IF you are a trout angler or aspire to be one, you owe it to yourself to visit at least once the chalk streams of England. Granted, New Zealand, Argentina, and Kamchatka beckon with marvelous trouting, but my aim here is to tell you why the fishing on the English chalk streams may very well be the most variously satisfying version of that sport to be had anywhere in the world.
There are numerous reasons for this, but let us begin with a bit of hydrology. The chalk streams take their name from a subsoil band of calcium carbonate, or “chalk,” formed of compacted shells a hundred million years ago when the British Isles lay under three hundred feet of ocean. This band runs for some three hundred miles through England, from Yorkshire in the north to Dorset in the south, and chalk streams are born when the plentiful English rain seeps through the chalk into an aquifer and then is forced back to the surface as springs, which join to become streams.
Emerging at a constant 50°F, filtered by the chalk into stainless clarity, high in alkalinity, rich in nutrients, and all but impervious to drought and flood, the streams are nothing short of perfect trout habitat. They are also soul-fillingly beautiful, in what the English chalk stream devotee and angling writer Charles Rangeley-Wilson calls their “verdant opulence” and “sedate grandeur.” Ambling elegantly through idyllic green valleys, rich in starwort, water celery, ranunculus, and other trout-food-nurturing weeds, they are, in Rangeley-Wilson’s deft description, “constant, equable, cool, fertile.”
There are over two hundred of these streams in England, ranging in width from ones you might jump across to some that are sixty to eighty feet wide, and in renown from world-famous to ones known only to a handful of locals. Some are intensely managed and manicured; others are left as nature made them. Some contain only wild populations of brown trout and grayling, while others are
