Weston Farm Fishery

Weston Farm Fishery sits on the River Lambourn at the village of Weston, in the parish of Welford between Great Shefford and Welford in Berkshire. The fishery is split into 3 beats, lower, middle and upper, running from the boundary with Welford Park up through Elton Lane to the edge of East Shefford.

Until 2021 the fishing here was let to a third-party day-ticket operation. Since then Weston Farm has managed it in-hand, and the direction of travel has been consistent: fewer rods, less pressure, and less stocking in favour of wild fish. The upper beat has already gone all the way down that road: it has never been stocked and is fished as a wild fishery. The stated intention is to keep scaling the stocking back on the other two.

The river rises in the Berkshire Downs and carries both Site of Special Scientific Interest and Special Area of Conservation status for its plant and invertebrate life. It also has something genuinely unusual for a chalk stream: a near-natural flow regime, with no significant demand for abstraction from the aquifer in the upper catchment. Fishing is for Brown Trout, Grayling.