It's called Le Ruisseau du Moulin. A little stream that wells up way out back beyond Landivy and wanders down to L'Airon…L'Airon to La Selune…and La Selune down to the sea.
Translated literally, it's The Stream of the Mill. One of many, many mill streams hereabouts, for the old French harnessed water power to any imaginable purpose. Wander down the least promising trickle and you'll stumble on signs of long slighted sluices. A marshy depression here was once a moon mirrored mill leet. Those boulders there, are the once broad shoulders that heaved a chuckling stream into a roaring mill race.
I like to call it the Mill Brook. And it's beautiful.
Mill Brook, like the streamlets that feed it, cuts deep between granite tops, each one crowned by a small village of stone and slate. The valley sides are steep, the bottom narrow, flat and boggy.
In the valley, unlike the rolling plateau, the land is not inclined to modern agriculture. Old woods cling to slopes too steep and shallow soiled for maize, and the floor is too marshy for the immense machines that sow, spread slurry and cut that cursed crop.
So Mill Brook runs as clean and clear as ever, chattering over pebbly shallows and streaming over beds of bright green starwort, riffling across clean sweeps of golden gravels, swirling around the gnarled knuckles of ancient willow roots, gliding over deep mysterious holes, and winding through seeping, iris stirred swamps.
The stretch I fish is around the ancient Abbey ruins of Savigny-le-Vieux - downstream to the faded glory of the Moulin du Pré, now a rather nice, large farm cottage but once the abbey's flour mill unless I mistake those stone filled arches in the foundations and the ditches aligned with them – and upstream to Le Ruisseau de Noire Eau, which I call Blackwater Brook.
This is Injun Fishing…creeping and crawling to make the most of what scanty cover there is, shooting a feathered barb at an unsuspecting Chublet, and whooping when it turns out to be a dark backed red specked native Brownie.
I took my fly rod to Mill Brook on the UK's Spring Bank Holiday Monday. The French Bank Holiday took place a week earlier and I had the place all to myself…but for the friendly young bullocks who followed me like curious children. I waited, and like children everywhere they soon lost interest and ambled off in a nonchalant gang behind their leader.
The previous time that I fished here I made a complete mess of it. Cold winds had driven the fish down deep and the only one that I saw all day, I put down with my first cast, which landed in a heap on its nose. It was all my own fault. I hadn't been thinking and my leader was far too long for Mill Brook. When I got home tired, empty-handed, but nonetheless happy, I made up half a dozen four or five foot tapered casts and attached one to the floating braided leader at the end of a DT4 natural silk line that I absolutely swear by. It's French, made by P.Thebault and I rarely use anything else these days. The rod is a Partridge built Farlows Royal Stream, 7'3" of cane delight with a Youngs Jubilee screwed onto the butt.
Choice of fly is a simple matter. Fly hatches are sparse and far between so there's little point in trying to match them. The fish just aren't that fussy. Anyway, my faulty eyesight makes small sizes and frequent fly changes a truly frustrating affair, so selecting a fly is mostly dictated by "can I see it?" and "will it float" in the rough and tumble of Mill Brook.
At last, I get the point through the ring of a Yellow Humpy and try a practice throw on the pool beneath the narrow road bridge with its equally humpy parapet. The leader curls out and unfolds straight as a die with the fly settling light as thistle down. Perfect. Except that I miss the fish that rises to it unexpectedly. Not so perfect, then, but promising.
There's no hurrying on Mill Brook. There's no point to it. And that's what makes the fishing interesting. There's something about the place that slows me down. I do an awful lot of just looking. It gives me time to enjoy the scenery, for me to register that the damsel flies here have cinnamon wings rather than the deep blue of those on Le Futaie, my nearest local stream.
La Futaie does run through Maize country and one still meets fisherman who speak misty-eyed of their baskets full of thirty brown trout in a day - most of them thirty centimeters long, and always more than thirty years ago. That was before the Maize. Since then, greedy people and greedy plants have put paid to the wild trout population.
