St PETER's GATE

PETER LAPSLEY explores the Cressbrook & Litton Fly Fishing Club’s eleven miles of water on the Derbyshire Wye, which holds healthy, self-sustaining populations of brown and rainbow trout

It was a chance meeting with David Marriott that first drew my attention to the Cressbrook & Litton Fly Fishers’ Club and its eleven miles of water on the Derbyshire Wye. David, a cheerful and enthusiastic ambassador for the club, and its treasurer, told me of the success of the recent merger with the Chatsworth Monsal Dale fishery, of the remarkable way in which a steady reduction in stocking had been matched by an increase in numbers of fish caught, of the friendly atmosphere that characterises the club and, of course, of the wonderful scenery through which the river flows. It had, he said, been described by club members as ‘St Peter’s Gate’ – the gateway to heaven.

“Come and have a look”, he said. I needed no further bidding.

The Wye is a limestone river. Only 15 miles long, it rises at Axe Edge, disappears underground, and then re-emerges to flow through Buxton as little more than a stream. Thereafter, fed by a succession of springs, it grows rapidly as it tumbles over weirs, babbles across stickles and slides through a succession of pools, deep in valleys and steep-sided, tree-lined gorges, past the mills at Litton and Cressbrook, and on through Monsal Dale. The valley widens as river meanders past Ashford in-the-Water and Bakewell before joining the Lathkill and running on into the Derwent at Rowsley.

In fishery terms, the Wye is a remarkably fertile river, largely unaffected by herbicides and pesticides, with excellent weed growth and similarly excellent hatches of fly. It is famous, too, for being one of the few rivers in Britain in which rainbow trout breed, with healthy, self-sustaining populations of browns and rainbows living alongside each other.

At David’s suggestion, I stayed at the very comfortable Church Inn in Chelmorton, just a few minutes’ drive from the club’s car park at Miller’s Dale. Over dinner there on the first evening, David and I chatted with Dave Percival and Stephen Moores about the club, its fishing and the ways in which it is managed.
Dave Percival has been the Cressbrook & Litton Club’s keeper for 25 years and is justifiably proud of what he has achieved in that time – not least with the reintroduction of Mayfly to the river and with its increased productivity.

His ready smile and sharp sense of humour conceal a restlessly enquiring mind and a wealth of experience and knowledge. He is a ‘local lad’, one of seven children, born and brought up in Earl Sterndale, five miles south of Buxton. On leaving Buxton College, he became a gas fitter and then a gas technician, remaining with British Gas until 1994. Although he had fished occasionally for sea fish off Bridlington, it was his introduction to fly fishing by a friend, Brian Pedley, a police officer, that was to transform his life.

When Brian retired from the police service, he went to the Chatsworth Estate as a keeper. Soon afterwards, in 1983, Dave received a call to ask if he would be interested in keepering on the Cressbrook & Litton water above Chatsworth. The interview for the post focussed on his willingness to tackle the serious poaching problem facing the club. Having no idea how he would react when confronting the miscreants, Dave suggested a trial period, offering to resign at once if he found he was not up to the job.

A new sport
Heading a team of three part-time keepers, he soon found that he enjoyed the work greatly and, before long, had come to see hunting poachers almost as a sport in its own right. In the first year, he and his colleagues secured 38 convictions and halved the number of poaching incidents on the Wye – a success made possible by his close collaboration with Brian Pedley at Chatsworth and by the development of an excellent working relationship with the police in Bakewell.

The reduction of poaching has continued since then, but the problem is never likely to be eradicated completely. The nature of the poachers has changed, Dave said. No longer locals after ‘one for the pot’, most of them now come from the cities that ring the fishery - Manchester, Sheffield and Stoke-on-Trent – and many are involved in other crime. He and his colleagues have been abused, spat at and assaulted. And, while he has always enjoyed strong support from the police, the job – in which continuity is so important – is made no easier by their policy of posting their officers every two years.

Turning to the club, its fishing and its members, Dave told me that it had been founded in the 1960s by a group of people who had previously fished the local reservoirs, chiefly Ladybower. They had brought with them a liberal and pragmatic approach to river fly fishing which remains a hallmark of the club to this day. In recognition of this tradition, of the ‘North Country’ nature of the river and of the view that fishing is meant to be fun, the club has few rules and members are free to fish however they see fit, provided it is with an imitative fly.

Dave said also that he had been keen to help make the club friendly and social. It was with this in mind that he had persuaded David Marriott that the club needed a hut. Erected beside the river in the car park in Miller’s Dale, it had, he said, completely changed the ethos of the club, with members often meeting there for breakfast, exchanging flies and tall stories and agreeing fishing plans. It is scarcely surprising that there are 90 people on the club’s (roughly) six-year waiting list.

While understandably ambivalent about giving up his post as head keeper, Dave admits that he will be semi-retiring towards the end of this season, remaining available to help his successor, Stephen Moores, and to stand in for Stephen when he is away.

