School Pool

Wessex Fly Fishing Trout Lakes

Wessex Fly Fishing Trout Lakes sits in the lush water meadows beside the River Piddle: 5 small, clear stillwaters run for stocked rainbow trout rather than the wild fishing found on the river itself. Meadow Lake is the largest at two and a half acres, School Pool and The Oxbow are half an acre apiece, and The Bowl and Church Pool are the two smallest, a quarter of an acre each. One ticket covers the whole fishery. The water is usually beautifully clear, which turns most days here into genuine stalking, picking out and casting to individual fish rather than covering water blind, though early in the season one or two of the pools can carry some colour. Rainbow Trout are stocked regularly from 1¾ lb up to well over 4 lb, averaging around 2½ lb, with the odd considerably larger fish put in as well. Fly life can be exceptional, with hatches of buzzers, pond olives, sedges and damsel flies, and the popular stillwater patterns, buzzers, goldhead nymphs, damsel nymphs and small lures among them, all take fish. The fishery has been featured in the game fishing press over the years and has built a reputation for good sport in a friendly, relaxed atmosphere. Two ticket options are on offer: £30 to take the first fish you catch and release three more, or £40 to take the first two and release three more. Catch and release is straightforward: barbless hooks, or barbs pinched down with long-nosed pliers, fish played as quickly as possible, handled as little as possible, and hands wetted in the net mesh before you touch a fish. Barbed hooks may be used for the first one or two fish you intend to take, then it's barbless for the rest of the session. The lakes open at 08:30 and are booked online at lakebookings.com.

Dorset

River Piddle

The River Piddle rises from chalk springs near Alton Pancras, high in the Dorset Downs, and runs 18 miles to Poole Harbour, joining the River Frome at Wareham. It flows south at first, then swings east at Puddletown, and runs parallel to the Frome for much of its length, a few miles to the south. Between source and mouth it passes Piddletrenthide, Piddlehinton, Puddletown, Tolpuddle, Affpuddle, Briantspuddle, Throop and Turners Puddle, in Dorset. The catchment is mainly rural, about 182 square kilometres, fed by the Lyscombe Stream, the Cheselbourne Stream, the Devils Brook and the Milbourne Stream among its tributaries. It is a classic sloped-face chalk stream: chalk bedrock overlain by large unconfined aquifers that supply most of the flow. The aquifer takes in autumn and winter rain and gives it back slowly through the summer, so incoming water holds a steady temperature of around 11°C the year round, and the flow stays stable through both drought and flood. Six miles below the source, at Puddletown, the chalk dips under clay and alluvial sand and gravel and the valley opens into water meadows, changing the character of the river considerably. Like most chalk streams it has been heavily worked over the centuries: medieval mills diverted and dammed it, weirs, sluices and hatches were built between the 17th century and the 1930s to irrigate the water meadows (their remains are still visible around Briantspuddle), and dredging continued into the late 1980s. Fly life remains excellent regardless: early olives and hawthorns open the season, mayfly follows, every beat sees a good hatch of grannom in April, and sport often picks up again in autumn with late olives and sedges. The river holds throughout, with light stocking on most beats, and salmon are known to cut redds at Briantspuddle. The Piddle at Tolpuddle was chosen by the Game Conservancy for a six-year study of the wild brown trout population and for research into ways of improving the habitat, work that fed into wider schemes by Wessex Water, the Game Conservancy Trust and the Environment Agency to reduce abstraction and enhance the river.