GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN

the etherial Ely Cathedral, floating above the Fens

Inspiring places of worship remind us of the passing of precious friends and it's not possible to forget those legendary anglers who have left so many happy memories behind them. Christmas for Sue and I is a time for family and friends, living for the now, hoping for a happy future and reflecting on the past,  so it's an approriate time to mention some of our friends who have left us for those perfect swims in the sky.

                

Every fisherman will have treasured John Wilson's TV films and books and Martin Bowler, Bernard Cribbins, Jacko and I have many happy memories of fishing with him, especially for our Ch 4 series  "Catching the Impossible".

On one memorable occasion John not only caught us a big pike to order, he caught us the biggest fish in Oulton Broad and in this happy moment all Martin could think to say was "you jammy bar-steward". But John was a brilliant fisherman and wonderful man and there wasn't all that much luck in what he achieved, just hard work ... and to lose him last November was a shock to us all.

More recently, we lost the legendary Bob Church. He was such an able angler and you'll never meet a keener fisherman, so energetic when filming with Martin and I that it made me wonder how he kept up so much enthusiasm for life. Here he is with just one of many pike he caught for us and he was a master of many skills so it was sad to see you go Bob.

I love fishing for tench, never more so than when sat sharing a lake side with Mike, and though many won't of heard of him, he was a lovely man and I was delighted to share this 9lb+ tench with him. Sadly, he too left us last year and I'll always miss his friendly banter and warm smile.

Roach fishing is my first love and I was fortunate to have shared many happy days with one of the finest roach anglers in the country, Mike Townsend. He was so keen he even eclipsed Bob Church for enthusiasm but he too suddenly left us this Spring and the angling press missed the moment to celebrate a very fine angler. I'll miss his warmest of company and sharing many a fine roach with him, including this two and a half pound plus beauty.

So lets all celebrate these finest of guys as we reflect on this moving tribute, found by that most famous angler and writer 'BB' on a churchyard gravestone ... 

"The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power,
the shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts."

Chris Yates with a splendid Stour perch of 2lb 8ozs.

I think most anglers live in the  spirit of that tribute and we are fortunate to have shared happy days with many like minded friends, admiring all the wildlife while dreaming of catching big fish. Luckily, many of them are still with us so please read on in my next blog about our worm dangling.

Martin Bowler with Bernard Cribbins and his twenty plus pike,  both still going strong and dreaming of an even bigger one

FISHING WITH FRIENDS

Not alone on the River Wye. Chris Yates was just upstream and Martin Bowler took this beaut. picture of me barbel fishing

If you happen to read this blog because you are an angler then you might think I’ve given fishing up because I haven’t written a fishy story for ages. The reason is simple, I haven’t been fishing!

I still love the idea of being out in the countryside with a rod but our big garden has taken up all our time as we create a flower filled gravel garden for butterflies and bees. We haven’t finished it yet but to see the squadrons of buzzers already feeding there is a joy.

a silver-washed fritillary on a hebe

No fishing might mean no stories but I have many happy memories of fishing with friends, so this will be a celebration of those special days when we shared our catches and time together.

                    Fishing with Friends

Fishing alone can be an intense and rewarding experience and might even lead to catching bigger fish but for maximum enjoyment you can’t beat sharing those moments of triumph and disaster when you both cheer when one of you catches a big one and cry when the big one gets away ... or maybe you laugh when your mate loses the big one!
 
Here’s a selection of some of our catches during the good old days when we had the good sense to ignore all the horrible things going on in our world and made time to breath fresh air. These pics are  just a random ramble through the archives to celebrate the joys of angling together with friends.

First up are some happy gatherings during glorious summer days of crucian fishing at an intimate Wessex lake. We almost always caught a few, even over three pounds but we were sensible enough to simply enjoy the company and take time out for more important matters, like my wife Sue's famous cake.

close friends Chris Wild, Avon Roach Project Trev and Mr Yates getting their priorities right - tea and cake!

happy days of sunshine and golden nuggets

Please read on - there's more friends and the fish grow bigger

OUR ENGLISH COUNTRY GARDEN IS BUZZING

 salvia atrocyanea with ubiquitous common carder bee - they LOVE it

Inspired by the need to help bees and butterflies and then encouraged by this years Dorset Wildlife Trust campaign to get Dorset buzzing, we set out three years ago to create a gravel garden that would enhance the attraction of our little patch of wildlife heaven. What follows is the story of our ‘work in progress’ -

    ‘CREATING A GRAVEL GARDEN FOR THE BUZZERS’

We started by visiting inspiring gardens such as Beth Chatto’s where she dug up her car park to create a stunning gravel garden, then reading books and seeking advice from our delightful Knoll Gardens near Wimborne.

as tall as our cottage, the bamboo thicket on the right is the chosen spot for our creation - lots of hard work ahead!

