There is a photograph of me – taken by my grandmother – kneeling with my first salmon.  I must have been about twelve and look absurdly young and pleased with myself.  The fish was caught on a hot August day when no one else bothered fishing – I was so mad keen then I would have gone on casting in an earthquake!

            That was six decades ago.  A lot has changed since then – for instance the kneeling is tricky – but the river is still the Eden and I still walk the bank from which I got that salmon, and the water is as thrilling to me now as it was then.

            At some time in almost every year of those sixty years I have come back to the Eden and its gorgeous younger sister of a stream, the Eamont, to fish for trout and – less often – for the salmon.  It’s something of a cliché, but those clear waters have flowed through my fishing life.  I have cast a line in many parts of the world, from Chile to Russia, from the Zambezi to the Arctic rivers of Iceland.  But none of those exotic destinations is so dear to me or means as much to me as the green valley through which the Eden seeks the sea.

            If I close my eyes I can see all the beloved places – the bubbling run past the willows above Udford on the Eamont, Watersmeet where the two streams come together and where the salmon rest, the bottom of the Carnatic, where big trout rise between the rocks to sip minute flies almost imperceptibly and where, one night some years ago, a monster broke my cast and my heart with it – these and so many more.  And beyond the railway line that runs along the side of the valley rises the great, long mass of Crossfell, the great bare ridge that shapes the weather that is such a determining influence on life in these northern parts.

            I trust I will have a few more years active service beside and in the Eden, and when I am too decrepit to totter along any more in my waders, I will sit and relive all those indescribably precious memories in my mind’s eye.