Voices from the Shoreline E-Book

Mike Smylie

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 528

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

For generations, coastal fishermen, working at the very fringe between land and sea, have fished salmon and herring using methods passed down from father to son. Some of these ancient traditions have been traced back as far as the days when the men from Scandinavia colonised these lands in the eighth and ninth centuries; others are simply nineteenth century in origin. Sadly, in recent years stocks have dwindled and regulations limit local fishing practices. Today, some surviving methods, such as haaf-netting, are in danger of dying out, whilst other traditional fisheries now lie abandoned. Though herring stocks have recovered from their late twentieth-century decline, the Atlantic salmon is now under immense threat and more danger of extinction than ever before. Tracing and describing his own journey from North Devon, through Wales and up to the top of Scotland, along with interviews with many fishermen, both retired and working, Mike Smylie explores the social history of these indigenous fishing traditions and communities, presenting a picture of their lives, past, present and future.

Leseprobe

To all those Voices, past and present, and Ana & Otis for sharing much of the journey.

Salmon

First published 2021

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Mike Smylie 2021

The right of Mike Smylie to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9920 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

Fish Pattern © Freepik.com

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Foreword by Mark Horton

Journey Beginning

PART 1 SOUTH-WEST ENGLAND

1 Appledore Salmon

2 Sweet Clovelly Herring

3 Hanging out with Herring

4 A Man with a Horse with No Legs

5 Parrett Fishing

6 The Weston Bay Shrimpers

PART 2 RIVERS SEVERN AND WYE AND INTO WALES

7 Putchering and Putting in the River Severn

8 Long-Netting the River Severn

9 The Stop-Nets of Gatcombe

10 Fishing the River Wye

11 The Lave-Nets at Black Rock

12 Fishing with a Coracle

13 Drawing a Compass in the River Cleddau

14 The Cleddau King

15 Fish Weirs (and a Few More Coracles) while Rushing up the Welsh Coast

PART 3 NORTH-WEST ENGLAND

16 Drafts on the Dee

17 The Rabble from the Ribble

18 Lune-ing About

19 Whammelling the Lune

20 Fishing the Other Side of the River

21 Hedge Baulks and Garths

22 Between Two Rivers: ‘Going to the Sand’

23 Southern Solway

PART 4 SCOTLAND

24 A Huddle of Haaf-Nets

25 Staking out the Solway

26 The Various Yairs of Kirkcudbright

27 Galloway Adventures

28 Yarning with Two Tarbert Ring-Netters

29 Chasing Genealogy Around Mull

30 Finding Fascadale

31 Cuil Bay

32 On up North and a Little of Salmon and Herring Together

33 North Coast, East Coast, and Home

Journey End

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

FOREWORD

The western coasts of the British Isles are among the most spectacular and diverse in the world – from the cliffs of Cornwall, the mudflats of the Severn Estuary, the rocky Welsh coasts and the spectacular scenery of Solway Firth. But these are not uninhabited spaces, but places, where for generations fishermen have sought out their living, following the herring and netting the salmon. Each place generated its own unique way to harvest the sea and hand down this knowledge, most probably over millennia.

Sadly, many of these traditional fisheries now lie abandoned, as fish stocks have dwindled and zealous government rules are being arbitrarily imposed so the fishermen are no longer able to continue. We are most likely to be the last generation to be able to observe one of Britain’s most ancient and intangible heritages.

This book will help to make a record of this disappearing heritage. Mike Smylie has spent a lifetime recording these fishing communities, photographing their craft and interviewing the practitioners. Sadly, many of the fishermen have now retired or died, and their know-how with them; others just hang on, trying to pass on the traditions to the next generation. But we all fear that the golden thread of knowledge will be lost forever and only this written record will survive.

I write this foreword in what was one of the main salmon fishing ports of the Severn, where thousands of fish were landed every year and have been since the Domesday Book. I am looking out at the wrecks of three stop-net boats, covered in brambles, which last ventured to sea in the 1990s. In ten years, even these will be gone, along with the salmon, and with them most likely the remaining traditional fisheries of western Britain. I hope that this book will be a call to arms, for everyone who is passionate about our coasts, that this precious heritage can be preserved and passed on to future generations.

Mark Horton Maritime and historical archaeologist Gatcombe, Gloucestershire

JOURNEY BEGINNING

Salmon and herring. Two great fish that have their own histories wrapped up in and around the evolution of what we know as Britain. One the King of Fish, the other the King of the Sea; one the Silver King, the other the Silver Darling. Then there’s the unprincely shrimp, the poor relative, neither regal nor silvery, and why will become clear!

I set out to record the shoreline fisheries of the west coast of Britain, my coast, so to speak. One I think I know best, the one I have lived nearby most of my life. Sometimes right by it, at other times upon it while residing aboard various boats. The coast is the fringe between land and sea, a boundary of importance. Some call it liminal, a border or bridge between life and death, a place to worship. In the Iron Age treasure was buried here, sometimes even bodies. To others it is simply a threshold where solid ground gives way to immersion.

Nevertheless, this is a coast that over a good part is pretty wild and untamed, edged against some seas that have not, in the past, been thought of as the richest in sea life: the Bristol Channel, the Irish Sea, the two firths of the Solway and the Clyde, those indented Hebridean lochs and the wild Minch. Others will say, on the contrary, that the west coast is diverse. One fellow told me he thought the Irish Sea has the largest mixed-species fishery in the country, while the amount of herring boats working the west coast up to the 1950s suggests a huge fishery. Today, prawns, shrimps, scallops and mussels account for the most landings but things have changed in the nature of the ways of fishing. Salmon and herring have almost disappeared from this coast due to various pressures: climate change, overfishing and pollution.

