My ten favourite rivers

My favourite rivers

After fishing across the country for 60 years, David Profumo recalls his top ten angling spots, from the Torridge to the Tweed

Ever since I caught my first trout with my father, John Profumo, in 1963 – shortly after he had resigned from Macmillan’s government – my life seems to have been embroidered by the course of various rivers.

My angling education proper began at Eton, on the Thames (where, as a notable part of its liquid history, Izaak Walton himself fished in the 1630s). There I learned to floatfish for perch and bleak – little beauties, with nothing ‘coarse’ about them. I also discovered that angling is good for you: you can’t fish and worry at the same time.

I was raised on a ramshackle chalk stream, where I could observe the behaviour of fish in aquarially transparent water. I have since become beguiled by the Hampshire Itchen – with its peaceable, bosky surroundings. Running water features in many versions of Arcadia, and I relish the chance to try for wild brown trout, hovering ‘on the fin’ as if swimming in clear air. In winter – time of bonfire smoke and hip flasks – you can cast for the spectral grayling, even in a snow shower.

Since my student days, I have been visiting the West Country rivers (there are some 50), with an especial fondness for Devon’s numinous Torridge, deep in Henry Williamson’s Tarka territory. In summer, you can fish the gloaming for school peal (sea trout), but there is also a (now depleted) run of Atlantic salmon: novelist Graham Swift and I once hit it right on a falling spate – a flood settling nicely – and landed four fish between us.

This was a favoured haunt of our mutual friend, Ted Hughes, who sneakily attached to his line a fish from his deep freeze, and tricked Michael Hordern into believing the cold water had frozen it alive.

Sea trout are our loveliest fish – capricious, athletic and delicious to eat. In Wales, they are called sewin, and the finest method of catching them is by fly-fishing at night. I was introduced to the Cothi by my wife’s uncle, a local sewin wizard who conjures them from the midsummer darkness with skills I have never acquired. You begin at dusk, once ‘the green has gone out of the grass’, and it can be thrilling as a silver beauty crashes at your surface lure, all unseen.

One September, staying at stately Baronscourt in County Tyrone, I hooked three salmon in an hour on the delightful and variegated river Mourne, part of the Foyle complex which embraces both Province and Republic. I was on the prolific Snaa Pool, with its edgy, ledgy wading, and later fell out of a tree where I was attempting to retrieve a snagged fly. Fishing is in Ireland’s genes. The ghillie offered me a jolt of poitín, ‘ter dry yer feet’.

Although I have swum my hooks in more than 40 different countries, I am eternally biased toward the waters of Scotland, where now I live. For many autumns, I have been fishing the charismatic Tweed, mainly around Mertoun and Dryburgh, with their gorgeous pink cliffs (‘scaurs’) and lovely leafscapes. Fishing for Atlantic salmon is an irrational iteration of a peculiar pastime, as these fickle nomads apparently cease feeding when they return to fresh water, but there is more to the business than the mere catching of fish – the keen anticipation fuels your determination, for hours on end.

My home water here in Perthshire is the rugged and feisty river Tilt – a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the mighty Tay – which trundles and foams its way down through pots and bonsai canyons, along the route Queen Victoria rode on horseback from Balmoral to nearby Blair Castle. I once picked the pockets of Shepherd’s Pool, and grassed three salmon in a morning, a feat I doubt I will repeat in this lifetime.

Over on royal Deeside itself, I have tried my luck on beats from Balmoral and Birkhall down to Banchory, and the silvery Dee is peerless as a picturesque, piscatorial destination – in spring particularly, when the strath is redolent of conifers, and the banks are a rug of bluebells. The current enjoys a sprightly rhythm, on its long course from the high, cold corries above Mar. There are occasionally violent floods: in 1829, the innkeeper at Cambus found ‘a sma’ trootie’ swimming in his kitchen.

Sutherland is where I served my fly-fishing apprenticeship, a venerable sporting uncle introducing me to the formidable river Shin when I was a teenager in the seventies. So bouldery and precipitous is this stream that in places you have to hang onto a wire to cover a ‘lie’ (angling is not as sleepy a pursuit as some imagine) and the spectacular Falls Pool is like an amphitheatre. As a callow youth, I landed a 22-pounder in the pool named Paradise – as a callow oldie, I remember every delicious moment.

Profumo, six, at Braemar Castle, 1961

Amhuinnsuidhe Castle estate in Harris is one of the rare places where, from your bedroom window, you can see salmon leaping in the bay. The rivers here are short but, once fish reach the wilderness lochs and the furrowing grey wind stirs them up, you can be in paradise – even if you return with only ‘a sma’ trootie’.

David Profumo’s The Lightning Thread: Fishological Moments and the Pursuit of Paradise is out now (Scribner, £20)