Home page About us Instruction Guiding Locations map Gift vouchers Prices Articles Contact us Accommodation Links	The Devonshire River Avon as described by A.G. Bradley in 1914 The word 'avon' is a pre-Roman ancient British word meaning 'river'. There are four River Avons in England. The Devonshire River Avon rises in the mires of south Dartmoor. Close to where the river leaves Dartmoor a dam was built in 1957 to form the Avon reservoir. On its 23 mile journey to the sea the river passes by the villages of South Brent, Avonwick, Diptford, Loddiswell and Aveton Gifford before reaching the estuary mouth at Bantham and Bigbury on Sea. In 1914 A.G. Bradley described the fishing on the Avon in his book "Clear Waters: Trouting Days and Trouting Ways in Wales, the West Country, and the Scottish Borderland" This page contains extracts from the book and a map of water owned or rented by the Avon Fishing Association (AFA). Bradley indicates that he fished on AFA water.  The complete text of "Clear Waters" is available  online.  Season and Visitor Tickets are issued by the Avon Fishing Association at £56 weekly, £71 fortnightly, £87 monthly (2007 prices). Please email pkenyon@pkenyon.entadsl.com for ticket outlets and membership application.
CHAPTER 7 "THE DEVONSHIRE AVON" SOME of the best rivers in Devonshire have been greatly damaged of recent years by the increase of salmon, which is a vast pity. For trout give more continuous sport to a great many more  people, and if they do not furnish the fevered quarter and half hours provided by the king of fishes, there is more varied interest as well as more science in the pursuit of them. ... .... I would give preference, as a trout stream pure and simple, to a river scarcely known by name outside the county. Something of its obscurity is possibly due                           River Avon at Humpy Bridge, Avonwick to the very fact of its name, which, for reasons obvious to the most elementary etymologist, is shared by so many notable rivers in the three kingdoms. I have never yet met any outsider who was even aware that there was an Avon in Devonshire. But there is and a very bewitching Avon too, the very antithesis of                       those placid, silent, and rather turgid haunts of pike and roach that fame has chiefly illumined. Of the rivers that flow out of Dartmoor the Tavy may boast of her peal, the Dart of her scenic pre-eminence and her fair share of sea-going fish, but the Avon in her lower half may fairly, I think, take precedence of either   for the quality of her trout ; and that is what chiefly concerns us in these pages. My own angling experi- ences of the Dart are of such ancient date as to be worth nothing in the matter of comparison. But an old local friend who has fished both rivers almost                            River Avon at Gara Bridge from his cradle has showed me his fishing journals extending over many years by way of rubbing in the  contrast which, in these pages, at any rate, is con- spicuous. The Dart in its upper reaches has long miles of moorland waters which provide entertainment for many visitors in the way of small fish, as fish are judged even by the Devonshire standard, which is another business. But in its wider and lower reaches below Holne, in my friend's records, which have much significance, it does not come near the Avon. Nor are the Earne and the Teign, which also run south out of Dartmoor, nor yet again the Okement, which runs north, quite in the same class. But then the Avon is very short, the portion of it,                         that is to say, to which these eulogies are applicable. It rises, to be sure, far within the moor behind South Brent , and in its pilgrimage out of the wild has a                                     River Avon at Topsham Bridge right tempestuous journey, deep channelled in woody gorges, and leaping betimes in high white cataracts that cannot even be seen without effort for the tangled foliage that meets above them. Running pictur- esquely down past the rectory and church of Brent, diving under stone bridges, and skirting the village, the little river tumbles through open meadows for a mile, and for yet another frets again in a contracted and bosky trough. Then all at once, within the space of half a mile, it becomes to my thinking one of the best bits of water in Devonshire. On the moor the Avon is prolific of fingerlings, and practically nothing else. In the tangled hollows below the fish are a little better, but hardly worth the arduous struggles                         River Avon at Venn Weir necessary to their ensnaring. In the meadows below Brent, the sportsmen of the latter being free of this much of the water, flog it pretty hard, while through the gorge below, the force of the current at least we always thought so was against it as a holt for fish. It is at Avonwick, just below this, that the river comes into its own as a trouting stream, and thence it is but a dozen or so miles to the little estuary where it joins the sea beyond Loddiswell. Nearly all of its wayward, sparkling journey thither lies through as snug a valley as there is in