This is the coast that I care most about, and equally I chose to support those that have, over generations, made a living by it in sustainable ways. In most cases, these folk have sought two fish as they were the most profitable: salmon and herring. Consequently, I chose to confine my research, to limit it to just these two great fish. I didn’t really want to go into deep water (literally and metaphorically speaking) because that has been done numerous times. What I wanted was to take the reader on a discovery of the methods that have been used throughout generations of coastal fishing, and at the same time to explore the communities that have learned to sustain their fishing through consistency between those generations. Where people have grown up in a community and stayed there, the elders teaching the next generation the value of tradition. But then technology arrived to destroy much. As one old fellow told me, ‘They should never have allowed the boats to get so big.’

There are still a few remaining open avenues to earn a living by fishing that do not necessitate the huge investment in fishing vessels and the associated gear. Small is beautiful, they say, and to stand facing the ocean holding a net, lave- or haaf-, is simply as basic as shrimping in rock pools the way children do it today, and have done so for centuries.

I pause. Much is said about the romanticising of fishing, of fishermen living the ideal life, earning a crust from their chosen profession, sailing out and hunting the shoals. Whereas that ‘profession’ might be used to describe many fishermen of today, there is little romantic notion in the job itself. It’s tedious and monotonous, hard work and often offering little in reward for that labour, dirty and smelly when covered in fish guts and scales, and dangerous when relying upon the vagaries of British weather. Having said that, many folk I’ve spoken to talk about fishing in a way that forms a beautiful picture in my brain. They are respectful of the job, and respectful of the memory of those that didn’t survive to the end of their working days.

But hang on a minute. ‘You are talking about fishermen who go off to sea for a week or two at a time,’ you say, ‘whereas here you are with fishermen who simply work the tides from their home.’ And mostly you are quite correct in your surmising. But to work the tides also means working hours that do not obey the rules of daylight. Maybe spending a week on a trawler out in the Western Approaches (which I’ve done) is somewhat different to time spent at home afterwards, but fishing the shoreline means fishing every tide when possible and if that means standing out in a river at three o’clock in the morning on your own, with a Force 8 gale blowing, then that is what they all do.

My initial intention was to undertake a journey from Appledore in northern Devon, all the way up this coast to Applecross, some 100 miles short of Cape Wrath. Why choose these two villages? Ignoring the name association, I thought that the coast in between would give me a good insight to what was happening fish-wise. North Cornwall was never a base for commercial salmon fishing, excepting the odd fish that swam into the rivers such as the Camel, but nothing of substance. It is not much of a herring fishing coast either, although it is worth mentioning that the rivers Tamar, Lynher and Dart, for example, all flowing into the English Channel, were home to some commercial salmon fishing. But the estuary of the rivers Taw and Torridge at Appledore were noted salmon-netting areas.

Then Applecross, a hidden gem over the infamous 2,053ft-high Bealach na Bà road, was once noted for its salmon fishing, even though most of the signs of it are now gone. Applecross – meaning ‘sanctuary’ in its Gaelic form – is actually a conglomeration of various townships in the area, and, although it was eventually somewhat disappointing in terms of fishing traditions, we did search along the coast to the south – around Milltown, Camustiel, Camusterrach, Culduie and Toscaig. The nearest anyone knew about in the locality were the bag-nets over at Raasay, and they were long gone. Although visiting is most pleasurable, we had to venture further north to find more commercial salmon history!

You see that was the initial idea from the outset: to study salmon and the various fishing methods undertaken both in the past and still today (just) for this prized fish. It was not to be a potted history of salmon as many others have written about this fish, its life cycle and history. I did, in no way, wish to repeat any of these. No, this was to be practical as much as possible, a chance to wet my toes and catch a glimpse of traditional ways of the past.

The exciting thing about salmon fishing, as against other fish, is the multitude of differing manners in which they are captured. Evocative names such as the lave-net, compass-net, whammel-net, sweep-net, haaf-net, bag-net, seine-net and fly-net conjure up so many images of what is actually a labour-intensive occupation, often with little remuneration. But there are so many more terms given to the various ways that have been utilised over time to capture salmon: the cruive, the yair or fishing stank, the mud-hangs, the stage-net, the toot-, cairn-, croy-, pot-, draw-net, hang-, bob-, T-net, teedle-, stake-, kettle-, keddle-, stell-, drift-net, poke-, paidle-net, paddle-, sparling-, cleek-, long-, tide-, floating-, jumper-net, even wear-shot-net, and all are variations on several types while, at the same time, being methods for catching salmon. Not necessarily just for salmon, but certainly effective at fishing for it. None of your boring old trawling here!

‘Herring’ from Jonathan Couch’s A History of the Fishes of the British Islands, 1865.

But then herring dropped into the frame and, by comparison, catching this fish could be said to be pretty boring too. Drift-netting and ring-netting were the only ways by which the shoals were captured until the advent of the modern trawling, pair-trawling and purse-seining, all of which devastated the stocks; and we ain’t going there! Drift-netting was practised all around Britain and further afield, and is the age-old method. Ring-netting, confined on the whole to the west coast (OK, yes, there was some on the east side but nothing like the west), was something new in the 1850s, and over the next century gained much in stature in some places while it was vilified in others. Today, although there are hardly any herring to ring and the method dwindled in the 1970s to an eventual stoppage, there remains much folklore and nostalgia among many fishermen. I didn’t want to encroach into Angus Martin’s fine The Ring-Net Fishermen, so I asked him for advice and found another course to navigate.

There are, of course, other fish, considered by some to be of a similar stature to salmon and herring, but I leave those to writers of superior literary skill, with their high-flying contacts and double-barrelled surnames, who seem to dip intermittently into fishery history when they appear to need a subject to write about. Their writing is, as expected, swift and sweet, but lacks any passion for commercial fishermen. Passion, I’m told, is what makes the subject alive, and coastal fishermen certainly do have my, and many others’, hearts. Passion creates possibility.

