I had forgotten just how much I love this river. Must be over fifteen years, maybe more, since I last fished here and I’m so happy to be back and away from the madness that is modern carp fishing. Not expecting too much this afternoon on my first visit back, more of an exploratory mission, and the water is carrying quite a bit of colour, but I’m just grateful to be here.

I was chatting with a friend, trying to recollect when we first fished the river and I think it was probably the very late nineties, early noughties. I was formally introduced to it by another friend who had moved down there to work on a renovation project on a beautiful house right on the river’s edge; THAT house. Naturally, the allure of the river brought a fairly steady flow of visitors, and amongst the many late nights spent under the influence and the various nonsense that came with that, including highly entertaining rounds of ‘lure fishing’ on the front lawn with a laser pen for highly strung border collies (that’s another story entirely), regular daytime sorties were made to various different stretches above and below the house in search of barbel.

Before that, I can’t remember exactly where I first heard of the Avon, but you can fairly well guarantee that anyone with even a passing interest in fishing would have read about it in one of the regular angling papers.

And today, on a dry day at the end of September, it looks as fine as I ever remember it.