Devon. There are many valleys in the county more beautiful, to be sure, but this one is absolutely and completely typical. Even the single track railroad which follows it to Kings- bridge has done little aesthetic damage. When I first knew the valley in my college days, and indeed for long afterwards, there was nothing of this. If bound for the Kingsbridge country you joined the coach or your friend's trap at Kingsbridge Road station, now re- christened Ugborough, after the tor at whose foot it lies. I have since fished the Avon in early spring when all England is, I think, pretty safe from debilitating in- fluences. But I would not give one day of May or June, when the water is low, for three in spring when it is usually in what is known as good condition when the streams, that is to say, are heavy to beat up against continually, and the fish rise briskly perhaps for a couple of hours, and then go down for good, and the surface of the water becomes, as they say in Scotland, dour. Moreover, in spring the good fish, of which there are or were a great many in the Avon, half to three-quarter- pounders, have not come out into the shallows nor taken seriously to surface food, as they do later. I think the river in this particular is rather different from most Devonian streams, though exactly like so many of them in physical characteristics. Urging its bright, impetuous streams through most of its seaward pilgrimage beneath a rarely interrupted canopy of foliage, this obscurest of all English Avons purls upon gravelly beds or lingers in deep rocky pools, overshadowed by fern-tufted crags and the spreading foliage of wild woods that clothe the hill-sides and hold the river in their sylvan grip. There are green meadowy strips too, plenty of them, on one bank or the other, sometimes on both. But even then thick foliage often bristles along both banks and holds the would-be bank angler at arm's length. Old stone bridges, too, festooned with trailing ivy, give here and there a more perfect finish to some vista of water that dances through flickering bands of sun and shadow beneath the swaying boughs. All, or nearly all, this water is in the hands of an association whose moderately apprised tickets make                                any one free of this Avon fishery who feels equal to grappling with it, an effort well worth the while. But it is no use poking about dry-shod on the bank here if you mean business, though there are brief inter- ludes where you might take your ease in this rather unprofitable fashion. You must get right down into the water and stay there, and push your way between and often beneath the trees, and face a current that is generally strong and rocks that are always glacial. The Avon is no brook, nor again is it a broad river, but of precisely the right dimensions in my opinion for a first-rate trouting stream. I prefer it, as I have said, in May and through half of June, and do not mind dry weather, sunshine, and thinner water in the least. Nor, I am sure, do the Avon trout. They are then, in my experience, almost always ready to rise, and the good ones too, if you can circumvent them. Looking down from the high bank at such periods when the voice of the stream is fluting in its highest key, and the stickles are running low, and the top waves of the pools have subsided into mere tremulous eddies, it looks, I admit, pretty hopeless. You can see the fish travelling affrighted up the gravelly runs into the deeper waters, among them that old pounder marked down of yore, followed by a score of halves, thirds, and quarters. You will not, however, be on the bank when you are fishing, but down in the water creeping warily up beside its alder fringes, and getting here and there some fine vantage-points behind an out-thrusting bush. No scurry of fish will be thus provoked, thin and clear though the stream be, if you are careful. A short line is not usually much good. This is a convention much too freely associated in print with up-stream fishing and a short rod. Well enough in high water or in early spring ; but a longish line must be thrown somehow between or under the trees, and it comes easy enough with habit and practice. ' Fine and far off ' is just as true of this woodland fishing as of a chalk stream, but with a great difference, for in the latter you have probably a twenty-acre water meadow behind you, and you must present the dry fly in becoming attitude, properly cocked, and all the rest of it. It does not so much matter how you present the wet fly. You have got to get it there through diffi- culties, above and around. And you must also know where to make the effort, and when it is worth while to run risks, commensurate with your skill, of hanging up your flies. These things are outside description, nor can the ' smittle ' spots upon a river's surface be chronicled, for experience alone, which becomes a second instinct, can read such lessons. Ingenuous fools have written of wet-fly fishing as an operation conducted on ' chuck-and-chance-it ' principles. Pos- sibly they refer to fishing a lake from a boat. Let us hope so ! Nor is the phrase wholly amiss as applied to ' salmon-fishing ' for trout down a big river. But in connection with up-stream fishing, and above all, in such a river as this is, it is a deplorable exposure of innocence. Let the man who can throw a decent fly, and has nevertheless such callow conceptions of wet-fly fishing, try his hand against some habitual exponent of it ! How shifting, too, according to weather and conditions, are the sort of places where the trout are feeding. It may sometimes take an hour or so to discover that some strange whim, as it would incorrectly seem to us in our ignorance, has seized upon the whole river, and that every fish is, as it were, out of place !   