Shrimps jumped on the bandwagon at a later stage, partly through an invitation to sample a spot of net clearing in Weston-super-Mare, and partly because of my old friend Tom Smith of Sunderland Point. He fished for shrimps with his horse over the sands of Morecambe Bay, in the same way as folk had done for generations. How could I not include such a meaningful and redolent imagery of the sands?

And so, in this journey, we start in Appledore, and eventually arrive in Applecross, but, as I say, we do need to travel slightly further. We will just have to see what occurs. Just as the old fisherman once said, ‘Sometimes I sit and think … sometimes I just sit’, I often think that sometimes I drive and think (with an end in mind) … and sometimes I just drive!

Maybe this is the time to say something about these three wonderful species that, alongside those whose voices we hear, are the heroes of this book. Herring swim in vast shoals and deposit their sticky eggs on coarse sand, gravel, shells and small stones, all the members of a shoal spawning over a relatively short time period. Around our coasts the fish tend to congregate on traditional spawning grounds, many of which are on shoals and banks and in relatively shallow water, approximately 15–40m deep. The Ballantrae Banks in the southern Firth of Clyde are a good example. Once the small fish develop, they tend to stay in shallow water for a couple of years before swimming out to join the adult population in the north-east Atlantic – the vast area between Scotland, Iceland and Norway. Then to spawn they swim southwards, flooding into the southern parts of the North Sea and down the west side of Britain and Ireland. Some are anadromous, in that they spawn in rivers and then return to the sea, while others return to the grounds where they were bred. They tend to stay in deep water throughout the day and come to the surface at night to feed off the plankton.

Salmon have similar habits, although they swim further. It is an incredible fish that, once matured, swims down river and out into the north Atlantic, perhaps as far as Greenland, to return to spawn in the exact same bit of clean gravel, in the exact same steadily flowing stream where they had hatched out of eggs laid in their mother’s redd. As ‘alevins’ they hung about, feeding off their yolk sac, growing into ‘fry’, then foraging for food in that stream. Over a period of up to five years they remained in the stream, becoming then ‘parr’, then later ‘smolts’ as they prepared to swim downstream and out into the ocean. Anadromous they are too, living first in fresh water, then acclimatising to saltwater.

Salmon have, over time, had more written about them than any other fish, perhaps due to their position as the ‘king of all fish’. Furthermore, no fish has been legislated about as much as he, and probably no fish has created the same profitability among the fishermen of northern Europe, though surely the herring must come a close second, probably followed by cod.

The trade in both salmon and herring is indeed ancient. Various records on herring date back to the sixth and seventh centuries, and salmon almost as old, though it is also known from evidence from remains that both fish were favoured by the Romans. Let’s face it, the taking of salmon and herring from the sea probably dates back to when man first started fishing, or indeed finding fish stranded in rock pools, when the building of fish weirs followed.

Both these fish come in various sizes, depending on all manner of factors such as being members of different sub-species, their age and where they were caught. Big Atlantic herring are huge compared with the small Clovelly herring. We shall hear of grilse too, an Atlantic salmon that has spent only one winter at sea before returning to the river. Salmon grilse are often difficult to distinguish from salmon that have been at sea longer, except by scale reading. They tend to be smaller on average (2–3lb in May, 5–7lb in July) but when they enter our rivers in September, often attain 8–10lb and in October 12–15lb. Or so I’m told.

The very same rock pools would have been full of shrimps, though things have moved on since the Romans and their forefathers were poking around them. Generally, it is the brown shrimp that lives close inshore and the pink shrimp that is found in deeper water, and that is how it is still fished in some quarters. Fishing with a horse restricts the fisher to the shallow water and thus it is the brown shrimps that today’s tractors are after, although others go out onto the sands with their push nets ‘putting’ for shrimps. It’s the boats that go for the pink ones.

The desire for shrimp teas in Victorian Britain grew as nineteenth-century factory workers’ rights included sensible holidays so that they spread out from the industrial mills and factories and decamped upon the up-and-coming coastal resorts at weekends and these vacation times. Potted shrimps – shrimps in butter – also soon became a delicacy where shrimps were fished and remains so today, especially in the north-west.

But today we all know that fish stocks are under pressure, and nowhere is this more obvious than with the Atlantic salmon. Recent figures show this decline. In the southern area of the north-east Atlantic (comprising Ireland, the UK, France and the southern part of Iceland), grilse have declined by 66 per cent since 1970 and multi-sea winter fish (‘springers’) by 81 per cent. Measures have been put in place over the last few decades but no one is sure that they are working. For example, in 2007, the Irish authorities banned mixed stock drift-netting. However, in 2006, the last year of drift-netting, the reported catch in that fishery was 70,000 fish and, after making a modest adjustment for the extensive illegal catch in this fishery, probably at least of the order of 100,000 fish. Notwithstanding the ‘saving’ of this very large number of salmon, neither the commercial estuary nets nor the angling effort have since exceeded their pre-2007 catch levels.

This is shown through statistics: adult salmon returning to the Irish coast has collapsed from 2 million in the late 1970s to 250,000 in recent years (2017). Furthermore, the marine survival of the species had fallen from 20 per cent of fish returning to rivers in 1980 to 5 per cent in 2017, before any exploitation. Catches of salmon in Ireland were at an all-time low then, and still are, at about 22,000 fish by all methods (comprising 7,000 by commercial nets and 15,000 by angling). At the same time, it was said that angling had accounted for 63 per cent of salmon catches since 2007. This mirrors the case both sides of the Irish Sea, and, in respect of this book, majorly affects the west coast. The general consensus is that this is due to all manner of causes; climate change being the prime reason, although add on agricultural pollution off the land, exploitation, increased juvenile predation in freshwater, migration barriers, the increase in seal populations, open-cage salmon farming and habitat degradation. Overfishing would undoubtedly have been added up to recent times, but with the tiny number of commercial fishermen forced out, stocks still don’t seem to be improving.

