Tom Fort - Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain

Contents

Tom Fort is a lifelong fisherman. With his love of the sport there grew a profound curiosity about the lives and habits of fish and their world. As a fishing correspondent for the Financial Times, he has written a huge amount not just about fishing, but the places fish live. Tom has travelled all over the world to pursue this fascination. He even wrote a whole book about the freshwater eel and its biology and life cycle and the people who fished and fish for them.

As the tide ebbs the netsman stands on the sandbar, the place as he calls it. The water, thick with sediment, is above the knee seams of his chest waders, pushing insistently at his legs. He scans the smooth water, searching for the mark, where the surface is furrowed by a salmon finding its way upstream.

The waiting and watching begin when the falling tide makes it possible to reach the place. The fisherman wants calm weather, to aid visibility. Too much wind is bad, rain is bad. He needs to be able to scan the surface intently. Then he sees it, a V parting the smoothness. He moves fast but without hurry. He knows from experience that as long as the fish does not detect his presence, it will move steadily up against the flow, holding its course.

He wades just faster than the tide, so that he leaves no wake. The net, shaped like a great Y, looks cumbersome. But he handles it with ease, leaning it against his shoulder as he moves, then extending it where he judges he is intercepting the salmons course.

He braces himself against the rush of the stream. Behind him, across the width of the river, the water is draining seawards. It pushes itself across the bars and banks of sand, seeking the channels, surging and seething in its haste, setting up a dry, insistent, rustling sound, the ruts, the fisherman calls it. He is intent on the one channel, where the fish run.

He can see nothing in the brown water, but he has followed the mark as the back of the fish steals upstream, and he knows it is close. The net is thrust out before him and his hands are firm on the ash staff. He dips it down then sweeps the frame up. There it is, like a flash of silver light or a sunbeam, but solid flesh and muscle, twisting and kicking against the mesh. He reaches for his knobbling pin, a short, heavy stick, smooth and with a slightly rounded head, and strikes the fish hard at the back of its head. Its life journey, which began on a bed of gravel on one of the nameless spawning streams that form the headwaters of this river the same nameless stream it is seeking today is over.

Mike Evans, one of the last of the Severn lave netsmen.

Tom Fort

The implement described is known as a lave net. The origin of the word lave is unknown, and its use in this country has been restricted to sections of the Severn estuary where the movements of the tides and the accessibility of sand and mud banks with deeper channels between made it effective. But the principle behind it is universal. The great ethnographer James Hornell who studied ancient fishing methods in all parts of the world found a fairly exact version of the lave net in use on the lower Ganges in Bengal, the one significant difference being that the mesh was made from bamboo mat instead of cord or thread.

Across the world prehistoric societies exploited the rich food source available in lakes, rivers, estuaries, lagoons and along shorelines. They trapped, netted, speared, noosed, stunned, tickled and lured every species of fish they could find. The methods they used evolved in response to particular circumstances. But as with the lave net the responses were often very similar because the circumstances do not vary that much. James Hornell, travelling and inquiring among what were still primitive and isolated communities at the end of the nineteenth century and into the 1930s, described many of these methods in his indispensable Fishing in Many Waters. He was able, for instance, to observe Chinese and Japanese fishermen deploying trained cormorants to catch fish on the Yangtze and Nagara rivers; and the use of toxic plants to stupefy fish in a lagoon in Fiji and in pools on the Benue River in northern Cameroon.

It may be that these techniques were used somewhere in the British Isles in the dim and very distant past (poisonous plants such as Verbascum phlomoides and Euphorbia villosa were still being resorted to on the Danube delta and in the Carpathian region of Romania post-1945). But if so, that use can be presumed to have lapsed well before the start of what we regard as recorded history. So for knowledge, we depend on remnants. Once we have those, it becomes possible to reconstruct what they formed part of, what that implement was used for, and how and when.

The oldest known fish traps in Europe go back 7,000 years to the Mesolithic era, examples of which have been discovered as far afield as Ireland, Denmark and Russia. The earliest confirmed trap in Britain, at Cold Harbour Pill on the western side of the Severn estuary near Newport, has been carbon-dated to the late Bronze Age (perhaps 1200 BCE ). These and other prehistoric structures revealed their existence because the wooden posts and other materials used can survive many centuries if buried or half buried in mud. Archaeologists love them, because they represent fact, data, proof. The fact that visually these pieces of blackened wood and fragments of basketwork are extremely unexciting matters not at all. They can be photographed, subjected to carbon dating, minutely described and compared with equally unexciting bits-and-bobs from elsewhere to build timelines and arching narratives, thereby justifying the whole laborious process of discovery and excavation.

A Chinese illustration of cormorant fishing, 1872.

La Pisciculture et la Peche en Chine by Dabry de Thiersant, published by Masson in Paris, 1872

But these finds are not the story. The fish trap at Cold Harbour Pill on the Severn represents one point in a timeline extending long before and long after. It was preceded by other devices installed for the same purpose to intercept fish, chiefly salmon, eels and shad so that they might be killed and eaten by the communities that managed the trap, or traded and bartered by them for other needs. It was followed by other traps used for the same purpose. Two thousand years later the same principle was being followed in both sides of the estuary in the form of fixed ranks of baskets known as putchers or putts more elaborate, more time-consuming to construct and maintain, more effective in terms of fish caught, but essentially no different. These survived until living memory, when the sudden collapse in salmon abundance put them out of business.

There were two terms in Anglo-Saxon for these fixed traps