I used to fancy Woodleigh wood, or 't/dleigh 'wde                     (with the Devon u of course), as the old natives had it, as much as any stretch in this delightful river. It clothes the high hill-sides with a fine tangle of varied foliage and spreads its protecting fringes over the pools and stickles for a long mile or so above Loddiswell. But down in the river, if you do not mind timber, there is here a prolonged treat of good things as you push up the current beneath the overhanging boughs of oak and hazel, of alder and mountain ash. Barbed wire, to be sure, has added new terrors for the fisher- man as it has for the fox-hunter. Once upon a time you could drag yourself up the densely fringed steep bank of the Avon when you felt in the mood for a rest or were confronted with deep water. You could cram your rod, basket, and landing-net somehow through the thick frieze of tree roots, saplings, and briars, and achieve the upper air and a grassy resting-place. The last time, however, I battled with these rough rocks and swift currents, the swifter on that occasion for April rains, all old avenues of escape were destroyed, the natural chevaux de /rise being everywhere en- twined with barbed wire ; and when all further progress up the river was barred by some deep pool, you were virtually imprisoned in a cul-de-sac. There was nothing for it but to wade wearily down again over the waters you had just fished, and clamber out into the upper air at the point from which you de- scended into it. This waste of time and energy is particularly annoy- ing in spring fishing, if the trout happen to be on the rise. For, unless the season be very forward, a great objection to spring trouting in my opinion in this class of river is that the rise, though sometimes furious and uncritical, is usually limited to an hour or two, leaving those before and afterwards a rather weary blank of futile casting upon dour waters. Every fisherman, of course, knows this, and furthermore that you can never be certain when that brief but blithesome interlude will take place, to say nothing of the possi- bility of its never turning up at all, though this last, of course, is all in the angler's business. It is tolerably certain that it will occur between eleven and four, and in rivers like the Avon one is constantly haunted by the fear that the fish will come on in awkward or in- different bits of water, sandwiched between the pet places you have already fished in vain, and those again higher up where you fain would be. It is not safe when the moment seems to have arrived either to push on or to drop back, for you might possibly find another rod in possession. Moreover, it is not easy to drag oneself from any water when fish come suddenly on the rise and face a journey through tangled woods or over untrimmed Devon fences, in waders and brogues, when you know all the time that the trout are splash- ing merrily at the March browns or blue duns. It is better to stick to it and receive this gift of the gods wherever it finds you on the stream. So it comes to pass that very often two anglers of equal capacity will turn out very different baskets on an April evening. Queer things, however, happen in every month. Not very long ago, after nearly a week of battling with the rather full April streams of the Avon in most inclement weather and with very poor luck, my last day had arrived. It was far the worst to all outward seeming, even of this bad week. As I descended to the river be- low Loddiswell station, a biting north-easter cut rasp- ingly down even that sheltered valley. To make the situation from an angling standpoint more supremely ridiculous, a violent thunderstorm without rain broke upon the scene while in mournful mood I was putting up my rod. Fork-lightning played in the leaden sky above the bare hill-top where the village of Loddiswell shivered in the icy blast, and repeated crashes of thunder rolled down the valley towards Kingsbridge and the sea. This, in truth, seemed a gratuitous piling up of the agony on an unfortunate angler, with no alter- native for hours but the waiting-room of a diminutive station. If the humblest inn or fireside had been accessible I should have lost a quite enjoyable day's fishing to an absolute certainty. As it was, I descended into the icy waters where they come out into the meadows from Woodleigh wood,                           and at the very first cast to my amazement was into a good fish. I took three