River Darent, Kent

I turned off the M25 motorway which divides Greater London and Kent and followed a narrow lane east, past warehouses and factories, and wondered if my satellite navigation had made an error. I crested a rise when suddenly the road fell away before me, and I witnessed the most magnificent vista of verdant valley and hills rolling into the distance. Early morning sunlight drenched the land in a crisp, golden focus. I marvelled at how an oasis of bucolic splendour could be hidden so near to the creeping sprawl of London. I couldn't yet see it, but a chalkstream flowed north in the valley below, my prize for the day thanks to a winning Wild Trout Trust auction bid. 

I dropped down the gradient in a low gear until I reached the valley floor and followed the river upstream. The narrow lane took me beneath an impressive Victorian viaduct and then on towards the ruins of a Roman villa dating from 80AD. I arrived half an hour before my scheduled meeting time, and whilst I waited for my host to join me, I watched the river flow lazily over red gravels and flowering ranunculus in the direction of the River Thames at Dartford. A fish rose in the shade of a pool about 30 metres downstream from the bridge I was standing on. My hopes began to swell. 

Phil Chamberlain of the Darent Valley Fly Fishers was my host for the day. The club has a waiting list of several years, so the occasion presented a rare opportunity to sample a relatively unknown and very private chalkstream. The river might be somewhat unheralded now, but there was a time in the 19th century when the Darent ranked among the most famous chalkstreams in England. More about that later.  

The Morning Session

Phil and I walked to the bottom of the beat, to a point just downstream of the viaduct. Phil considerately left me to my devices after telling me about the water ahead and the typical holding lies occupied by fish. I could see several chub in the water, together with a trout, jostling among the weeds, and my second drift of an olive shrimp was taken by a fish. When the fish breached the surface I saw flanks of silver scales and knew it to be a chub. It was 7 inches long and by some margin smaller than the other chub I had seen. Still, it was great to start with some action, and I took it as a promising sign for the remainder of the day.

Almost beneath the arches of the viaduct my attention was drawn to a screeching in the sky above me. I looked up to see a brown medium sized raptor flying off with what looked to be a nestling in its clutches. It was likely a sparrowhawk, having just raided a nest, perhaps sited in the greenery growing from the cracks in the brickwork just below the lip of the railway line. Nature can be cruel, but it was a fascinating sighting nonetheless.

Phil and I diligently worked up the rest of the beat, playing hopscotch. Phil would talk me through a pool or run with his near decade of Darent experience, and then leave me to it, whilst he went off to fish upstream, beating his way through chest high nettles and pretty yellow flag irises. Then I would overtake him and leave him with enough water to catch up to me. As the morning progressed and the day warmed the realisation sunk in that the fishing certainly wasn't easy. Neither of us elicited any interest from trout, whilst I seemed to be plagued by small chub. There was a smattering of mayfly about, but I didn't see a rise. Phil captured it best when he said we seem to have skipped spring in 2021 and launched straight into summer. 

I fished a nymph through some terrific looking water but oddly felt no resistance other than the occasional tug of weed. After about 90 minutes my fortunes were to change when I approached a shaded pool, where a depression in the gravel had been scoured by the current of a sweeping bend. Phil pointed it out and said a trout would normally sit in the spot, and he wasn't wrong. My line straightened in the sweet spot and a good sized trout of perhaps 1½ lbs leapt clear of the water when I struck. Disappointingly, the hook dislodged as the fish  thudded back to the water with a splash. My first trout from Kent would have to wait.

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait very long. When I ventured around the next bend in the river, I spotted Phil fishing some 30 metres upriver. A fast section of 'streamy' water lay between me and him where currents billowed and raced over the gravels between the white flowering ranunculus. It was a pretty chalkstream scene in the bright sunlight. I focused on the currents against the banks, where a slight colour to the water belied an inviting depth, but initially had no joy. I approached the head of the run where the club had erected a wooden post to ease entry and departure from the water, where Phil would have entered the water. I assumed any fish in the vicinity would have been spooked by his earlier presence, and almost as an afterthought before leaving the water I flicked my nymph into a small gutter of gravel between weeds. I was taken aback when the nymph was grasped by a fish, and overjoyed when I managed to net it. The moment marked my first success from the county of Kent, and from a chalkstream to boot. Phil had mentioned the club stock trout at around 1 lb to supplement the wild head of trout in the river. Stocked fish are distinguished from wild trout by having their adipose fins clipped, and this was the former.

A first trout from the county of Kent

Last cast before lunch

Historic Lunch Venue

When the specifics of my day had been arranged with Phil several weeks ago, I made a booking for lunch at The Lion Hotel in Farningham. The hotel has a very special place in local fishing folklore. The site is listed to date from the 16th century, but it was really in the second half of the 19th century, when rail travel came to the fore, that the Lion Hotel gained fame as having the nearest day ticket stretch of trout fishing to London. Charles Dickens is even said to have visited the hotel to fish the waters of the Darent. 

