I was down in Derbyshire this weekend, walking with friends.

One of our walks took us over the Lathkill on a small bridge (not far from Youllgrave).

There were several large trout feeding in the pool just below the bridge.

There was a sign on the bridge asking people not to feed the trout as they are an "important type of brown trout" .

Is this true are the trout an "important type" or are the keepers (understandably) just trying to prevent people from feeding the trout on unnatural food so that they won't be put off naturals??

Looking forward to learning more about this.

Cheers

Walt

They are important in as much as they are wild self sustaining fish of the strain of trout native to the Lathkill (referred to by Isaac Walton as "the reddest trouts in England"). Feeding them bread is bad for them because it is pure carbohydrate and results in nutrient deficiencies and the attendant health problems. Nothing to do with catering to anglers.

The Lathkill fish are indeed fine looking trout:







...and you can see what Walton was on about when referring to their reddish colouration.

__________________
"A homeward tramp thro' mist wrapped night,
With heart and creel in common light,
Complete content, the day has brought it,
They fished for pleasure - and they caught it"

P F Morgan
taken from the catch record book at Llanthony Hotel, Honddu Valley, Aug 1942

www.monnowlogue.com
www.monnow.org.uk

Cotton not Walton...

richard

__________________
Who resides on the right bank of the Derbyshire Wye and is lulled to sleep each night by the mutterings of a weir, dreaming that "When the rivers and their inhabitants come first, we ALL win..."

Hi Waltyluft

For a little more insight I suggest you load up the bbc i player and watch last weekends Countryfile (about 19 mins in) and watch Warren talk about his work

__________________
Two things to have in life - A good bed and a good pair of boots -and if you aren't in one you should be in t'other

Thanks guys. Interesting stuff.

Sedgeking - I'll look at that clip tonight.

Tigermoth - smashing looking trout. There were 3 or 4 in the pool I was watching on Sunday. Must all have been 3lb + .

Cheers

W

They are unique. So maybe that makes them "important"?

They are locked away from invasion by fish of other strains due to a natural barrage of tufa rock down in Alport.

Their ancesters probably had an easy time of it for a few hundred years after the ice receded but inevitably they will have faced a serious problem that could have eliminated trout from the Lathkill above Alport.

The Lathkill is host to a rare symbiotic relationship between a species of moss and a bacterium that live together on the minerals dissolved in the water that flows from the many limestone springs that feed the river.

The by-product of the moss and bacterium's feeding is a sediment. This sediment is tufa and it petrifies the lower parts of the moss's "stems" making the moss feel like a pan scourer over all of it except the youngest tips. Tufa also settles and forms rocks, such as the barrage mentioned above and the 15 metre thick bed of tufa that Warren's house is built on.

It also makes an aggregate with the stones and gravel of the river bed!

This makes the usual redd building of our native brown trout impossible. Thousands of years ago there was a winnowing out of the fish that were unable to adapt to these unpromising conditions. The fish that were successful in spawning were those females that were big enough, strong enough and persistent enough to batter themselves into a bloody and frayed condition as they dislodged what bits of stone and gravel they could to build a little wall to catch the eggs and milt (instead of scooping out a little saucer as other brown trout do). This is how it has been since the tufa became omnipresent.

The net result?

The Lathkill supports a strain of brown trout that is entirely descended from big, strong, persistent females. Couple that gene pool with the astonishing abundance of invertebrate life that thrives in the Lathkill's limestone water and you have a double whammy, naturally big trout with a lot of freely available food.

There is a bonus to all this in that the Lathkill trout are still as Charles Cotton described "the reddest trouts in all England". So we have big, strong and beautiful trout that, frankly, really are "important".

richard

__________________
Who resides on the right bank of the Derbyshire Wye and is lulled to sleep each night by the mutterings of a weir, dreaming that "When the rivers and their inhabitants come first, we ALL win..."

Did it take the nymph or the Klink?

__________________
"The sun was so delightfully warm, and the stone, which had been sitting in it for a long time, was so warm, too, that Pooh had almost decided to go on being Pooh in the middle of the stream for the rest of the morning."

www.monnow.org

tut tut T'was a tiny blue winged olive

__________________
"A homeward tramp thro' mist wrapped night,
With heart and creel in common light,
Complete content, the day has brought it,
They fished for pleasure - and they caught it"

P F Morgan
taken from the catch record book at Llanthony Hotel, Honddu Valley, Aug 1942

www.monnowlogue.com
www.monnow.org.uk

Great thread this one!

I also walked this area maybe ten years ago and saw some huge browns

5lb+ I think it was Alport.I was told trout were stocked from the wild

strain,is this true anyone? stocking pools were adjacent to the bridge pool.

The river looked stunning and VERY PRIVATE