out of that pool in quick succession while the thunder was still rumbling, and the lightning playing, and the north-east wind lashing the bursting willows on the bank, and threatening snowflakes every moment. They were the better class of Avon fish, and weighed a pound between them. I went on picking up fish all the morning, for in the heart of the woods the cold wind seemed to sink to rest, and a rise of blue dun set the trout astir in flagrant violation of every rule which is supposed to guide them. But better, to my thinking, than zephyrs and April showers are those days in the thinner waters of later May and early June when fish may be picked up on and off all day, and on the whole better ones too, if harder to catch. The playing of a strong June fish, too, in these leafy avenues, amid rocks, boughs, and rapid currents, is a different business from the same encounter in an open stream. There are about twenty more things to think about, and no time to think of them, as the fish dashes and jumps from one danger spot to another, and the point of the rod has to be dipped like lightning under trailing boughs, and the line shortened as quickly by a grab at it below the bottom ring. Instructions to a young angler how to play a fish would be mighty little good here ! There is no time to reel in during these fast and furious early stages as the trout runs down towards you or darts like lightning for a submerged bush. And with a longish line out these critical moments are inevitable, while as for holding the point of your rod up, you have got to hold it at just such an angle as the all-embracing foliage for the moment admits of. A half-pound fish will give you no end of a time in such situations for about thirty seconds. After that another minute, perhaps, may see him in the net. Though if perchance you are a fixture, as often happens where the depth of an uneven slippery bottom varies from one to three or more feet, you may have had to let him run down stream a long way, and be forced to reel him on fine gut, by slow stages up a rapid current, which is a slow and ticklish business. A three-quarter-pounder, which is always possible in the Avon, will give you anywhere in its waters, and above all in these very prevalent awkward places, some really stirring moments. You should not be wholly ungrateful if you get him safely in at all, and the encounter, if successful, will possibly occupy five minutes, which will seem like a quarter of an hour. I am talking, of course, of real honest half- and three- quarter-pounders, not those lesser fry which anglers, particularly those accustomed to waters where trout run large sometimes, airily allude to as such. A half- pounder in the Kennet or the Test is by comparison a poor, immature weakling, who in his own waters, unvexed by trailing boughs and rocks, and torrents and sunken bushes, may be handled with something like contempt. But in the western streams he is a well-developed lusty veteran, the tyrant and the bully of the few square yards of water over which he rules. As I have already intimated, in the Devonshire Avon the herring-sized fish, going about three to the pound, are far more numerous than in most Devonshire streams. This evidence of good feeding for the look of the river hardly suggests this standard used to be attributed, whether truly or not, to the presence of the fresh- water shrimp. It is needless to say that the tail fly in up-stream, clear-water fishing kills two or three fish for one taken on the dropper, or droppers if a couple are used not altogether advisable, I think. It alone reaches many of the far-away fish, and gets into brushy nooks, par- ticularly where the water is shallow, and a slight but significant enough wave is the glad sign of a fastening fish. The trout at this season and in such places, if they come at all, nearly always mean business, and are generally of the better type. Where a screen of alder brush dips into a gravelly run, with little recesses here and there, into which, standing well below, you can curl your tail fly sideways, are perhaps the spots which on these bright early summer days upon the Avon come back to me as the most prolific of all upon the varied surface of this beautiful stream. And as tail fly upon the Avon at this season there is nothing like, certainly nothing better than, a good old-fashioned Devonshire red palmer not a coch-y-bonddu, but a rather full red hackle with a plain body, and with for choice a few turns of gold twist round it. Four varieties of the red palmer, as used by the oldest and best fisherman I knew upon the Avon, have occupied a pocket of my fly-book for the last twenty years, on ' in memoriam ' account alone. His generation never dreamed of fishing without one. It is certainly a wonderful fly there in early summer, the fish taking it under water as freely as on the surface. The decline in the number of fish, probably in a majority of rapid rivers, is, I think, an accepted fact, and is certainly a perennial source of discussion among anglers, and that, too, in rivers where neither poach- ing nor over-fishing can have had anything to do with the