Fishing the River Calder

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Across the river and halfway up the field that sloped up some hundred-odd vertical feet towards the road, the woman picked the sheep up under her arm and strode on another few dozen paces. Resting herself for a moment on her knees, she suddenly and startlingly started raining blows down on the hapless animal. After a minute of this, she picked it up again and staggered towards the gate in the corner once more. After about an hour of this surreal activity, she and her sheep vanished from view.

Once you get past Halifax you start to expect to see things like this. After all this is nearly Lancashire…

The Calder wends its way through some of the oddest parts of Northern England. Mill towns that arose from nothing to power the industrial revolution cling to the steep-sided valleys in rows of sandstone, punctuated still yet by towering chimneys.

Needless to say, the swiftness of the rise was only bettered by the swiftness of its decline. If you went back a mere 30 years or so, these towns were still proud manufacturing centre. But the firestorm of competition from the East burnt them to the ground. The buildings are still there – great edifices that speak of industrial power – but the industry itself vanished like a ghost, to be supplanted by scattered outposts of commerce.

And as the industry left for the East, the East arrived here in the form of immigrant populations. Swathes of workers arrived from Pakistan to seek work in the mills that were already dying before they got here. So the faded signs for “purveyors of mungo and shoddy” and “bile beans” that are still just visible on the brickwork are as often as not written above plastic signs promising Hal-Al meat.

So in two centuries these places supplanted the traditional rural life of many Dalesfolk, becoming minor versions of the squalor and splendour of the likes of Leeds and Manchester as they grew. A culture of hard work and hard life was born in the shadowy valleys and adopted with grim pride by the towns. And then a wrecking ball was driven through the whole lot.

The river that winds along the bottom of this valley bears witness to these changes. The riverside is punctuated by old mills and warehouses, their broken windows filled from behind by blackness. Of course, some of them are now filled with flats. The river itself is recovering from the years of industry that once turned it black and made it uninhabitable for fish.

We were here for the fishing. Now, I am not a competent fisherman. Any series based around me in the style of Extreme Fishing With Robson Green would feature an interminable amount of footage of me trying to tie hooks onto lines, trying to untangle lines from around my legs and overhanging trees, wincing as I pulled hooks out of my scalp and generally dropping pieces of essential equipment into the river.

All this would be punctuated by the occasional cast of the rod until, inevitably, something snapped and the whole process began anew.

Even getting the gear in the first place was a trauma. Fishing is one of those activities that is steeped in lore and mysticism that only seems to come naturally to slightly taciturn and oddly menacing men. The tackle shop where we bought out gubbins in the morning (after a splendid fried spam sarnie in the Piece Hall) was the nearest thing Yorkshire has to offer to a white separatist militia compound in the Waco mould.

Of the approximately 100 square feet that the shopfloor covered, 80 was given over to frighteningly realistic-looking armaments – BB guns that were indistinguishable from Desert Eagles, Magnums and such… double barrelled air rifles and a lot of knives that could only realistically be used for one thing: making a pelts from the skins of soft lads from the suburbs.

Behind the counter 3 men, locked in the Omerta that characterises the deadly serious, capital-letter Angler. Not for these boys the easy, casual riverside chat that marks out most folk you find on the banks. No, their every utterance carried unspoken riddles and menaces hinted at. Tests of your knowledge were behind every seemingly innocent question. Buying a day ticket and a few spinners somehow turned into a rite of passage that we barely escaped.

But the day stretched out ahead of us in glorious, icy sunshine. The clearest of airs dispelled the parched threat that sometimes veils the fells in these parts. The bare trees and rocky outcrops seemed welcoming and calming rather than menacing and bleak as they often do when shrouded in rain and other climatic unpleasantess.

Kneel before Zod

I even hooked a beauty of a trout on my second cast. A good 14 inches of river-taut muscle clad in deep greens and golds. Alas, then, that it suddenly flashed its back muscles as I tried to disgorge it and simultaneously snapped the line and leapt out of my startled hands back into the river. With the spinner still locked into its jaw, it swam back into the murk to presumably meet a long, drawn out death at the hands of starvation.

In the interests of Karma, the next big fish we (i.e. The D) caught was an egg-bloated female of the darkest river green hue. We admired her on the banks before letting her go back to her lair and continue to refill the river with her brood.

It seems silly to stand in the ruins of a just-vanished industry just 20 minutes drive out of a major town and claim to get a taste of the rhythms of the wilds, but that’s what fishing does. Standing still watching life gurgle slowly past you for a few hours… the flash of a blue kingfisher shooting along the bankside and the occasional tug of a fish on your line reminds you that life doesn’t begin and end in an office and death is ever at hand. He said, right cheery like.

If you’ve never given it a go, you really should. And if you see a woman hauling a half-dead sheep up a hill, ask her what the hell she’s doing.