Stephen’s background could scarcely be more different from Dave’s and yet they complement each other perfectly. Quiet, friendly and modest, Stephen, who was keeper on the Chatsworth Estate’s water until the beginning of this season, has 31 years experience in the role. He was born in Dorset and brought up in Hampshire, where his father was a river-keeper, initially at Martyr Worthy on the Itchen and then on the Test at Longparish before eventually moving to Newton Stewart.

Stephen’s introduction to fly fishing was highly privileged, on the Martyr Worthy water. Understandably, his father refused to allow him onto the river until he had learnt to cast well in the garden of their cottage. Thereafter, he fished wherever and whenever the opportunity arose, and recalls particularly the 5lb chub he caught while dead-baiting for pike on the Welsh Wye, and the day in the late-1970s on which he caught a 25lb hen salmon to trump his father’s 23 1/2lb cock fish.

When he left school, Stephen followed in his father’s footsteps, spending a year training as a keeper with the Houghton Club on the Test, a further year at Fulling Mill on the Itchen, and then ten more years with the Houghton Club before moving to Norfolk to spend ten years on the River Wissey. He took over as keeper on the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth Estate water in 1998.

Born naturalist
Stephen is a born naturalist, interested in all forms of wildlife. As he says, fishermen have wonderful opportunities to study the wildlife around them at the waterside; if they do not appreciate it, they are missing a great deal. In his role as head keeper, he has been encouraged by the club to manage the water for the benefit of all wildlife, not just the fish. He has long been associated with the Wildlife Trusts and other local conservation groups, which are beginning to realise that the management of countryside and rivers for field sports is good for all wildlife.

A keen ornithologist, he has put up dozens of bird boxes in the woods along the river and spends part of his free time ringing birds in order to track their movements. But it is entomology that fascinates him particularly and, when I met him, he was standing in temporarily for Tim Jacklin, former Environment Agency scientific officer, now full time Conservation Officer with the Wild Trout Trust (WTT) and co-ordinator of the club’s invertebrate monitoring group. Assisted by the club’s under-keeper, Chris Dore, the group monitors aquatic invertebrates monthly at three or four sites on the river. It is a time consuming business – not least because of the prolific fly life, the number of specimens turned up by each kick-sample and the length of time it takes to go through them. Taking over from Dave as head keeper will increase Stephen’s workload even more, and the search is on for someone else willing to take on the monitoring co-ordinator’s role.

A significant point made by Stephen about the monitoring process is that there is a real need for those organising the courses to provide the necessary kit to kick-start the group. The courses themselves are excellent, but if the group then has to send off for Surber samplers and other equipment, there is a risk that much of the enthusiasm and impetus generated on the course may fade.

The following day, I met Dave and Stephen in the Miller’s Dale car park where several WTT Auction Winners were ploughing cheerfully through splendid breakfasts of bacon, eggs, sausage and tomatoes. Once they had set off along the river, Stephen took me on a guided tour of the fishery, through some of the loveliest countryside and to some of the loveliest water imaginable. Everywhere we went we found club members or day ticket fishermen, individually or in small groups of two or three. With a steady stream of small olives and yellow sallies coming off in the morning and a very respectable Mayfly hatch building up from lunch time onwards, every one of them seemed to be catching fish.

Stephen explained that the rainbows behave rather differently from the browns. Whereas browns thrive in the relatively slack water of the pools and spawn in mid-winter, often in quite shallow water, the rainbows favour faster water and spawn in April in deep, gravelly runs, which makes them quite difficult to see. The one thing both have in common, which comes as a surprise, is their willingness to hold a lie. Farmed rainbows stocked into rivers tend to roam in search of food, which can be frustrating for the fly fisher who may have spent time and effort creeping into a position to cast only to find his quarry wandering downstream past him for no obvious reason. Wye rainbows tend not to do this, but to stay put, which makes fishing for specific fish more practicable and rewarding, as I was to discover the next day, when the club had generously invited me to fish as their guest.
I began at the hut and, during the course of the day, worked my way upstream for a couple of miles. I shall not dwell on the number of fish I caught and returned, save to say that every pool and every stretch of faster water held trout seemingly determined to grab my fly. In the morning, a #14 Klinkhåmer brought a succession of fish to hand and then, in the afternoon, as the Mayfly appeared, the fish switched onto them and I changed to John Goddard’s Poly May Dun, the fishing became even more spectacular.

My final tally seems to have reflected the differences in habit between the two species. Overall, the club’s records show the river to sustain about 20 percent more browns than rainbows, but I caught only one rainbow for every four browns – probably because I concentrated my attention on the pools, rather than on the faster, streamier water. Whatever – it was as enjoyable a day’s fishing as I can recall, made the more so by the warmth and friendliness of the club’s members and keepers, by the wonderful scenery and by the wealth of the wildlife in that enchanted valley.