trouble ; for in such cases there is nothing to discuss or theorise about. The Avon is a case in point. I am pretty sure there are as many fish as there were twenty years ago, and in fact there are quite enough for any reasonable person. It was, roughly speaking, in the twenty to thirty years before that period that the change was effected by some mysterious agency, here, as in other streams known to me in many parts of the west and north. In a long spring and summer for other brief visits are not worth considering I spent upon the Avon, I never killed more than five- and-twenty sizeable fish in a day. And I am quite certain that much larger baskets were not then made by any one, nor indeed would an occasional exception alter the case. But in the sixties thrice that number were frequently taken. There was some correspond- ence in the Field many years ago as to the baskets made here in these brave old days by local worthies, country parsons and suchlike how they filled their creels and then their pockets, till even these last over- flowed, obviously not from any mysterious super- excellence, for many an expert, more efficiently armed and with finer tackle, has fished the river since these days. I have good reason, however, for knowing that these tales are absolutely true. The contrast between the then and now, or rather between the then and twenty years ago, must be looked for in this case as in many others to some natural cause. Nothing con- cerned with fishing, legal or illegal, has brought it about ; that, at any rate, is pretty certain. The theory of improved drainage which carries off flood water and its store of feed in a day instead of several days seems to me the most worthy of consideration ; a theory which may be applied to scores of rivers like the Avon with plausibility, for there really is no other. The Barle of my boyish Exmoor days, for instance, is another case in point. There is nothing like the stock there was then. The casual, unobservant person goes on repeating in all these cases that there are more fishermen than of old. This sounds reasonable, but it is not always true, and even were it so, amounts to nothing when the fecundity of trout and the frac- tional toll taken with a rod and easily estimated in protected rivers, is totted up. A curious coincidence occurred during the last visit I paid to the Avon, and if the hero concerned catches sight of these lines, I hope he will forgive me. Now on the Welsh border there was, and possibly still is, a certain cleric who enjoyed a tremendous and justly earned reputation as an angler. Though a native, his cure of souls happened to lie in a county in which, from my knowledge of it, I should say there is not a trout but such as have been recently introduced into reservoirs and the like. But his operations were still, and naturally enough, carried on upon his native streams. I know some of these last pretty well myself, and also many of the local fishermen who are justly accounted great men upon them, and with one voice they used to declare that there was no approaching this terrific parson in the matter of a basket. I have often heard them, both gentle and simple, discuss the problem of why and how it was that he never failed to make them all feel second-raters when he descended into their midst. But such was undoubtedly the case, and there are other magicians of this kind in various parts of England, men who for some mysterious reason stand out above the best. It was even said that some owners hesitated to give this one a day's fishing, which merely exhibited their ignorance of the natural history of trout. His patterns of flies were eagerly sought after, and named after his name. But this was no good. The users of them had half-baskets while the parson filled his. He has even been watched by envious professors to see if he has any special patent dodge, but there was obviously nothing of the kind. His execution was apparently precisely the same as that of any other good local fisherman. But this brings me back to the gist of the story and the fact that when fishing the Avon some three or four years ago an old local friend officially connected with the river remarked, among other items of gossip, ' We have got a demon fisherman on the river now, a regular otter. He has killed bigger baskets than any one within my memory.' [This last went back fifteen or twenty years.] ' His name,' quoth I. ' Captain ,' replied my friend. ' Good Heavens ! ' said I, for the name was a rare one, ' a brother of the famous parson, I 'd lay a hundred to one.' And so he proved. Here indeed was a study in heredity ! I positively dreaded to meet him on the river. It was that un- satisfactory week before alluded to, which ended up so genially in the north-east wind and the thunderstorm ; for abjure rivalry as you may, and as I always try to in fishing, it is never pleasant to encounter success with failure. Moreover, I met the keeper in due course, and he instantly unbosomed himself on the subject, namely that of the newcomer, the like of whom had never been seen in his time on the river. His baskets ran up in the neighbourhood