Trout and Tweed
When I am in need of solace, which seems to be more and more these days, I cast my sights, heart and line toward trout. But not just any trout; my thoughts go to wild brown trout, specifically those found in the lovely small streams that thread through Devon in England’s West Country.
Though not lunkers, as many overfed, blimplike, stocked rainbows that need to be forklifted out are in some U.K. and U.S. fisheries, Devon browns are extraordinarily wary and challenging, which makes them great fun to pursue, despite their modest size. I once caught an 11-inch fish and was perfectly thrilled. Salmo trutta, as the naturalist Carl Linnaeus dubbed the species, are native to Great Britain. They practically have a Union Jack tattooed on their pectoral fins, and they happen to be the trout that promulgated the sport of fly-fishing around the world.
Conrad Voss-Bark, when he was the angling correspondent for the Times of London, insisted that catching one demanded a leader as fine as a brunette’s hair, and he was adamant that nothing less than an artificial fly — “an incantation of feathers,” in his elegant phrase — be used in their pursuit.
I met Conrad, now deceased, through his wife, Anne, owner of a place I like to fish: the Arundell Arms in Lift on, a village that sits at the border of the rolling green landscape where Devon yields to Cornwall. The hotel, formerly an old coaching inn, nests between two moors. It is a sporting hotel, a particularly British genre that sees guests come for trout from spring to early fall, and salmon in summer and fall, and to shoot pheasant, partridge and woodcock in the cooler months. Sadly, Anne