‘Salmon’ from John Couch’s A History of the Fishes of the British Islands, 1865.

One question I hear often is, ‘Will wild salmon return?’ As was pointed out to me by Douglas Carson, no one seems to have researched the effect on salmon stocks when Iceland and Greenland fishermen discovered a huge market for the fish. Did this coincide with the sea temperature increase due to climate change? Did the drift-netters working off the Irish coast up to the beginning of this century make inroads into stocks? The answer, from common sense, is probably yes but nothing is certain. What is certain is that the wild salmon stocks are low. Compared with Pacific salmon, where the fishery is well managed, especially in Alaska, then what lessons can we learn here?

Some regard the Pacific salmon as aquaculture because the fish are put into rivers from the hundreds of hatcheries up Canadian and west coast US rivers. Depending on which species (there are generally five: Chinook, Sockeye, Coho, Chum and Pink), some can be released after a few days and others after eighteen months of growth. Some 900,000 fish are landed a year and sold, and it is estimated that 34 per cent of these are from hatcheries. One mature adult fish is said to be caught for every ten released from a hatchery, so that nature takes its percentage. Yet that leaves 66 per cent from the wild, which surely suggests success. On the other hand, are we in the UK too wrapped up in supporting the farming of salmon in pods, with its knock-on effect on jobs, to be bothered? Meanwhile, herring continues to be plundered in quantity and fed to the farmed salmon because to us, the general populace, this fish has fallen out of favour. Surely there’s some irony there!

On the beaches, the same generations of children continue their exciting researches into the summer’s rock pools with their shrimping nets without really realising what they have. Tractors make life on the sands less labour intensive but perhaps more dangerous than they were. Nevertheless, salmon, herring and shrimps are still very much with us in some form, and will, if we take some care for this planet of ours, remain so for the foreseeable future.

It’s worth mentioning that this book was beginning to consolidate into a narrative back in March 2020, at a time when the first coronavirus lockdown was thrust upon us. Since then, over the year, it has been almost impossible to interview elderly fishermen without the possibility of me bringing contamination upon them, always a risk even with the strictest precautions. Thus some interviews haven’t been concluded and others have been done by phone. This has sometimes been difficult, even impossible in one case when the particular fisherman’s hearing aid had broken and he couldn’t hear me, even with me shouting down the handset. To make matters worse, he couldn’t get out to obtain a replacement, which was so upsetting and confusing for him as he was in his early nineties. Yes, it’s been confusing all round, with the virus, Brexit and a downturn in economic activity. Sometimes it’s surprising that there’s any fishing industry left in this country, given successive governments’, and their quangos’, total indifference to it.

Finally, I generally use the term ‘fisher’ for sport fishers, anglers, ‘the rod brigade’ (as some call them), while commercial fishermen are exactly that, or ‘fisherfolk’, sometimes ‘fishing people’. Nothing untoward, simply a matter of distinction!

Brendan Sellick, whom we meet in chapter 4, sadly died at the age of 86 during the production stage of this book. Doubt lingers whether his son Adrian will continue to fish without his dad’s support …

PART 1

SOUTH-WEST ENGLAND

1

APPLEDORE SALMON

You’d be excused for missing Appledore when you drive exhilarated down the A39, northern Cornwall beckoning in the distance. In the excitement you might simply shoot on southwards, while others might be tempted away on seeing a signpost to Kingsley Amis’ Westward Ho! But Appledore has had its moments, nestled as it is at the confluence of the rivers Taw and Torridge, and is often described, as many others are, as a fishing village with narrow streets and colourful houses. Indeed, you do have to wonder what, without the description of ‘a colourful village with olde worlde cobbled streets and oozing with character’, many of our best-known coastal tourist traps would be!

However, in support of Appledore, it does have one wonderful atmospheric narrow street, edged on both sides by a variety of different-shaped fishermen’s houses, although they weren’t as brightly contrasting in colour as some of the photos I’d seen. Those on the seaward side came with the added bonus to fishers that they have direct access to the river frontage. The Beaver Inn, halfway along, has been serving the fishing community, as well as sailors from all over, for over 400 years and it is said that press gangs worked here, wearing beaver pelt hats that gave the pub its name and pressing the King’s Shilling into the hands of unsuspecting drinkers. Another suggestion is that the ships coming into Appledore brought beaver pelts with them. Nevertheless, the salmon boats were also moored alongside the quay just below. Standing outside the pub, gazing seaward, it is easy to see just why Appledore is perfectly placed, geographically speaking.

With the wider River Taw heading north-east, then east, to Barnstaple, and the Torridge heading south, Appledore is right at the confluence, on its south side, facing Crow Point to the north. With a long quayside to receive the numerous ships from Wales, Ireland, France and Spain, it was also equally well placed for the salmon fishers to work the tidal waters from where the rivers join and empty into Barnstaple Bay, and upstream upon both rivers.

Looking east across the Torridge reveals an expanse of sands, dotted with boats, some sailing, and the jumbled line of houses below the green hills; this is Instow. With its railway from Barnstaple bringing in tourists until its closure in 1985, it became a haven of activity, though now, I admit, it retains a more peaceful air. From across the river, with the sun shining on the golden sands, it sure looks the part. But there was fishing here, too, as there was upstream of the Taw at Fremington Quay, which, once the railway had been built in the 1840s, became a busy port, largely due to the Taw silting up and boats not being able to reach Barnstaple. Exports were mostly ball clay from the local clay pits.

A maritime port needs boats and ships, so it’s no surprise to find that Appledore was also home to several boatbuilders. Some of its ships sailed to Newfoundland to fish back in the sixteenth century, as did many West Country vessels, catching cod that was then dropped off in northern Spain before they returned home with wine and other badly needed goods, with the cycle recommencing the following spring.