of fifty fish, which was certainly an unprecedented figure in modern times, and there were plenty of experts here as on the Welsh border. Now this is really curious and should give fishermen something to think about, though on the lay reader its significance must inevitably be lost. It is indeed a matter of scientific interest that two brothers should be thus miraculously endowed. There is no dry fly subtlety in their case, no casting of phenomenally long lines with a fly laid beautifully cocked at the end of them, no persistent studies of nymphs and images and cunning contrivance of imitations. In fact, I doubt if any dry-fly fishermen stand out with such singular consistency above their brother experts ! It is in this case simply a question of thrashing up-stream with practically the same flies as other men who have also been at it all their lives. These occasional superfishermen, if the phrase be per- missible, are to be found on lakes, too, which is still more curious ; for lake fishing from a boat, the least attrac- tive to my mind under most conditions of all forms of trouting, one would think, reduced all practised fisher- men who indulge in it to more or less even baskets. But I have encountered at least three lake-fishers in my life who are admitted to be supermen in this respect, and invariably bring home the largest basket in what- ever company and on whatever water they may find themselves. One of them was a Welsh squire, the other an English parson, and the third a commercial gentleman. The latter represented England against Scotland in the competitions that are or used to be held on Lochleven. He was quite frank himself re- garding his phenomenal gift, and admitted his in- ability to account for it. Lake fishing over a drift of all methods of trouting one would fancy left nothing by which the most gifted angler could consistently lift himself above his brother experts. The last-men- tioned one had a theory that some kind of fourth sense had been vouchsafed him which enabled him in some mysterious way to divine and anticipate the movements of unseen fish. The Avon isn't everybody's river not by any means ! There has been, I think, some thinning out done of late years, but I have often seen strange anglers, officers or the like from Plymouth, wandering down the woody banks below Garabridge or Avonwick, asking in despair where the river was get-at-able. These were mostly no doubt what the Devon folk used to call ' up-countrymen,' handy enough some of them perhaps on moorland, or water meadows, or on lakes, but daunted at the first flush by the uncompromisingly sylvan character of this river, on to whose banks the little train had dumped them. A military friend of mine who used sometimes to fish for sewin with me in the bush-free waters of West Wales, and heard me speak betimes of the Devonshire Avon with that strong regard I feel for it, hailed upon this very account the call of duty which planted him at Plymouth for a season. He was one of those anglers, of whom I fancy there are a good few, who, I am convinced, enjoy the prospect of fishing and its after-memories more than its actual realities ; and these mental and conversational pleasures associated with the gentle art are of course perfectly genuine. In hunting or shooting such an attitude comes instantly under the suspicion of pose. But humbug is happily impossible in trouting, and these people, I am quite convinced, honestly enjoy those anticipated excursions which will very likely never be made and the recollection of others actually achieved but clouded at the moment with disappoint- ments now forgotten. All the aesthetic and outdoor charm of the craft appeals to their imagination, but when it comes to the actual point the glamour fades a little, or perhaps they are a bit lazy, while they are sure to be rather indifferent performers. However, my friend went to Plymouth full of rosy anticipation of many spring and summer days upon my much esteemed river, which is only about an hour by rail from the famous west country seaport and garrison town. He did get there once, of course, but only once, and he wrote to me that he most assuredly would never repeat the experiment. He could not understand my predilection for the river or indeed how anybody caught any fish there. The trees were too thick, the banks were too high, and the wading too rough. It must be said he was rather middle- aged in habit of body as well as in years, and a very middling fisherman. But he was one of those enthu- siasts who fish a great deal in dreams, and thoroughly enjoy the prospect of days and hours that are so rarely fulfilled. And after all why should they not ? I re- member, too, on a certain day in early June when the fish were taking nicely, encountering a young marine sitting gloomily munching his sandwiches on the bank of the Avon at one of its open interludes. He com- plained bitterly of the secretive nature of the stream, and that he had been sitting all the morning by the big open pool beside him waiting to see a fish rise. As the fish were then feeding in the stickles and runs his vigil had of course been