Disembarking at the tiny Mottisfont and Dunbridge station, I’m met by cheery painted cutouts of grayling and trout, schooling along the platform fence: avatars of a celebrated river. But the welcome fades fast as I join the Test Way and encounter a plethora of fences and signage designed to keep walkers away from the very thing most people come here for. I meet an agitated elderly man struggling to clean his hands because he’d inadvertently touched a gate daubed with black anti-climb paint. By the time I manage to (briefly) encounter the famously clear, bright chalk water from a bridge, I’m starting to regret coming.
The estate upstream is Mottisfont, owned by the National Trust. There I meet Alex Olejnik for a tour of the four river beats immortalised by the father of dry fly fishing, FM Halford. Alex is not what you might expect a head river keeper on this hallowed water to be. She’s been in post for 18 months, during which time her boss, Dylan Everett, recommended she learn all she could about traditional fishery management, then forget it, because things are changing here.
