream's
surface, or lying motionless, but for their slightly swaying tails, in
mid-current, surfeited with a recent meal, or quietly absorbing such
subaqueous morsels and atoms as drift along. How rich, too, in colour
are the low green banks whose very rims these brimming chalk streams,
even in the dryest season, seem ever to press against, whether in early
days before the first May-fly heralds the Itchen's carnival, and the
cuckoo-flower and the kingcup star the growing grass; or again, later,
when the purple willow-herb blazes behind the waving sedges, and the
glorious meadow-sweet, in feathered ivory masses, ladens the fresh moist
air that moves above the stir of so many waters. Many, to be sure, of
our winged friends that are always with us in the streams of the north
and west are absent here. The white-breasted dipper will have nothing to
say to chalk streams. The migrant sandpiper from the sea-coasts, with
rare exceptions, holds absolutely with the dipper, and hies him away
for the breeding season to share with his dark-frocked, white-throated
friend and permanent resident there the snugger bank-harbourage of the
bosky western torrents. But there are water-fowl here at any rate, if of
a less elusive and more clamorous kind; for the osier beds by the chalk
streams are strident by day with the various notes and boisterous antics
of the breeding moor-hens, and often melodious by night with the song of
the reed-warbler. The willow-wren keeps you company in the pollards, the
rare kingfisher loves the chalk stream, and there is nothing in which
the corncrake more delights than to grind out his monotonous love
notes--for all the world like a gigantic salmon reel--in a water-meadow
put up for hay.
But even the Itchen does not exist wholly for the trout, and like other
chalk streams submits itself to the hand of the irrigator. And over the
broad meadows its numerous runlets fertilize, it is always pleasant to
pick one's way by such paths as bridge the numerous channels spouting
and shining, fresh, cool, and lusty in the lush grass, be the weather
ever so torrid.
Avington Park, where the Merry Monarch and Nell Gwyn spent some time,
with its long stretches of fringing wood, is a prominent feature upon
the east bank of the river between Winchester and Alresford. And as you
draw near the latter, one of the three streams that form the Itchen
comes pouring down rapid and shallow over a radiant gravelly bed. Follow
it up for a mile, and lying low in trees, with a park spreading above it
on the one side and an old church perched high upon the other, is the
doubly famous mansion of Tichborne. For as the ancient abode of probably
the oldest landed family of distinction in Hampshire it would call for
notice. But much more than on such account as this would it appeal to
any middle-aged wight whose memory has not badly failed him, for that
_cause célèbre_ of the early 'seventies, which lasted for so many years,
rent England into factions, broke up families, and severed friendships
in the amazing partisanship and excitement it engendered. Alresford is a
pleasant, old-fashioned, wide, open, typical south-country market-town.
Beneath it is a pool or mere, covering, perhaps, three or four acres.
Though not literally such, this might be roughly held as the source of
the Itchen, since above it the river loses all claim to consequence,
while below it come in the Candover and the Tichborne, brooks of equal
volume to itself. Yet more, for, as already mentioned, there are several
curious welling springs in the outskirts of Alresford which contribute
almost as much water to the river as its three parent streams.
The Test is of the same quality in all respects as the Itchen, and as
large if not larger. As a dry-fly trouting river it stands perhaps at
the actual head of the list, and like the Avon is also a salmon river in
its lower reaches, which fall into Southampton Water just to the west of
the mouth of the Itchen. Travellers on the main line of the
South-Western from London to Exeter must be familiar with its infant
efforts if they have any sort of eye for a country. For after an hour or
so out of London, of monotonous pine and heather region varied by
cemeteries, golf links, and jerry-built suburban-like villages, the
train bursts over a valley's head and gives a beautiful breezy glimpse
of altogether another kind of country. A limpid chalk stream, obviously
near its source, trails down towards an old-world-looking town. The
latter is Whitchurch, and the tiny clear stream is the famous Test. We
cannot follow it here. No places of high renown stand upon its banks,
unless the old abbey of Romsey may retrieve its reputation in this
respect. But lovers of the Test do not rest their affections on such
things as these. It is enough for them that in their opinion it is the
finest trouting river in England for the display of what they regard as
the quintessence of scientific fly-fishing. In this sense it is known
throughout the English-speaking world much as the Pytchley and the Quorn
hunts are known. In short, like the Itchen, it is classic ground, and
there we will leave it.
Though it is not our business here to catalogue the streams of England,
one cannot dismiss the chalk streams without a word of reference to the
Colne and the Gade, whose clear buoyant waters strike such a pleasant
and even unexpected note within 20 or 30 miles of London, in the fat and
formal luxuriance of Hertfordshire. Born in the chalk ridges of the
Chilterns, they show in their quite considerable span of existence many
a delightful vista of fresh glancing waters amid opulent forest or park
scenery, flowing as they do through a county that for generations has,
more perhaps than any other, been associated with the country-seat of
the city magnate.
[Illustration: THE DOVE, DOVEDALE, DERBYSHIRE]
[Illustration]