An account from the Fishing Gazette in 1879 describes a carnival atmosphere amongst the anglers at the hotel but also complains of the hotel water being very over-fished. It describes "rods by the dozen flashing in every direction, wielded by piscators in white straw hats and light tweed suits." Unsurprisingly the accounts from the 1870s describe the trout in the hotel's waters to be "absurdly frightened at the dropping of the fly upon the water, and unreasonably averse to respond to the fisherman's desires". The "spreading chestnut at the edge of the lawn" in 1879 still stands today, and Phil and I enjoyed lunch and a cold beer in its shade, whilst families and pet dogs splashed happily in the river next to us.  

The only great shame is that the photos I have seen of the hotel from the early 1900s show a river in the foreground running with a substantially greater volume than today's flows. Phil told me that parts of the Darent ran dry in the 1970s and 1980s, sucked from the ground by water companies supplying the burgeoning population of London. Fortunately the river is now protected by meagre minimum flow regulations, but it must truly have been quite something to have seen the Darent in full flow in its heyday. 

Steeped in angling history

The Afternoon Session

Fortified by a decent pub lunch, we made our way to the Castle Farm beat in the afternoon, where the river flows through a cattle farm. The banks were mostly bare and trampled by hooves, and very different to the beat we had fished in the morning. We had rather hoped for a decent hatch of mayfly in the afternoon, but it wasn't to be. Small numbers of mayfly showed, but the trout never really seemed to focus on them with any vigour.  Phil fished very well and soon after arrival caught a rainbow trout with a parachute Adams beneath a row of alder trees. Higher up the beat, he caught a fine 17 inch brown trout with a nymph and I could hear the excitement in his voice from my vantage point some way upriver. I continued to catch healthy numbers of small chub, and Phil ordained me the "chub king". 

I heard the purr of bygone engines in the skies and glanced up to see the distinctively curved wings of two Spitfires, flying low and directly overhead in the direction of Biggin Hill, where they are available to be flown by enthusiasts. It felt poignant to witness them flying in the skies of Kent. 

A small section of the beat was fenced off from cattle and the river margin grew pleasingly wild. It was here that I dropped a parachute Adams beneath the branches of a tree on the opposite bank, and watched it snatched barely a second after alighting on the water. I paused a moment before lifting the rod and felt a heavy, pulsating resistance, as line was stripped from my hands and the fish travelled downstream like an express train to where a fence crossed the water to keep the cattle out. I couldn't allow the fish to travel beneath the fence, so I added pressure to the line. Sadly, the line went limp and I was left to rue the loss of what felt a tremendous fish. In truth, the creep of despondency began to grow in me, for the end of the beat was in sight, and I felt hot and tired, and had nothing to show for my efforts in the afternoon. 

I would have thought the entire pool disturbed from the hooking of the previous fish, but somewhat remarkably a trout rose in the same real estate of the pool, no more than 3 metres from where I stood partially concealed by reeds and nettles. It was a lazy but assured rise, the sort reserved for big, confident trout. I observed its entire length from head to tail arc in the motion of fluid gracefulness before it settled about half a foot beneath the surface where I could see its silhouette. I couldn't believe my eyes. I cast the parachute Adams in front of the trout and watched as it casually rose and took the fly. I paused a second and struck, and prayed that this fish didn't have the same designs on a downstream escape beneath the fence. I played it hard, anxious to net it, and despaired when my initial efforts to net the beast were hindered by my net being too small! The trout entered the folds of my net on the second attempt when I exhaled in relief. By now Phil had joined me and excitedly said it was the best fish he had witnessed with his own eyes from the Darent. Phil produced a measuring tape and we measured the trout at 19 inches. My conversion chart suggests a weight of 2 lb 11oz for a brown trout of this length in good (but not fat) condition. It truly was the perfect moment to cap off my day on the Darent. My attention was drawn to its evident adipose fin and Phil and I dared to dream it was a wild trout, but on closer inspection the fin had an unnaturally straight edge. I suspect they must grow like fingernails and that this was a stocked fish which had seen a winter or two in the river.  

It had been a challenging day of fishing, presenting the perfect evidence of the fickle nature of trout. My tally of two fish may have been modest in volume, but it was rich in hard-won reward. I draw comfort from the words of William Senior, who wrote in 1877 of the Darent in his book 'By Stream and Sea' that, "...after the beginning of June, though June and July are probably the best months of the season, the most sensible expectations will be those which are restricted to a very modest limit... the man who can bring away his one or two trout need not mourn over his ill-luck."

My thanks to Phil, who was the most engaging host, and to the Darent Valley Fly Fishers for putting up with an interloper like me, every year, in the aid of a good cause. I was unaware of Farningham and Eynsford, two rural jewels a stone's throw from the frenetic M25 motorway. Both are charming little villages, oozing in history, and I have promised to return to explore them, and to visit the Roman villa, the ruins of the Norman castle at Eynsford and the Tudor manor house at Lullingstone.