CLUB FISHING
Don Stazicker meets members of one of the world’s oldest fly-fishing clubs
MANY FLY-FISHING clubs are associated with famous events, but few have experienced anything quite as dramatic as Derwent Fly Fishing Club.
The club has six miles of the Derbyshire Derwent, extending from just below Ladybower Dam downstream to Grindleford. In May 1943, the roar of Rolls-Royce Merlins disturbed the peaceful trout fishing as Lancasters of 617
Squadron flashed down the Hope valley practising for Operation Chastise, the Dambusters raid on the dams of the Ruhr.
Things are quieter now. The club’s 50 members can enjoy their mayfly fishing in peace on waters they had already fished for more than a century by the time Guy Gibson came visiting.
The Derbyshire Derwent rises from the flanks of Bleaklow in the High Peak, six miles to the east of Glossop, and flows 50 miles to join the Trent, south of Derby. The name in Brittonic means “belonging to the forest of oak trees”. An apt description of the club’s beats as the tree-lined Derwent winds through the beautiful landscape of the Peak District National Park.
Only a few miles from its source, the Derwent feeds into three reservoirs, Howden, Derwent and Ladybower, which lie in a valley surrounded by high moors that give the water its characteristic peaty brown colour. The lowest reservoir, Ladybower, completed in 1945, supplies water to Sheffield and the East Midlands. The village of Derwent was demolished before being submerged beneath the rising waters of the new lake, although a 17th century packhorse bridge survives, moved to the top of Howden Reservoir.
Ladybower dam affects the river, often beneficially, by evening the flow during heavy rain and providing compensation water in drought periods. Once the reservoir is full, the excess water pours over the dam’s face. When this occurs, the Derwent can experience flooding. The club has a corrugated iron fishing hut that is set into concrete and chained to the bedrock. On the inside of the hut’s door, painted lines record historic high-water levels.
A Derwent tributary, the River Noe, joins the main river about one third of the way down from the upper boundary, contributing colour to the Derwent during heavy rain and the occasional wild rainbow trout, spawned in the Noe feeder streams that issue from limestone geology.
There’s spirited debate within the fly-fishing world about which club is the oldest. There was a flurry of club-founding activity in the first half of the 19th century and the Amwell Magna Fishery (1831) claims to be “The oldest angling club in England still fishing the same water”.
