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Bridge of Sighs
Curiously enough: Bridge of sighs
An inveterate bridge leaner, I have leant over hundreds of bridges - and some perhaps a hundred or more times. From an early age I learnt to stop and approach a bridge quietly. Seldom is there disappointment when you peer over. There’s usually something. A water bird, a wren in the bushes, insects dancing or just cattle browsing. Sometimes fish. Startle any of them and the show can be over before it begins.
Apparently we are all - plants and animals - made of water and seek it out inexorably. So, I’m answering to a deep call when I halt by to slake my curiosity.
My favourite bridge is right in the middle of the Vale of Towy. Cilsane, often called Golden Grove, bridge is a stunning viewpoint. You can see Dynevor castles old and new, Dryslwyn castle, Paxton’s Tower, Gelli Aur, Grongar hill and, distantly, Carmarthenshire’s Vans towering above Llyn-y-fan Fach. And, as local poet Dudley G Davies nicely observed, ‘hills [that] in their arms hold many quiet white-walled farms’.
Some of the curious things I have seen there in recent years include a strangle-hold fight to the death of a huge eel and a cormorant; a mother mink trans-locating her young from one breakwater to another; a monster dead lamprey that was not to Mr Otter’s taste and, three weeks ago, a duck goosander with a crèche of between fifteen and twenty ducklings dodging the shadows.
A winter or so back three crows were feasting on a bag of pheasants that some block-head ‘sportsman’ had tossed over the bridge on the last day of the shooting season. Saddest of all, waving from the pool, a German Shepherd dog tied with a rope to a concrete block and executed by drowning.
A happier occasion was in February this year, the river running brown in spate, I detected a movement below the bridge that could have indicated a migrating fish, and a pretty big one. Another similar water boil upstream and my supposed salmon revealed himself as Mr otter, working the depths.
So intent was I that I had not noticed the arrival by my side of a young cyclist. ‘Have you ever seen an otter?’ I whispered. He had not. ‘Look there, beside the right bank ... See?’ Otty did another upside-downy, and looked our way as he crossed towards the withies. Pure delight lit face of this young lad, a reflection of long ago.
The cormorant, by the way, won the battle - after some twenty minutes, the giant eel writhing in that gruesome gullet.
Remembering ‘long ago’ at Cilsane bridge, you would scarcely believe the crowds that gathered there on summer evenings after the war - often twenty or more - ‘to see the fish’. Though petrol rationing was in force until May 1950, it did not deter those who owned motor cars from ‘going out for a run.’ Long before the hypnosis of television.
Upstream, the river would be paved with sewin (sea-trout) lying in shoals, hundreds flashing their sides. Sewin are year-old native brown trout that decide to migrate to sea. They are usually females.
Downstream, below the bridge at the head of the deep pool, aimed like dark torpedoes, would be salmon, patiently awaiting the chill of autumn, while the entire surface of the river as far as the eye could see was livid with activity. Scarcely was there a square foot of water not agitated in rings by sip-feeding, rising or splashing trout, and occasionally the plunge of a majestic salmon. The place was alive with fish.
GWR freight records provide an accurate account of the quantities of net-caught salmon exported from Carmarthenshire to Billingsgate, Bristol, Birmingham and elsewhere in Victorian times.
The 42 coracle nets at Carmarthen and St Clears, and the 22 seines at Ferryside and Llanstephan considered 1883 an above-average year for salmon catches. From Carmarthen Junction alone, 24 tons 2cwt of salmon were sent away in boxes by rail, 20 tons from Ferryside and a comparable amount from Kidwelly. These fish averaged 11.25 lbs weight.
Only the best third of the total catch was graded for export. Sewin did not keep, and were not in demand. So the estimated total number of fish netted is in the region of 200,000 - allowing for under-reporting, pole-net and coracle netting from Cilycwm down to tidal waters, and wholesale poaching activities by individuals and organised gangs who were reported as ‘setting the river alight’.
Minutes of the Carmarthen Bay District Board of Conservators, 1884, provide a glimpse of rod-caught fish:
121 salmon and 91 sewin at Llandilo and about 100 salmon from the Cothi. Also, an estimated 60,000 salmon peal called ‘samlets’ (long thought to be a separate species) were hooked out annually by trout anglers – boys and ladies in particular – further depleting future salmon populations.
How the fishery managed to sustain such unremitting exploitation, and keep on providing a renewed harvest, is a mystery. But stocks did steadily decline.
After both World wars fish numbers were noted to have risen again for lack of fishing. In 1946 the nets took out 4,900 lbs of salmon (450 fish) and 19,800 lbs of sewin (average 2.5 lbs). Rods took 419 salmon and an estimated 11,000 sewin.
In 2009, catch returns from nets and rods for the Towy fishery as a whole amounted to 427 salmon and about 3,000 sewin. Nowadays a high percentage of rod caught salmon are released back into the river, as are some of the bigger sewin.
Catch returns and estimates are perverse river stock assessments. How many fish escape human and other predation is hard to guess unless you can see the fish and count them.
So far this year I have not seen a single fish take up station or break the surface at Cilsane bridge. For me it has become a bridge of sighs.
-o0o-
Lynn Hughes
July, 2010.
Published in the Carmarthen Journal