Maize is a thirsty crop but the machines need firm, flat ground. To plant it, wetlands are drained and then the fields are irrigated. Slurry from the sewage works is spread in liberal quantities. And when they water the seedlings or the rain falls like stair rods, soil and sewage pours straight down the land drains and into the depleted stream. Here it chokes the spawning reds and asphyxiates the weeds that form the fishes' larder. And then there's the wash-in from over-grazed banks that lack the vegetation to bind them…
But that grim picture is a million miles from the Mill Brook just a few kilometers away.
There are rings in the ripples here. Small chub and decent dace mostly, but there's always a chance of a surprise. I lean against a rickety wooden footbridge and peer through my polaroids into a deep hole below a bramble bush. Something of largish size is swinging and swaying in the current. As my eyes adjust, I made out the form of a carp about four pounds. A descendant of the Abbey fish ponds perhaps? More likely a modern stocking but it's so much nicer to imagine…
Just before Blackwater Brook joins the stream, there's a small red and white sign nailed onto a leaning willow. "Pêche Interdite". No fishing. So satisfied with the four or five chublets I've caught and released on my way up, I head back to the bridge and take a short cut downstream across country to fish up from Moulin du Pré and back to the car.
There's a buzzard mewing somewhere up sun and a cuckoo calling from the wood. The air sings with the chirping of crickets and smells sweet with watermint. There's no hurrying on Mill Brook. You just can't do it. Not if you have an ounce of soul.
Madame comes out of the kitchen door at the mill on the other side of the water meadow. I raise my hat. She stares. Then she goes about her business, an old lady stiffly climbing the steep steps to a stone walled potager built safely above the level of the flood plain. When she comes back, her chicken-wire pannier is piled with "pissenlit" – dandelion leaves that could be either for the rabbit hutch or for Monsieur's lunch, tossed with crispy diced bacon or "lardons". Not bad under a poached egg, either.
France's pre-war concrete electricity posts are excellent bridging material and two of them have been laid down with a long chestnut branch to serve as handrail for anyone seeking access to the other side of the stream. I cross and make my way to a long straight glide below a riffle on a tight bend. It's the only place on "my" part of Mill Brook where you need to, or can, cast more than five yards in front.
Knee deep and inch by inch I work my way up. It's comfortable fishing, firm under foot, sheltered by high banks, and no sticky fingered branches to grab your back cast. I'm fishing the seam where the current pushes against the left hand bank. Humpy sits high on the ripples and my left hand is working a leisurely finger-of-eight as the fly floats down towards me.
What happens next is pure "Mr Cherry & Jim". Like something straight out of a strip cartoon, Humpy floats under a clump of overhanging grass. The surface bulges. A ring forms, And when I raise my rod tip just enough to tighten, there's a tug and a trout leaps out of the water.
It's not a big one. Small in fact. Certainly not of takeable size. But it's lively on this light outfit and it gives a good account of itself. When it comes to hand it's a pretty little thing and I'm please that I remembered to debarb my fly. It comes away without the slightest resistance or damage, and I just hold brownie lightly between fingers and thumb as he gulps his breath back. Strength restored, he just idles away back upstream. Even for the fish, there's no hurrying on Mill Brook.
I splash back to a gravel beach, reeling in line and stowing Humpy in the fly ring. Time to straighten my back, look around, take a deep breath and drink in the atmosphere. Enough fishing for today, I decide. That's just the note I want to finish on.
Back at the car, I raise the hatchback, sit on the tailgate and roll down my waders. My trouser legs are damp with sweat. "That's the bugger with rubber" I think to myself as I kick them off.
There's a bottle of Tanglefoot in my fishing basket and for once I have an opener in my pocket.
Trouser legs are drying nicely in the evening air as I reward myself with a beer. There's still plenty of daylight in the sunset, but evening is drawing down. Still no rush. I think I'll wait a bit for the bats to come out.
There's no hurrying on Mill Brook.
