What makes history? I’m bound to say that I’m with Alice Oswald on this one. Her long poem “A sleepwalk on the Severn” looks away from connected and confected narrative “A caused B, therefore” – and gathers fragments; the flotsam and jetsam of real life and turns the overheard conversation, the bus tickets, dog ends and litter that flow past us like a river and fashions them into an evocation. History comes back to us after the event. In retrospect the ordinary – ‘the way we did things in those days’ glows with a last ray of sunlight before the sun drops below the horizon. Memory lends new life to the events.
I was sitting in a very boring meeting, gazing out of the window when a tractor and trailer passed slowly down the lane loaded high with salmon putchers, turned off and took the track down to the river Severn. It took years to realize that I might have been witnessing the last time putchers were set up. Of course they haven’t disappeared. They’re good to grow sweet peas up and I daresay they feature in the Chelsea flower show, but like cobblers’ shoe lasts and salt glazed gin bottles they’re more likely to be repurposed as decorative patina by interior designers.
Putchers go back to the 5th century, they’re a five foot long conical basket with a wide opening tapering to a point. They were set up in a rank and the ones I remember and in the photo were arranged in a V shape with the arms opening upstream to catch fish on the ebb tide which, with the poor visibility in the water the fish would enter and find themselves trapped in the putchers which were attached up to five high in the rank. There was another type of putcher called a kype which was longer and the hazel whips were woven tighter towards the end to trap smaller fish.
There was a small shack upstream from Shepperdine and near the ranks which were thicker stakes embedded in the mud. It was here that one of the last fishermen wove his putchers from hazel or withy during the tidal slacks. I met him on the riverbank one day and we had a long conversation in which he told me that he hardly ever caught salmon. He was an ardent royalist, and he said he always sent the first salmon of the season to the then Prince Charles, but the previous season the first fish was also the last. Nonetheless he packed it up and sent it to Highgrove, waiting in vain for any letter of thanks, which left him deeply disappointed rather than angry. The fish, he said were often marked with raw lesions which he suspected were caused by pollution in the river. Some time later I was taking to someone who worked for Imperial (Commonwealth) smelting and asked him if they dumped waste in the river. He freely admitted that they did, but said it was only gypsum, a byproduct of one of their processes. Nearby Albright and Wilson who made some very noxious chemicals, and a fertilizer plant also nearby almost certainly dumped waste in the river. Then only a few weeks ago we watched Michael Sheen’s documentary about the dumping of PCB’s around Wales. It emerged that some of this dangerous waste was being dumped further upstream in the river.
The river bank is wild, and cold winds sweep up the valley forming waves as they blow upstream. Birds gyre and tumble above. The water is bitterly cold, the tide menacing and ignores normal working hours; the mud is thick and glutinous – no place for an easy life. The putchers were emptied at low tide and before the great ecological silence, the salmon were sold locally at a subsistence wage and yet nothing the man said implied that it wasn’t a fulfilling life. Increasing regulation finished what pollution had begun and the only evidence of the practice, the ranks, were left rotting in the mud. I think he was the last one. It still staggers on in the Chepstow side being kept alive by the few remaining licence holders who still practice lave netting.
Elver omelette
Another form of fishing which once provided food was destroyed by industrial poaching and yet more regulation. Our local baker once told me how they would go to some secret spots with nets to catch elvers, baby eels. He described to me in detail the making of elver omelettes: break the eggs and beat them with pepper and salt, tip in the live elvers, cook and eat making sure they’d all stopped wriggling. The perfect breakfast for a young man with a bike and a net who’d been up half the night. But, like wild garlic, black headed gulls’ eggs and wild fungi they represented a lot of money to professional foragers and poachers. The elver population dropped like a stone as they were overfished and sent to Japan as a delicacy. Incidentally the baker, Brian, was one of the few remaining people alive who knew where and when to cross the Severn in the shallows somewhere around Arlingham.
I can see Brian now; a Severnsider to the core getting up at four am every day to make bread for the village. He began his career as a baker by making deliveries with a horse and cart as far away as Oldbury on Severn. He would slip away when the shop was opened by his wife – who came from the forest of Dean across the river – and take his dogs for a walk wearing a Loden cloth jacket and a cloth cap. In the winter he would go rough shooting with Les, the funeral director. He didn’t say much but what he did say had deep roots. The rooted people in the community were its soul; families going back generations and who, as you walked further upstream, would sometimes offer a hint of Welsh in their accents. The river is also a border – the border, porous, without barriers and gun emplacements or men in fatigues but when you cross the M48 bridge you soon realize you’re in another country.