The site we chose picked itself, for it is the sunniest area in our wooded two acres. Trouble was, this large patch was a forest of invasive bamboo, so tall and thick that giant pandas raised young in it!

cutting the bamboo provided a lifetime of kitchen garden poles and allowed us to admire our lovely oak tree behind

If you’re wondering what the scaffold is there for, we were building ‘Hugh’s Folly’ at the time, a picture window that looks out over our frog marsh and as it faces east, allows us to bask in the sunrise of winter dawns. It’s beautiful but cost twice as much as estimated and took twice as long to build, hence the term ‘folly’!

a timber framed 'folly' maybe, but warming in a winter sunrise overlooking our frog marsh is a delight

in the summer it's a very wild garden - just as we like it

winter pollarding and pruning - and progress clearing the gravel garden area on the right

Clearing the bamboo jungle was the first priority and after a couple of years of sawing and digging bamboo and snowberry roots, along with a jungle of bramble and ivy, we had the beginnings of a workable site. 

bottom left is our chosen spot, sunny in the summer but we'd hardly started even clearing it

But other priorities got in the way and all the roots started a riot of growth once again and removing them was getting ever more difficult.

blink and the jungle returns - bamboo and snowberry growth is relentless

There was also the smelly matter of an old toilet soak-away buried under all this growth, left over from the days when there was a privy outside our ancient cottage. 

a glass plate pic of our old cottage built on sunny heathland before the top story was added in 1910

The three thatched cob dwellings are shown on maps dating 1747, set in a heathland habitat and when we first moved here thirty eight years ago, the area behind the house was still heathland and had a population of stonechats and linnets. The extraordinary speed of the oak and birch growth behind the cottage since living here still surpises us every week.

the cottage has changed a bit over the years but look at the growth of the oaks and birch behind the cottage - awesome

After many weeks we had cleared the site but still had the problem of deeply buried tree and bamboo roots and had to remove them without damaging the roots of our majestic oak tree.

what a beautiful tree - 100+ years old and growing fast - the gravel garden will be on the left

the fibreglass skin I'd added to the wood survived under the compost heap

Buried underneath the jungle of roots was a compost heap for grass snakes and slow-worms, covered by my old boat that in my early twenties enabled me to row around the Norfolk Broads, looking for birds and fish.

making a start between the stream and main pond

Then we had to remove the soak-away and tree roots and it seemed the only way to achieve this was with a mini digger. Enter fiddle player Steve Brown who plays in Irish bands at ceilis but by his own admission is even more skilled and artistic with the blade of a digger.

it's a big area and needs all the roots and ivy stripping off - a digger made it possible

Steve making excellent progress

piles to fill many barrow loads - good excersise

dismantling the woodland privy soak-away and filling the hole with roots and soil

roots all dug out and cleared and almost ready for covering - didn't he do well!

several layers of tarram left for two growing seasons would kill any growth below - we hoped!

In just a few hours he had everything dug up and the site levelled, so all I had to do was barrow the mountains of bamboo root away and we were ready for the next stage.

 a lovely tidy job created by Steve and now we could make a start creating our dream garden for buzzers

after nearly two years it's almost ready for removal, then the hard work of tons of soil, gravel and planting can commence

The advice was to cover the area with an impervious membrane for two growing seasons in order to kill anything still hidden below, so after laying five layers we waited patiently until dragging it off a couple of months ago. It was so encouraging to see that it worked and hardly anything had survived the dry darkness we’d created.

we were advised by Knoll Gardens to create raised areas of soil and gravel so the plants were free draining

Because the area lies between a stream and a large pond, friend David and I laid 23 tons of soil in hills to ensure the plant’s roots were above any damp soil. Then came the expensive purchase of bank-balance breaking numbers of plants loved by bees and buzzers. Planting could now commence.

barrows of delight for bees and butterflies

We purchased seemingly endless numbers of lavender, hebe, salvia, aster, nepeta, echinacea, rudbeckia, lobelia, gaura and several others, [blimey, I sound like an expert] and it was so exciting to see all the wildlife buzzing in to take advantage, sometimes flying onto the plants before I’d even put them down, let alone planted them.

paths through the area will become less formal as the plants grow

 we mulched the new plants with 2" of 10mm gravel to keep them moist but weed free - dream on!

aster nectar for hoverflies that arrived within minutes and we have a years planting still to go - exciting times

The bees have come in squadrons and we’ve hardly started, so once I’ve secured another mortgage from the bank so we can afford to buy the spring and summer delights, by next autumn the area should be pure joy. Then comes the fun of learning to identify all the insects that we’ve attracted to this lovely little corner of sunny Dorset.

silver-washed fritillaries love hebes

The Dorset Wildlife Trust’s campaign to encourage members to plant for invertebrates ‘Get Dorset Buzzing’ has been an impressive success. They hoped to win support from about 1,000 and have now attracted upwards of 4,000 so well done to them all because it’s great for bees and for all those other pollinators that are so essential for our own long-term survival.

In the meantime, we’ll just keep digging for England. Flowers, colour, bees and butterflies in our gardens. What’s there not to like!

