On the treacherous horseshoe bend of the River Severn, a handful of fishermen are carrying on the time-honoured skill of lave net fishing for salmon, while passing on their knowledge of the river’s mysteries to future generations.
Newnham: the River Severn glimmers like a diamond in the morning sun, barely a ripple on its swollen surface. It’s a silent late-winter day; but, as months wear on, the river’s borders of buff-toned reeds will gradually become choired by the chattering song of reed warblers; counterpointed by the white-moustachioed chunkiness of reed buntings.
(Beautiful reeds: Nature’s way of securing the river’s brimming banks. (Humankind thought it knew better, with concrete and plastic. Humankind was wrong.))
Out across the river’s horseshoe depths, there’s a view of the Dumbles saltmarsh; another view towards Broadoak: both are barely changed over centuries. Bring back fishermen of a couple of hundred years ago and they’d feel at home under the same immensity of sky. (Only the roar of traffic on the road behind would break their reveries.)
They’d recognise, too, these heavy, treacle-walker waters: givers and takers of lives.
These are fishermen who’d pass down their arcane knowledge – of the fish; the sandbars; the tides; the nets – like secret handshakes from father to son. (Their voices dropping to indiscernible whispers in the presence of strangers. Their close-hugged knowledge meant money; their knowledge guaranteed them a hard-won living.)
As our imagined long-lost souls converse, their stories will be the same as are swapped today. Tales of those who never came home: bodies lost but names preserved. Fishermen whose cautionary ghosts still help keep other fishermen alive.
John Biddle, back in 1935, who chased a fish into water too deep even for him. He must have known, as the sand scoured from under his feet, as the tide made mockery of him, that he would never see dry land again.
Or 1920, when Arthur English – as fog descended – made light of warnings from fellow-fishers. ‘I’m going to catch me a salmon,’ he told them, and disappeared forever into the disorientating gloom.
MIKE POWELL and Matt Hart are waiting for me at the old Fish House in Newnham. The warmest of men, they greet me with handshakes firmed by the river itself. It’s a short muddy trek to get here from the car park, but the perfect spot. No heating or power, yet this relic of the 19th century is warm and dry, with foldaway chairs for us to sit on as we chat.
Last weekend, it was a different story.
‘There were 10-metre tides in the area, and the Fish House was flooded. We had to come down and clear it all out.’
‘A good inch of mud in here. Once the Severn visits, it leaves its mark.’
Here, in this simple red-brick building, salmon fishermen would once have warmed themselves at the brick fireplace; used it to dry and store their nets.
‘The men would sleep and eat in here,’ Mike says. ‘You could fish at Newnham on small tides almost round the clock.’
Those were the days when the river was busier than the noisy A48 behind us. Yet, as late as the 1990s, Mike can remember seeing nets mended here, as the Severn fisheries gasped their last on these fast-emptying banks.
Today, you can read the history of the river’s fishing industry on the Fish House walls: ‘Net Making & Mending’, describes one board; ‘Putt & Putcher Baskets’; ‘Stopping Boats’; ‘Draft Netting or Long Netting’…
Set up on the floor is the middle-section of an historic putcher, made from split willow staves. These huge static funnels faced upstream, trapping the salmon as they swam upriver on their migratory journey to spawn.
But we’re here to talk about the subject of another of those boards: ‘Lave Net Fishing’. For Mike and Matt are two of a bare handful of fishermen still practising this ancient skill. Mike is the master: Matt his fast-learning pupil.
‘The lave net is a clever design: it’s a lovely thing,’ Mike says, as he unfurls what looks like a giant lacrosse stick. (Actually, it reminds me of a whale’s open jaw in the act of scooping up krill.)
‘There’s a wonderful book, Severn Tide, by Brian Waters, in which he describes a lave net as the last true hunting weapon used in Britain today. It’s a description I love.’
He built the contraption himself, did Mike: a week’s work of fashioning a rock staff (the handle, in lay terms) in ash; and a yoke board in plum out of his late dad’s orchard. In the old days, the netting would have been knitted by hand; nowadays, it’s nylon, cut to size. Folded up, the net sits on a fisherman’s shoulder as he wades through water to find his fishing ground.
‘Interesting,’ I say, looking at the natural kink in the rock staff.
‘Ah,’ Mike says. ‘The hardest thing is finding the timber for that shape, which gives you a grip when you lave a fish. There’s nothing inherently important in the type of wood, except that ash throws up that kind of kink quite often.’
So, is it easy to find?
He laughs. ‘You can walk miles and miles and miles to find the right shape of ash. It becomes an obsession. When you see the one you want, you know.’
Both net and fisherman need to be strong: salmon are athletic, determined creatures.
What’s more: ‘The biggest fish recorded on the Severn was 68.5lb, taken in 1912 at Wellhouse Bay – in a stopping boat, that was. Fish of 50lb have been taken in these nets. Sturgeon have been captured.’
Not by one person wielding a lave?
‘Absolutely.’
Nowadays, the average Severn salmon is around 10lbs – down two pounds even from when Mike started fishing. Because of dropping numbers, each salmon is released immediately these days.
But catching them is still the game it ever was. And the lave net – clever design though it is – is only the start of it. The Severn is a complicated river; a dangerous river.
And the salmon only come to those who can read it like a book.
MIKE POWELL has been fishing for 35 years. His dad, John - an author and Gloucester Citizen journalist – was a fisherman before him; as was his dad. Mike’s great-great grandfather was a water bailiff. The Severn is in his blood.
No wonder, then, that Mike almost viscerally feels the river; the progress of the fish; the shifting of the sands. ‘The way the fish move, the way they swim, changes as they come further up the Estuary,’ he says.
