try telling bernard venables that

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WHEN YOU LEAVE THE RIVER, TAKE NOTHING, AND LEAVE ONLY FOOTPRINT'S!!!

THA CAN TELL A YORKSHIREMAN ,BUT THA CAN'T TELL HIM MUCH !!

Then the Angling Times really has a lot to answer for.. I wonder if they can still be prosecuted/sued for spreading diseased stock and ecological vandalism? (if such charges exist )


The previous paragraph from fishery ecologist Dr. Nick Giles' book:
Barbel, Barbus barbus

Identification, habitat, distribution and related species.
A handsome fish with bronze-gold body colouring and pale-pink/red fins, barbel
occupy the middle reaches of large rivers in central Europe and are indigenous and widespread in waters from eastern England eastward to the Black Sea.
Where conditions are right, the species thrives and can dominate the fish community.
The barbel appears to be native to the rivers of eastern England from Yorkshire southwards to the Thames. Alwynne Wheeler and David Jordan have published an up-to-date account of the spread of the species in Britain and the following section relies heavily upon their research.

Wheeler and Jordan suggest that barbel are truly native to the following main British Rivers: the Yorkshire Ouse, Derwent, Wharfe, Aire, Swale, Don, the Trent system, Witham, WeIland, and the Great Ouse and Thames systems.
Several other smaller rivers may also have provided a home for post-glacial barbel populations which subsequently either died out or survived at low densities in localised pockets of suitable habitat.
Anglers have, in recent years, aided the slow natural spread through British
rivers. No one knows what effects such introductions have had on the former fish communities of these rivers but it seems likely that the newly-introduced barbel will overlap for both food arid space requirements with chub and, to a lesser degree, dace and roach.
Some invertebrate species may well have been subjected to predation pressures which they are ill-equiped to withstand, whilst others, like the parasitic hookworm Pomphorhynchus laevis, have thrived. Pomphorhyncus lives as an adult parasite in the upper gut of cyprinid fish including barbel, chub, roach and dace. The fish are infected when they eat shrimps (Gammarus pulex) that are carrying Pomphorhynchus larvae in their blood systems. Fish which eat a lot of shrimps can build up heavy infestations of
the adult hookworms and lose body condition through the drain on their systems. The chub in the Hampshire Avon were badly affected in this way during the 1960s/70s. It seems likely that the translocation of barbel from river to river, for example from the Kennet to the Hampshire Avon and Severn, has aided the spread of this damaging parasite, infecting chub, roach dace and other species in the process.

Redistribution of barbel in Britain began in the 1890s when fish could lawfully be moved anywhere without consent: in 1896 barbel were stocked in the Dorset Stour from where they spread into the confluent Hampshire Avon. These fish are thought to have come from the Thames. Barbel from the rivers Lea and Kennetwere subsequently stocked into the Avon.
In 1956, 509 Kennet barbel were transferred to the Severn. (By the Angling Times.) This population has subsequently thrived and spread..."




My point is that they both fished the Hampshire Avon in what is now Dorset.
Barbel fishing in Dorset, after all, being the thread subject.

love the royalty in christchurch had some great fun down there and the landscape is as good as. good price for a lovely stretch of river and some good features too.