Among the fine array of boatyards was J. Hinks and Sons, which had been building wooden fishing boats since the 1840s, and thus there was no shortage of craft for the local fishers, both for inshore and river fishing.

Although Alan Hinks, who took over the firm in the 1960s, continued building 70ft boats for Scottish fishing owners, by the 1990s orders had dried up and the yard had closed. Shipbuilding must have exercised some blood control, though, as Appledore Shipyard, again dating from 1855, only recently closed in March 2019, though they generally built larger boats than fishing vessels throughout their existence. The current thinking is that it will reopen to build vessels for the Faroese fishing industry. Another well-known name was that of P.B. Waters and Sons, a company stemming from Tom Waters, who had moved from Clovelly to East Bideford in around 1855 and then later to Appledore; but we aren’t here to talk about boatbuilding, or indeed cod; it is salmon, that King of Fish, that we’ve started our search here for.

So we find that both the rivers, Taw and Torridge, were good salmon rivers, just as the estuary was, once both rivers had joined it, and the area has been fished for many centuries. I guess ‘were’ and ‘was’ are the operative words as some say there’s plenty of salmon in the river. It’s just that no one but the anglers are allowed to catch it.

Hauling in at the Bridge Pool, Bideford. (North Devon Maritime Museum)

They have, without doubt, been good salmon rivers, so far back that nobody really knows when the first salmon was caught. Common sense tells me it was probably when man first realised he could eat fish, long before the first mention of it in the Domesday Book! But as his fishing methods evolved, at some point we arrived at the era of the seine-net.

The seine-net is probably the oldest method of netting and is rowed out into the river upon a small open boat – or off a beach directly into the ocean as often as not, though never in these parts. One end is held to the shore while the boat travels in a circle, shooting the net as it goes, to arrive back at shore. On these two rivers a place that a seine is set out is called a ‘draft’, which often as not is little more than a pool of deeper water within the river at low water where a net can be laid out by boat. Once the net is out, the two ends are brought together and are then hauled in. Sounds easy but, given strong and erratic tides and currents, heavy nets, uncertain riverbeds and any other number of variables, it certainly is not.

On these rivers the net was worked just before low water, then through slack water and into the first of the flood. It took a couple of hours, sometimes more, depending on the tide. That meant the fishers could work two tides a day. Generally speaking, the Taw was fished by people from Barnstaple and Braunton, while the Torridge was the domain of fisherfolk from anywhere between Appledore and Bideford. Fishing above both downstream bridges across each river seldom occurred much in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Then there’s the legislation that necessitated having a licence. Before the 1860s, fishermen set their nets unfettered by any regulation and one of the first hereabout was to ban Sunday fishing. This probably marked the beginning of years of conflict between the fishermen and the legislators, who most thought were on the side of the rod fishers. Today, those same sentiments linger on and we shall be hearing much more about them as we move around the various fishing communities. This is obvious in all the various small fishing communities that once relied on this sort of fishing. What we shall see over the coming pages is that the conservation of fish is not the main driving force behind the loss of commercial fishing (although it certainly plays a part and sometimes seems to be an excuse drummed up by the authorities), but finance. In the early days of legislation, those conservators, who were appointed by Justices of the Peace, were gentlemen who enjoyed sport fishing with rods, much like the JPs themselves, so it was pretty obvious whom the regulations were going to favour. These days, it is those very same anglers fishing with rods that pay far more through various licences into the coffers of the various government agencies (Environment Agency (EA), National Resources Wales (NRW), Marine Scotland etc.) than do most commercial fishermen, excluding those working in the aquaculture industry.

So, prior to the 1860s, any amount of fishing gear could be set in rivers and estuaries and vast amounts of salmon were caught. It was almost a case of there being a limitless amount and it was eaten abundantly in the growing towns and cities. The general consensus was that folk were tired of it, and word got around that the service sector was rebelling being fed on it: it is said that they insisted they must only be fed salmon three times a week. This tale does change somewhat and there’s no documented evidence I can find that this was written down, but it does emphasise that salmon was eaten widely. But then, government took an interest, set up a special commission, and salmon fishing has, since then, been limited. Today it is almost a thing of the past. Which is one reason I am chasing up the country, talking to fishermen who work mostly in the rivers and very shallow estuaries and, in Scotland, in deeper water.

When man needs to take governance over something specific, he generally turns to a licensing system. These licences thus enable the authorities to restrict that activity or whatever in many ways. For commercial salmon fishing this entails limiting the fishing time, dictating the gear used, and charging a fee for the pleasure. Even back in the 1860s, there was an awareness that overfishing was a reality. Today there’s definitely a lack of wild salmon, but the reasons that fishing has been first curtailed, and now banned, aren’t as clear cut as they should be. Opaqueness, sometimes called politics, comes into the equation. Today, blatant lying has been made acceptable.

For salmon fishing on these two rivers, the period people are allowed to fish during has decreased over the decades and there is a charge for the licence. Until salmon fishing ceased altogether, this meant latterly three months over the summer. Generally, it was the net that was licensed and this had to adhere to certain sizes, not just in mesh but in length. Indeed, in 1948, a petition was submitted to the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, signed by 163 netsmen, asking for the netting season to be extended to six months because, at that time, the commercial fishers had a five-month season while the anglers could fish for seven months. Not for the first time was there animosity between commercial fishermen and the rod fishers.

The fishermen of these two rivers, as is usual among such kin countrywide, were democratic in deciding the order of fishing and gathered at various places such as the Beaver Inn in Appledore at the beginning of the season. Numbers were drawn from a hat and names of the captains of the seines from another hat, alternatively to give each boat a number. Even numbers fished the drafts on the Appledore side and the odd on the opposite, or Braunton, bank for the first two tides and then they moved across and then round in sequence. There were several drafts that could only be fished when the weather and the current were favourable.

