‘In my mid-teens these visits to the river were a rare treat, just two or three club coach trips each season and always undertaken after October when the maggot ban was lifted. This fact and the stark contrast with my home environment with its prosaic park lake fishing engendered in me a deep reverence for the Wye’
It’s a good day for writing. Most days I can find reasons, excusesperhaps, that are often tenuous and frequently flimsy for not engaging with the creative process. Most artists will tell you how inhibiting a pristine white canvas or sheet of watercolour paper can be. Similarly, that same sheet of paper or, nowadays, the blank screen can induce ‘Writers Block’, that crippling inability to order one’s thoughts into a cohesive whole. Today there can be no excuse. It’s early February, the sun has hidden away for days, an all pervading gloom has settled over the Midlands and now a knifing East wind is banishing all thoughts of fishing to the furthest recesses.
In truth, for more than a month now the sport has varied between extremely poor and downright non-existent. Rather puzzling it is too because five years ago when I first moved here I was pleased to discover that the canals would throw up something on the worst of days; indeed I recall on our first winter here, a January day, pushing ice floes around to enable the capture of some very nice roach and a couple of decent sized bream. My diary too confirms this happy state of affairs, with very few days recorded when nothing was tempted. But this winter, since just before Christmas, the fishing at all my favoured locations has deteriorated to the point where I’m almost resigned to a blank even before setting out!
Yesterday the weather was quite benign and with the gradually lengthening days I had a full four hours to enjoy up to dusk and after much agonising I plumped for the decent walk up to Wood End Lock and fish my way back, dropping in on the half dozen spots where sport has been assured in the past. The only ‘fly in the ointment’ being the breeze having backed into the East. It wasn’t too strong however and happily my final destination, the “Junction Bend”, faces westwards and is nicely sheltered by a tall and dense hedge.
So, with a pot of ‘pinkies’ and half a loaf of fresh white bread packed, I set off along the towpath buoyed by the sight of several boats on the move and hopefully colouring the water, thereby increasing my chances of a bite or two. On route the distractions were few, only the odd hardy dog-walker with a friendly pooch and a fleeting glimpse of a bird of prey, a sparrow hawk, I think, bulleting away over the arable farmland that dominates hereabouts. With its abundance of plump wood pigeons and the hedgerows attracting flocks of avian migrants from the North this is indeed raptor heaven!
I arrived at the lock just after a boat had gone up, the water silt-stained and the by-wash flowing nicely; perfect conditions for a chub but ‘Are they still here?’ I mused to myself. When the boats were moored on the far bank the fish had both cover and probably food too but the boats had left two years ago and it’s uncertain whether the fish went as well…
On the morning dog-walk some tentative signs of nature’s resurgence were apparent; snowdrops blooming at the Fradley Reserve, bright green spears of reedmace puncturing the margins on the canal and in the garden a solitary daffodil dripping gold against the winter drabness. On the walk to this spot there were, too, mallard drakes aplenty, all signalling their amorous intentions, a pair of moorhens quietly going about their nest building and several blackbirds disputing territorial rights.
But sadly, under the surface everything appeared comatose. After half an hour with no interest shown in either bait I rose from my stool for a stretch. Crossing the wide towpath to the rather unkempt hedgerow I found a gap to look out across the large field that borders the canal here. Fifty, maybe sixty acres, it reached away to the north-west and after all the recent rain, the furrows, ribboned with molten metal streaking away into the distance. There was much puddling, despite the sandy, stony river valley soil that normally is so free-draining. Edging the field were blackened stalks of rape, a reminder of summer’s bounty; back in the heat of July this scene would have been a shimmering sea of yellow rippling in a southerly breeze and alive with the industrial hum of trillions of pollinators.
The fishing not holding my attention, I drift off into a moment of reverie, pondering just what stories the land could offer up? As with much of the British Isles this area is rich in history. Just a few short miles distant, Lichfield and its surrounds are crisscrossed by two major Roman roads and several existing thoroughfares have names of Viking origin. Most famously a Saxon Hoard was unearthed nearby in 2009; more than four thousand individual items, many of precious metal, which had lain hidden for more than a millennium. Valued at north of three million pounds, what rich man wouldn’t pay that sum to be temporarily transported back to discover what happened on that fateful day?
