John Bailey: The wonder of summer weirs

And so it was that by the age of 10, a love for the Thames was born, a passion only heightened by the discovery of wondrous writings by Richard Jefferies and Patrick Chalmers who both painted a picture of Arcadia I realised I could never find in reality.

But, know what, I pretty much did, last week when visiting Mapledurham weir for a few days of fabulous fishing. Chalmers wrote about walking to Mapledurham a century ago along a towpath of “buttercups and daisies, blue dragonflies, baby swans and you will come to the weir and the mill among the meadows and climbing greenwoods". True, I arrived in my car, but even in 2022 I saw what Chalmers had seen, largely unchanged and still achingly beautiful.

Mapledurham mill (Image: John Bailey)

My first human encounter was with Kieran, who had stepped out of a Kenneth Grahame idyll. He lives on a houseboat above the weir cill, in sight of the ancient mill. Inside, the floors are waxed oak, the kettle sang on a hob and he showed me the floats he makes from quills, reed and even the dried and hardened stalks of cow parsley. His rods were stacked against the boat’s timbers and were all renovated cane, along with a net that would have been old when the Three Men bobbed past. After tea and biscuits, this generous soul walked me round the pools pointing out hotspots for perch, the fish I had come many miles to see. An early summer Thames perch caught when they are waxing fat on the shoals of minnow and bleak was my aim and Kieran gave me a float for the job, pretty enough to watch all day, oblivious to whether it went under or not.

Jim and a big perch (Image: John Bailey)

My mentor in the quest was to be Martin Salter, not long ago Member of Parliament for Reading, the town that now looms close to the jewel that is Mapledurham. As agreed, he arrived bright and early the next morning with crewman Jim and we sailed out onto the weir full of hope. Good old Ratty indeed. Nothing beats messing about on rivers and though I fished with the patience and perseverance of Mr Toad, perch were caught.

Beautiful, bristling, boldly barred creatures they were that I was more than happy to net for my more talented companions. After all, I hadn’t come to catch as much as live the childhood dream and that I did to the very full. We were visited by Stuart and Peter from the Environment Agency and they were just brilliant too: I might get shirty about the Agency, but that does not mean that those who work for it aren’t gentlemen who are grand to fish with. Stuart has a lust for silver bream and together we went off to an SB hotspot and caught them to half a pound. What joy. My first silvers since Gunton Hall in 1961 I see today from my diary of that year. Honestly, there wasn’t a cloud on the Mapledurham horizon and I drove home a happy man, only dimly aware of the drab outskirts of Reading creeping ever closer to this oasis of Chalmers-like loveliness.

I also note in that Letts diary of 1961 an ecstatic entry made later in the August. I’d been dropped at Bintry Mill, just downstream of Fakenham, for a day on the Wensum there. The writing is in pencil and faded but it is evident I saw dragonflies, water voles, minnows, gudgeon and that a man came with lemonade when the day got very hot. A gardener showed me a deep hole under a rustic bridge and there I caught a fine four-ounce perch of my own, so things don’t change very much over some 60 years it might seem.

Mapledurham weir (Image: John Bailey)

Or do they? Chalmers and Jefferies were both writing about a Thames on the brink of perceived disaster decades ago, but it still keeps rolling along and I’ll bet there are still quarter-pound perch up at Bintry even now. However, I didn’t mention that Martin now works for the Angling Trust where he campaigns for river purity, amongst other causes. I divined that his attitude is that the Thames and Wensum could be a blooming sight healthier but that they could actually be worse. Perhaps that is the nub of it. We have always feared losing what we love and we have always ached for a paradise lost. All we can do in the end is enjoy what we have and work damned hard to preserve every last perch in every way we can.