A team of fishermen used to consist of four men and they used a stoutly built boat to row the net out. One man, the shoreman, would stay on the bank holding the shore rope, to which the end of the net was attached, while the other three stayed in the boat. The amount of rope he paid out from the shore depended on the strength of the tide and the nature of the riverbank. Two aboard the boat would then row around in a semicircle, with the third man paying out the net and then the headrope and footrope, while the shoreman began ‘walking’ the net in the same direction as the net (or tide) was going. Once they were close to the shore once again, this third man would throw the pole staff (a 5ft staff attached at either end of the net that stuck into the mud) into the water and leap in to hold it. The other oarsmen would secure the boat and quickly come and help him before the net was hauled in by its head and footrope, being careful not to let any fish escape by jumping over the headrope.

Although this fishing was seasonal, and therefore part-time, it could be very profitable in the days when there were plenty of salmon. In the nineteenth century, catches were good and salmon sold between 4d and 1s a pound in weight. Each crew was paid a share of the total money received from the fish dealer. A sixth went to the net, a sixth to the boat and a sixth to each crewman. Usually the ‘captain’ owned the boat and net; it cost at least £20 for a boat and possibly a bit more for a net and rope in the 1920s and ’30s. A licence at that time cost £5 but that was often advanced by the dealer, who took a penny per fish for his trouble. Nets had to be barked to be preserved, ropes tarred and boats overhauled and painted. The year 1932 was a bonanza one in north Devon, with 6,317 salmon being netted, though, like all fishing, the next year could bring a dearth.

In more recent times a team of two can work a draft. A good example of the latter is the husband and wife team of Stephen and Sheila Taylor. Stephen has been fishing for well over sixty years, which is a long time. He’s 89 as I write this, 90 coming up in a month or so. Sheila, his wife, is a few years younger and they’ve fished together for at least thirty-five years. I remember talking to him a year ago.

‘She can haul in a 200yd net as easy as anyone,’ Stephen spoke of his wife, ‘and a net is lighter and easier to haul in with a fish in it.’

They still have a couple of fish huts on the Braunton side of the Taw, near where the River Caen from Braunton flows in, where they used to keep their net until their licence was removed in 2018. Access meant a mile’s walk to get to them, a bit more these days as part of the marsh has collapsed. These days the huts are still full of mooring gear, anchors and buoys and things that every fisherman collects. To take away their licence was purely an act of evilness on the part of the authorities in their drive for conservation. Even the bailiff said it was a totally unreasonable act to take one away from someone who had been fishing for so long and was in his late eighties.

Stephen jokes that he had obtained his first licence almost as a mistake by the authorities. Initially licences were issued to bargemen to give them some employment during the winter when barging was impossible. Stephen decided to apply and when filling in the form wrote ‘butcher’ as his employment as that was what he was. But maybe his writing wasn’t very clear because whoever processed the application read it as ‘bargeman’ and so issued the licence. That was back in the 1950s. At the time the licence cost 10s, whereas it was £350 by the time they banned all nets in the two rivers.

Hauling in one of the old hemp nets, Old Walls on the Braunton side of the estuary. (North Devon Maritime Museum)

Often the Barnstaple fisherfolk would come down the river in their bigger boats, and some even rigged a small sail. In those days, it needed four men to handle the heavy cotton nets but once man-made materials were introduced, the lighter nets and ropes meant that only two men were able to fish one sweep. Smaller boats, such as the one Stephen still has, were ideal. The nets themselves were 200yd long and 14ft deep.

‘You had to start from the shore and shoot without pause in a circle and back, and only over three parts of the river,’ he told me. ‘I used a 5½in mesh most of the year, though I never got a word of thanks as others used smaller mesh over much of the season. Only occasionally did I swap to the 4in mesh when the fish were running and we caught grilse.’

We talked about the highest catches:

355 in one season was the best. Sold it in my fish shop in Braunton. Some got sent to be smoked and tasted wonderful. Fourteen once in one sweep, though it might have been more as some swam out. Grilse they were. Once I caught a 38lb salmon but it was an illegal netting and I had to put it back. The man who owned my fish shop once caught a 54lb fish. We made a good living then, had to as we had three children to bring up. There were thirty-six newsmen out on the river when I started and just three when we finished. My son had a licence too. But they kept reducing our fishing time as well as raising the cost. Used to start in April in my time but that was June by the time we finished. Up to August.

I mentioned the fact that I thought it was more about finance than conservation, the withdrawal of licences:

They didn’t see that we had to make a living. It wasn’t a sport like the anglers do. They catch fish and take some home and sometimes even not using flies when the fish are angry. But the netsmen and the anglers have been at loggerheads since way back. Trouble is it was a way of life and once it’s gone, it’s gone. We can’t go back. But it has done us well. I’m 90 at Christmas and although I’ve had a new knee and other things, I’m fit.

‘It must be all the Omega-3 you’ve had,’ I told him as a parting shot. He laughed and agreed.

Felicity Sylvester married into a line of fishers. We met one bright Monday morning, a day after we’d both exhibited at the annual autumnal Clovelly Herring Festival, set around the picturesque harbour of the privately owned, nearby village; me smoking the herring and she exhibiting her ‘Sustainable Fish Education’ stand, extolling the virtues of fish while letting festival-goers taste the wonders of various dishes of marinated herring to whet their gills. This time we met first at The Seagate, a recently refurbished Appledore establishment, and talked as we sat with our cappuccinos at the low tables and chairs in the bar. It was quiet: hardly surprising for a Monday morning!

After I’d taped her ‘fish talk’, we left and walked across the riverside car park and down the narrow Irsha Street, with its central drainage gulley, along with pastel-coloured houses and fishermen’s cottages, though I was surprised that the houses weren’t of brighter colouring. In the weak November light they had none of that bright sun-filled embrace I’d sort of expected. More dim moonshine! Yet, as we ambled along, she pointed out the various homes of fishers and where the boatyards had once been, now filled in with more dwellings, until we came upon the Beaver Inn at a point midway along this strangely named street. Here, presumably on the foreshore below the wall, the fishermen once gathered at the start of the season, and then finished off their discussions over a few pints inside.