SCOTTISH WILDCAT CRISIS

wild by name, wild by nature, all teeth, claws, muscle and attitude to match

Blood dripped profusely from my hand as I walked up the steps of the hospital, a red trail leading to reception and forming a pool on the floor. The nurse asked what I’d done, the answer not what she expected, her expression incredulous. I’d been bitten by a Scottish wildcat.

one of Scotland's ultimate gems

Several stitches later I left Grantown on Spey hospital, bandaged but able to continue my work, making a film on ‘The Great Wood of Caledon’ and it's wildlife for ITV. I felt it essential that one of my key characters had to be this rarest of animals.

the Caledonian pine forests of the Spey Valley in the Highlands, a last stronghold for the Scottish wildcats

doing what they do best, trying to be invisible in the forest

On a recent BBC news item, several authorities stated that the native Scottish Wildcat is one of the most endangered species in the world and with only about 35 survivors left, even rarer than the giant panda. Hybridization with feral cats has brought it close to extinction and one biologist even declared it to be functionally extinct in the wild. Being almost impossible to see in the wild, I'll always wonder how they calculated that total of 35, for over many years I've only been lucky enough to catch a few glimpses in the dense forest.

such beautiful creatures and deserving of all the help we can provide so they survive for years to come

The situation wasn’t as critical in the early nineties when I was attempting to tell their story but I needed a pair of true wildcats in the hope of captive breeding so their lifecycle could be intimately filmed.

this is the area of forest that we felt would make a perfect home for our cats

With the considerable help of friends such as my colleague Michael Richards  and not least Jo and Molly Porter, we built a huge escape proof enclosure in a dense area of remote forest. 

fallen scots pines and larch would provide the cats with cover

upturned tree roots are always favourite places for sunbathing cats

enclosure building in all weathers ... and there's always plenty of weather in Scotland

many hands make light work - thank you guys and gals

Scots pines and fallen larch with dense ground cover and rocky caves seemed a perfect habitat for our cats, and once netted up the sides and over the roof, we felt they would be secure and happy with their new home.

if the film failed we could at least get a job as scaffolders with SGB 

It was an impressive structure and on reflection seemed like madness but my ambition knew no bounds. I still can't believe how we managed to wire a roof over the top of all the big trees. Madness indeed!

We even managed to get the scaffold lorry stuck in the mud and had to hike a long way to find a friendly farmer.

Once the enclosure was complete we were loaned a true native female from the Edinburgh Zoological Society and she soon settled in with what seemed happy approval of her new home. 

she loved the wind blown trees as a look out for prey and we hoped kittens might one day appear from the cave

We needed a male to join her and I put the word out with several friendly keepers. In those bad old days wildcats were persecuted but one kind keeper trapped a magnificent male and took it to the Highland Wildlife Park for safe keeping until we were ready to re-house it.

We approached his temporary enclosure and there hiding on a shelf was the most magnificent cat, twenty pounds of extremely angry feline, ears flat with fear, growling with such menace that his scowl could kill. I've been snarled at a few times by tigers in India but this was in a fiercer league. All we had to do was capture him, put him in a box and take him to his new home. Simple!

Armed with thick leather gauntlets, the head keeper was going to grab him by the tale while I held his fang armed head with a noose on a pole. I was worried I would strangle him so didn’t hold the noose tight enough and suddenly he escaped my grip and I was confronted by this fierce and angry cat that was all claws and teeth and even though he was held by the tail he flew at me like a whirling dervish. It was really quite frightening as twenty pounds of truly wild cat tried to claw my face as he growled and spat while attempting to kill me.

Watching outside, my wife and daughter screamed in fear and though it all happened in a blur, it seemed the only way to quell the attack was to grab him by the sharp end and so plunged my hand into his mouth. He bit me so hard through the thick leather gauntlets that the blood blisters and wounds from his canines took weeks to heal. His strength was most impressive as we forced him into the box, the adrenalin rush replaced by relief. What a battle.

the male was never relaxed in my presence, threatening me if I ventured too close, if I could find him

Within an hour we had released this magnificent male in the enclosure and so dense was the cover and his ability to hide I didn’t see him for weeks. I sat silently in hides for days with no success but when I crept round looking, he would suddenly leap out in front of me and growl explosively while stamping his foot in anger. His spitting fire always made me step sharply back in shock.

those flattened ears prove our male was never at ease, even after several weeks. He sure was a wild cat.

Our female was much more benign and I captured some lovely film of her simply being a wild pussy cat in the forest. It was a memorable privilege.

compared with our male, our lady was completely at ease in our huge enclosure

what a delightful pussy cat

grooming was a daily ritual

I was lucky enough to film her stalking prey

 On one day the mouse was actually dead and pulled by a string to get her to pounce - ‘cheating’ I know but it looked very convincing and she seemed to 'enjoy' the game.

wound up to strike

Unfortunately the story has a sad ending because in spite of the notice attached to the enclosure explaining the reason for the captive breeding attempt, some supposed ‘do-gooder’ broke open the gate and released the cats. No doubt soon after some keeper probably shot them for we never saw them again.

I pray that these ancient forests will provide a safe home for one of the world's rarest animals long into the future

Captive breeding of true native Scottish wildcats is now being carried out successfully by various conservationists and we can only hope that this magnificent creature survives to inspire us all for many years to come. I feel quite honoured to have been a bloody victim of their fierce will to live.