Who wouldn’t like to wet a line in Salisbury Cathedral? After all, standing beneath its vaulted ceiling, watched over by stained-glass angels and saints, while working a fly through its secret waters, could be the peak experience of angling in England.
Go for it. The thirteenth-century structure, a fluent example of English Gothic, was famously painted by John Constable in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831). The artist depicted it in the distance, with its spire, England’s tallest, thrust up like a defiant finger to a stormy sky. A wagon and team of horses ford a foreground river, a tidy biblical rainbow topping it all off. Aside from the nags and the hit-or-miss atmospherics, the same view is still available today. You pause on a footpath in the watery meadows, the vista uncluttered, and there stands the spired old basilica, with the Avon River rippling past—rumored to be a decent trout stream in its upper reaches.
The path bridges the river and bisects the willowy Queen Elizabeth Gardens, then loops around to the cathedral, which you enter with fly rod in hand, or at least the tip section with a reel taped to it, tenkara-style. Nobody stops you; anglers having a long history in the faith. You make your way up the central aisle, imagining yourself in a tabletop model of heaven, and stop at the transept. If you’re lucky, a docent with a long wooden stick may be hooking the iron ring on a small panel and pulling it out of the stone floor. Someone in the knot of visitors around you gasps when the docent then lowers the stick into the hole and brings it back out dripping wet. Just below the cathedral’s foundation, the visitors discover, lies a bed of gravel and the flowing River Avon itself. It is now up to you to win the docent’s indulgence (the trick is to pose as a harmless nut, for which the fly rod is an ideal prop) so that you can lower your nymph through the hole—like icefishing—and then jig it back as sultrily as you can.
It’s unlikely you’ll catch a trout. The point is that, in the underground waters of this place, loaded with old art, encrusted with tombs and crypts