Who or what was Irsha, I wondered, but got no answer. Even Google didn’t know. However, once inside and seated at a table, we were able to chat more over a drink while waiting for our ordered lunch, although our talk in lowered tones had to be so, down to the number of local fishermen who, she said, had elephant ears. Yet I wasn’t here to denigrate them, although I did realise any nuances might be misunderstood.

Felicity was once a town planner until she married local fisherman Chris Sylvester in the 1980s. With long blonde hair and now into her fifties, she didn’t give the appearance of being a fishwife. Maybe because she had to continue to work as well as becoming in effect what was an Appledore fishwife, she didn’t fit the pattern, and she continued in the same vein even after they’d split up. Here, primed with half a pint of ale, she started telling me about her association with fishing.

‘Yes, I remember some of the fishing families. There were the Eastmans, Craners, Coxes and Canns, most of whom lived in Irsha Street. Often the families got on really well, though went in different directions. Like the Coxes and the Canns, who knew each other. One family went to the pub and another to the Baptist church!’

She had a sup of beer before continuing as the chips arrived:

In Appledore people mostly fished the bottom end of the Torridge and then out to sea and across the estuary to what we call Crow Point. Names like ‘Cannon’, ‘Greysands’ and ‘Pulleys’ this side and ‘Old Walls’ and ‘Sandridge’ on the far side. The boats from Barnstaple would come down here and fish the Taw. My ex-husband Chris Sylvester was a salmon fisherman when he was younger and he knows a lot about the Taw. He fished with a chap called Pat Nore and they would come down salmon fishing day or night in a three-wheeler Robin Reliant and if Pat saw a rabbit run across the road on the way down to the river, he would turn round and go back and sit in the Horse and Groom pub in Braunton all day! Just because of a bloody rabbit!

Thus was the nature of his superstition. Neither did they ever go to sea on a green boat! I asked what happened to the fish when they did catch it:

We had someone catching salmon for us when Chris bought a trawler. We gave the licence for salmon to someone else and then we took all the fish and we sold it with our own fish from the trawler. So we sold river fish and sea fish and we gave them something. But I was a woman and I wouldn’t be told what financial arrangements had been made. I just had to sell it. Don’t ask me questions like that!

You had a licence for fishing in certain parts of the river and everyone knew their place. And if you went to the wrong place at the wrong time, boy, was that a problem. People moved round to fish drafts in a fishing time, which was quite limited round there, two or three hours at the most, and they all had to move at the same time. If you went to the wrong one at first, you’d be in trouble. It’s all really complicated until you know how you fit into it. To an outsider it’s almost impossible to understand. The boys above the bridge at Bideford would not be allowed to fish below the bridge but whether that was a rule from outside or a rule between them, I don’t know.

‘So what happened to all the fish?’ I said again, chomping on a locally sourced steak sandwich:

We used to have an old deep freeze in the garage and the fish used to go in there until November, when we sent it down for smoking. I was selling wholesale and retail, as well as working and bringing up three kids, and had the shop and later a fish and chip shop. The salmon we took from the boats and sold it to the fish merchants or sold it locally. If it was a large fish, 10lb or more, we’d send it for smoking. That fish, and maybe more, would go down, wrapped up, on a bus from Bideford Quay to Newton Abbot to a very good fish shop, where it was smoked. No slicing, no vacuum packing, none of that nonsense, and it would come back, two sides together, beautifully wrapped up. And I had to go and meet the bus and there’d be mothers meeting their children and I’d be meeting the salmon on the bus. People would have it for their posh parties, hotels for their Christmas menus. I also sold naturally smoked white fish, which was unusual as, in those days, most of it was dyed. And I’m still dealing with the same smokehouse, though now it’s the son I deal with. Today it’s really just herring I send down there for smoking and that becomes the product I’m selling. And fresh herring of course, now, as you saw yesterday at Clovelly.

At the mention of herring and Clovelly, that was the point at which I thought I’d have to include that fish in this book. A sudden decision, though a sensible one it turned out, which then took me in the opposite direction that I had planned, and one from which I’d just come from a couple of hours earlier.

2

SWEET CLOVELLY HERRING

It’s the second stop-off and already we’re off course, heading in the wrong direction for Scotland; but, as I’ve said, it was a sudden decision. So instead of ‘it’s onward on our way up north’, it’s ‘no, we’re off down ’ere’! However, it would be a travesty if we didn’t stop off at the previously mentioned cliff-hanging village of Clovelly, some 13 miles towards Cornwall, before heading north. It is a privately owned village that has only had three owners since the middle of the thirteenth century, nearly 800 years ago.

I’ve a strong affinity to Clovelly, and have had for its fishing for over the twelve years that they’ve been running the Clovelly Herring Festival, seeing as how I always take the Amazing Travelling Kipperhouse (an exhibition about commercial fishing) to this annual November festivity. It’s a funny sort of place, with one steep street without any vehicles other than sledges pulled by donkeys when the tourists are about (when they aren’t it’s the locals that pull them). You’d almost think you’d fallen upon a film set, it’s so quaint, though of course it has been used as such. But real people doing real jobs reside in the houses that almost trickle down the street, with their bright flowers decorating the colourful tubs outside, or around their postage-stamp gardens if they are lucky enough to have one. They say that flowers grow here ‘super-abundantly’ because of the unusual climate, although one blast of the north-east blizzard can kill all plants in its path. The same north-east wind has put paid to fishermen in the past too.