bootless. He proved, poor fellow, to be an embryo dry-fly fisherman, nurtured up in Hertfordshire or some such country, and a victim of dry-fly literature in what may be called its arrogant days. He honestly thought that * chuck-and-chance-it ' fishing, as he called it, had disappeared among sports- men everywhere, and that waiting for a rise and throw- ing a dry fly over it was the only legitimate method of catching a trout. And the Avon seemed to him a deplorably awkward river for such noble endeavours, as indeed it was. Of course he was young and hadn't been properly * bred a fisherman.' So presuming on the discrepancy of our years, which for that matter I could gladly have dispensed with, I endeavoured to get him into a more knowledgeable frame of mind, by explaining that he was in another world from Hertfordshire, and must brush all these fallacies from his mind if he wished to be a happy angler and enjoy the four years of Plymouth, to which he told me he was destined. I felt I might venture, when we had smoked a pipe together, to offer him an illustration of how all of us, good, bad, and indifferent, fished a woody, west country stream. He came along with me on the bank above for half an hour, and though the spectacle could not have been of much practical service to him he was quite grateful, and declared that his eyes were opened to a condition of things he had never dreamed of and that he would re-commence his angling career, which I do not think had been a very full one, from another standpoint. I dare say before he was ordered off to Chatham or Portsmouth he became quite an adept, for he was very keen. I don't know whether the Avon is more beautiful in April or in June. Its lush verdure in the latter month is delightful, and I like better to fish it then for reasons more than sufficiently stated. But in the spring, in the woods of Devon, above all along the margin of the streams, what a spangled carpet nature spreads upon the cool mossy ground, before the foliage of the trees and saplings has yet been shaken out and the eye become accustomed to the warmth and colouring of summer verdure. What a blaze is here of primrose, violet, and celandine, of campion, anemone, and marigold beneath the still bare branches of the oak and ash which play so prominent a part in Devonian woods. One misses, to be sure, the opulent sycamore, that precocious harbinger of summer, by the streams of Wales and Cumberland. And if the larch, first of all trees to illuminate the brown woods, is in fair and welcome evidence here, one may be thankful for the comparative scarcity of the sombre pine in all its varieties. The rectangular fir plantation with its monotonous colouring and stiffness of out- line, so baneful to my thinking in many northern valleys, is happily not an obtrusive feature in south- west England. Both salmon and peal (Devonian for sea trout) run up the Avon in limited quantities, but very few of the former are taken, while the latter do not, as in the Tavy, rise freely either by day or night. Let us hope, even if such a thing be possible, no attempt will be made to spoil one of the best trout streams in the county by turning it into a second-class salmon river ; for there is little doubt that a horde of young salmon fry makes demands upon the food of a river that is most detrimental to its stock of trout. The Barle, the Bray, and the torrential and beautiful Lynn seem still to retain a fair portion of their old fecundity. The Tavy, which the peal love and rise freely in, though the salmon reject it for the larger Tamar, is also a fair trouting stream despite the copper mines in its upper waters. So are the Lydd and the Lew, which flow out of Dartmoor to join the Tamar with the Plym, the Meavy, and the Walkham, all beautiful little rivers which find their several ways into Ply- mouth Sound. Away from the two great moors and their skirts, the beauty of inland Devon lies almost wholly in its deep, winding valleys. Save perhaps in the south-east, the Honiton portion of the county and a few others, look almost where you will, from any inland hill-top, you will see little but a succession of bare, humpy hills criss-crossed with rectangular lines of bank fences, and everywhere patched with square tillage fields. A distant background of moor redeems in a measure these long, rolling, chequered ridges, neither wild nor wooded, that nothing but a hardy superstition could absolve from the reproach of monotony if not of actual ugliness. Dreary outlooks are these beyond dispute, yet not dreary enough to touch the imagina- tion with a redeeming sense of mystery. A survey of the same kind in Hereford or Monmouth, let us say for example, because the colouring there also is De- vonian, is rich, broken, and beautiful. But one cannot truly say that such outlooks over the average inland Devon landscape is anything of the kind, and the many exceptions are not to the point, for the valleys are hidden, and it is down in the valleys that most of the beauty of non-moorland inland Devon assuredly lies, and of this beauty the trout fisherman most un- doubtedly sees the most and the best.