These are the clues he follows in the way a land-based hunter tracks paw-prints, broken branches, spore. His is a knowledge and an intuition about which direction a fish will go as it aims for deeper water. Fishing this way is a skill; but it’s an art, too.
The journey of a salmon is an extraordinary thing. Those fish born on the Severn will travel hundreds upon hundreds of miles to the North Atlantic, where they mature into adults. Here they feed on small fish, squid, eel and shrimp – staying for as little as a year; sometimes several years – before returning to the Severn to build nests and lay the eggs that will produce the next generation.
(No one quite knows how they navigate over these vast distances, though latest theories suggest scent plays a large part in their incredible sense of direction.)
Mike shows me his mobile: ‘Here’s a picture of a fish I caught last year. It’s swimming into the tide so it leaves looms [traces] on the surface.
‘Or, if a fish gets washed down onto a sandbar, its back will be out of the water; it will be throwing spray; it will be panicking and swimming into the tide and leaving a mark, which you then run after with the net on your back.’
It’s exhilarating – you can see that in Mike’s face as he tells of battles won and lost.
Are they worthy opponents, these fish? Do we underrate them?
He nods.
‘Salmon have been known to probe barriers to find the weakest spot. I’m talking natural barriers of sand: Think of ripples on a beach. That’s how the sand works in a river, but on a bigger scale.
‘It goes deep; it shoals, it shoals until you’re probably only talking six to eight inches of water. But the fish will be behind the bar, trying to get over to swim upstream. You’ll see that fish come up on the bar; drop back off; find the spot it wants to pick its way up through.
‘And that becomes the lave netter’s knowledge: you look at a bar and you think, ‘Where is this fish going to come up through? Where’s it going to head?’ So that’s where you position yourself.’
IN THE OLD DAYS, woe betide anyone new wanting to muscle in on salmon-fishing territory. It just didn’t happen.
But things have changed. And Mike’s a nice guy.
So, when Matt contacted him, saying he’d love to learn lave-net fishing, Mike didn’t hesitate. They didn’t know each other – but Matt wasn’t a total newbie. He’d grown up on the banks of the Severn; bought his own do-er-upper boat, aged 12. Fished for eels and elvers.
But lave-net fishing was something he really wanted to try.
So, they met at 5am last summer at Lydney pier. (Not that fishermen talk in o’clocks. You’ll hear them arranging to meet at three or four hours’ ebb.)
Mike was taking Matt to Penny Patch, a fishing ground a couple of miles’ walk away. It was a beautiful day, but the tide was running hard.
To repeat: Matt is no newbie. He’s worked for the Environment Agency; for Thames Water; and now for an environmental consultancy.
‘But this was the first time I’d been out into the Estuary proper, and I was blown away by the vastness; this huge sky, sand, water. It was just…’
He trails off, lost for words.
He thought he’d feel pretty comfortable in the river: ‘But then we started to wade across the channel onto the fishing grounds, and I was watching with hawk-like eyes how high the water was. First around Mike’s legs; then above his waist; then a bit higher. And I was thinking: I hope it doesn’t get much higher than this! What I didn’t appreciate at the time was how quickly the sand disappears from underneath your feet.’
But Matt kept a cool head, and Mike knows exactly what he’s doing.
Even so, what happened next surprised them both.
‘We got out onto the fishing place,’ Mike says, taking over the story. ‘It wasn’t quite flat calm; what we call black calm if there’s not a ripple on the water. And,’ he laughs, ‘there we were, fishing away. Over the last decade, there are fishermen who’ve been years not catching a salmon. So, the chances of actually going out and catching a fish were quite slim. There weren’t many about…
‘And, fortunately, one turned on the by and Matt caught his first fish.’
‘You can still see the grin on my face, thinking about it now.’
THE OLD STORIES are pretty good, too.
The chap killed by a swordfish in Worcester in the 1700s, far enough back in time to see the grim humour. ‘What are the chances?’
Or the fisherman catching whatever rushed through his net, who nabbed a dab. He popped it into his mouth while adjusting his bag, accidentally swallowed it, and choked to death. ‘Terrible way to go.’
‘In the 1800s, a pod of killer whales came up the river – a huge bounty for the fishermen. It still blows my mind to think of it. They captured one towards Gloucester and removed it from the river while it was still alive: so there was a live killer whale exhibited on Southgate Street.’
The ice, too. Such as the photo Matt has of local bobby PC Hector Evans riding his bike up the middle of the Severn in 1940.
But those times are probably all long gone. Pollution has seen to that. Run-off from agriculture; from the roads; sewage discharge; nano-plastics; forever chemicals.
It’s all a huge worry for a river both men adore.
But their part-answer is simple and effective. Both use the social media platform ‘X’ to spread their love for the Severn; and they also give talks, Tales from the Riverbank, trying to reconnect people.
‘We need to celebrate it. We need to get people back and passionate about it. Once they connect, that’s the way we’ll push against pollution.’
Mike and Matt know the river’s dangers all too well; they know its wily ways. But theirs is an unconditional love… even last weekend, when Matt was standing at his kitchen window, wondering whether or not his house would flood. (Thankfully, it didn’t.)
So, what does the Severn mean to them?
‘Everything,’ Matt says, simply. ‘The river for me is a constant.’
Mike nods. ‘There are very few wild places left. Further down the Estuary, you’re two miles away from the nearest person. You’re a visitor and you’ve only got a short time there.’
He pauses.
‘If we start feeling a part of the natural world, as I do on the river, then we’ll realise we’re not a unique species. We’re just another species – and we’ve got to live in harmony with everything else.’
• Follow Mike on X: @severnpiscator; and Matt @MattyH02