The herring festival is almost the last remaining of these annual celebrations around Britain’s coasts, where once they were abundant. Here it’s a relatively new event in the village calendar. Why? Because Clovelly has been famed for its herring for a very long time. If you look back through the annals of Clovelly history, you will find that activity around the harbour was the lifeline of this small community. The harbour, dating from the fourteenth century, was a melting pot of tradition: local fishermen from the cluster of houses lining it, coastal sailors trading from across the waters, bringing in coal for the cottages and limestone for the kiln, taking herring back over to Wales, and the odd deep-sea ship loaded with luxuries from afar, even tourists arriving from the paddle steamers from up the channel, coming for a taste of Clovelly. In summer the so-called ‘long-boomers’ came from Bideford, sailing trawlers that worked the offshore seas. Much of the herring was salted into barrels and sent away, keeping a cooper busy in the village making barrels. Some folk say that Clovelly herring should never be gutted fresh but left a day or two to mature their taste!

Today the tourists come by car and park atop the visitor centre, pay the entrance fee and marvel at the locals in the glass-fronted exhibition cases, for which they pay rent. Today many commute to work but in the past, work was local and often meant going to sea. Fishing throughout the year was the most profitable activity for the village: lobster and crab pots in summer, and still a bit of trawling for white fish such as cod and soles, maybe a bit of tripping too. But it was the herring that Clovelly was once famous for and which went as far as London by train from Bideford, and which many of the village’s inhabitants once made a good portion of their income from. Once, so they say locally, there were as many as 100 boats going out in search of the fish and, in 1814, it is said that more than 3.6 million herring were landed by the fishermen, which was an incredible amount. In 1880, one boat alone was said to have returned to harbour with forty mease of herring, which equates to almost 25,000 fish. Locals, they say, could normally buy five fish for a penny, though at times of such huge catches the price would have dropped to more like a dozen a penny. Now, they are about 50 pence each!

I remember the first time I went fishing there. I’d just won the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme’s ‘Campaigner of the Year’ in their Food and Farming annual awards and was recording with Sheila Dillon, the programme’s presenter. Thus, I was out with local fisherman Stephen Perham, Sheila and producer Margaret Collins, shooting and hauling drift-nets not 100yd from the end of the quay.

Stephen has been herring fishing since before his early teens, out with his father who followed in the footsteps of his own father, Stephen’s grandfather, and his before that. He recalls how his mum would wake him up in the early dawn, the sea outside his bedroom window, as he was expected down on the beach to help shake the herring out of the nets. He’s a fifth-generation herring fisherman, his family coming to the village in the 1830s, a time when almost every man in the village went herring fishing.

However, he had to wait to fish on his own. With overfishing of herring a serious environmental disaster waiting to happen around the British coast, all herring fishing was banned under the Common Fisheries Policy of the then Common Market, until 1977, by which time Stephen’s dad had died. Stephen was on his own then, in a small open boat with a few drift-nets cast over the side, working within sight of his home affronting the Clovelly harbour beach each autumn. Just him and his brother Tom still fishing in the time-honoured way. As I’ve said before, this book is about those who fish inshore waters close to home. For the sake of clarity, I call these ‘sheltered waters’, which can mean rivers, estuaries or simply close to the shore.

You could say that Stephen’s a bit of a jack of all trades. You have to be these days to keep alive. He’s harbourmaster, boatman, lobster potter, ex-lifeboat coxswain, harbour repair worker, tripping boat operator, unofficial bodyguard (to whom I’m not sure), rubbish putta-outa, shopkeeper (shop?) and herring fisherman, all of which ensures he’s a busy soul. He herring fishes from the small 20ft picarooner, the Little Lily, a relatively new boat built upon the design of boat unique to Clovelly, and which was the replacement in the 1880s for the larger and more clumsy older herring boats. Because these picarooners were smaller and easier to get to sea on the rising tide, the older fishermen regarded them as cheating, or ‘robbing’, the word meaning ‘sea robber’ in Spanish, perhaps coined in the days when smuggling was almost as profitable as fishing. Although rigged with two lug sails and oars, Stephen is usually to be seen sculling the boat, standing with one oar over the transom. Thus, you can say he fishes in a totally ‘green’, zero-carbon way. Basically, he sculls upstream of the harbour to an area where the herring are known to spawn, shoots his drift-nets and drifts down with the current, past the harbour entrance, before hauling in his nets and returning home. Hopefully with nets full of fish, which are then shaken out once the boat is back on the beach.

Picarooners on the beach, loaded with herring, nets being shaken.

Add the recent addition of a small child to Stephen’s lot, and his life is hectic but that doesn’t stop him fishing. So I can simply say we’d caught up once again at the thirteenth annual Clovelly Herring Festival in November 2019, the day before talking salmon with Felicity. I wanted to start the book with salmon, which is why I’m backtracking.

My daughter Ana and I joined him on that Sunday morning. Light was just beginning to creep into the eastern sky, above the cliffs. With Clovelly facing north, the sun only spends an hour or so each morning spreading joyous rays on the harbour between about October and April, and only when there’s no cloud. After two days of wind, the sea was once again flat calm and the dawn gave a bit of a chill. Stephen rowed the picarooner in the normal fashion out of the harbour and over to beyond the waterfall, a few hundred yards to the east of the village. Then, taking up a sculling oar over the stern, he proceeded to shoot the nets over the starboard side. Once the six nets were in the water, he sculled about to distract a seal lurking nearby. His brother Tom was out in a very small rowing boat, as was Vernon in another of a similar size, while Malcolm, in his fibreglass picarooner, was also nearby with limp sails set in the windless morning. The sun appeared over the hill and we were warmed as Stephen talked about the fishing:

The second berth always has to go down below the first berth because if you were to go above them, that’s shooting foul of somebody because the fish swim east to west, so you had to go the length of their nets and your nets to not shoot foul. I’m fishing six nets so I’d have to keep twelve nets away from them. You should never really go east of someone and shoot foul of someone as the fish are swimming down the shore.