There exists more recent history here; on a fine late summer’s day busy with boats I was rewarded with four good sized chub. Boats were queuing along each side of the lock which was in constant use and the fish seemed energised by the turmoil, feeding with abandon.
There was to be no treasure here for me this time, nor indeed on any of my stop-offs along the return walk. A spell had been cast and the fish, wherever they were, remained completely unresponsive. But did I enjoy my afternoon? Of course I did! Obviously it’s nice to get a fish or two on a cold winter’s day but there are many facets to the appeal of this season and underpinning it all for me having reached my ‘three score and ten’years, is the fact of having snatched yet another day from the empty void that is eternity!
Looking back to a time when mortality was hardly considered, life was lived with urgent passion, nevertheless I still had a true appreciation of the feel of my waterside surroundings, though some parts definitely exerted a more powerful influence on the emotions. A ‘sense of place’ you might call it and at that time, for me, the Wye in winter had this in spades. In my mid-teens these visits to the river were a rare treat, just two or three club coach trips each season and always undertaken after October when the maggot ban was lifted. This fact and the stark contrast with my home environment with its prosaic park lake fishing engendered in me a deep reverence for the Wye. Of course the fish helped too! It had wonderful dace and chub, quality roach and grayling but no Barbel at that time, they were for the future. Later, owning a car enabled far more frequent visits and my pals and I began to accumulate an intimate knowledge of the reaches available to us. It brought so many memories, too numerous to single any one out but one feature that binds it all together is the winter sunset over the Wye Valley fields. I always took time out to drink it in at the end of the day; the reddening lower sky throwing into sharp relief the skeletal trees and lending a final gleam to the terracotta Herefordshire loam, much of which adhered to our boots and made the sixty-mile journey home with us!
Winter watersides are threaded all through my sixty year span of angling. Indeed it all began post-Christmas 1965, a time when winters were winters, if you know what I mean. The Boating Lake in the suburbs of our little provincial town, set in parkland and less than a hundred yards from the seafront high-water mark, was (and still is) in summer a popular attraction and a magnet for young lads with fishing rods or a few Bob to spend on hiring a rowing boat.
In winter, however, a quietude descended on the pool as nature’s pulse slowed to a tick over; never at a standstill though and as January progresses the annual cycle resumes, albeit quite imperceptibly at first. Much of the pool’s bankside was heavily manicured and neatly edged with vertical logs driven into the margins but one bank, the furthest from the landing stage, was more naturalised with cultivated shrubbery interspersed with wild waterside plants. Here, hogweed, meadowsweet and purple loosestrife rubbed shoulders with water mint, rush and Reedmace,all laced through with bramble and bindweed in a riot of colour and scent.
The wizened remnants of the summer’s burgeoning, black, brown and grey stalks, some proud and erect, most tumbled and broken, lent a linear pencil-line quality to the scene dominated by the ‘cigar’ seed-heads of the reedmace towering over even the generous dessert-plate of hogweed seed-heads. Each winter brings a variation on this almost theatrical backdrop; so while different players come to the fore as summer’s lease favours one and stunts another, none can avoid its inevitable fate. There is an undeniable poignancy inherent in these wintry and watery sketches by the hand of nature; this is enhanced by the season’s gloom. The deep tranquillity of still waters is never more keenly felt than beside a long forgotten woodland pool, leafy bottomed and lily studded,such as ‘BB’ would often write about and illustrate with his evocative scraperboard pictures conveying that special atmosphere more eloquently than any words ever could.
Although in my last written offering I alluded to feeling the cold more keenly in recent times, still I can’t imagine foregoing the pleasure of being out there through inclement weather; some extra layers of clothing suffice for me. Trimming an hour or two off a trip is another ruse I use; you won’t find me at the riverside on a frosty morning these days but, equally, I will always squeeze every last drop out of a winter’s afternoon. The year-end sunsets over the upper Trent at Alrewas run the Wye ones very close and with a cacophony of vocal geese streaming across to their island roost, there is a profound elemental feel that thrills me anew each time.
Writing & Paintings – Paul Huxtable, Wales, January 2026
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