“The angler is the eyes and ears of the river.”

Tony tells of his life fishing the Taff river, from the days when it could only be fished upstream due to pollution. As the collieries closed the river got cleaner but deposits, such as iron, from old mines still surface in the river. Tony tells of the challenge of getting migratory fish up the river today, due to its past uses, including weirs.

“The anglers are the eyes and the ears of lots of things, on rivers. I grew up in Merthyr Tydfil and my first foray into fishing the river was probably when I was about eleven years of age and, from that point on, I took a real interest in the river. Part of the reason being that, when I started fishing the River Taff, it was basically, you could only fish as far as Merthyr Tydfil. Below that, it was black with coal dust and all the other things from industry which were not really conducive to the fish environment and that. So when I first started, my fishing was curtailed to above Merthyr town. And then gradually, as the years went on, and some of the factories that were put in their effluent into the river started closing, the river, from the town down, started coming that much cleaner again and then, when you came down the lower valley, where the collieries then started closing down, the river became really clean then because it didn’t have the coal dust [the duff?] from the collieries going into the river. I mean, you know, we’ve seen the river, in our area, where we’ve seen the bed is just jet black. But one flood and it’s washed away because it’s all surface sort of thing. I mean, you will still find coal dust, in the river, even today, in some areas. And the one thing that now comes into the river, which is from the old mine workings, is you get the iron water coming out and that actually sometimes still comes out from the bed of the river itself, which goes to show that the mines underground are now fast, rapidly filling up with water and where that water crosses the iron deposits, underground, it comes out as an orange substance. On the Taff, it disappears quite quickly. On some of the Valley Rivers, it doesn’t. It makes them actually go orange for miles.

What we’ve been doing, on the river Ebbw, we’ve been coming over here to improve the rivers for the passage of fish. For more fishes to go up the rivers to spawn. We’re limited on places like the Ebbw because, once you start going down, your water supply drops off rapidly so it’s not conducive, really, to get the fish up here to spawn because, even in the winter, you have those high flows. They can get up here but then there’s hardly any water left for them to spawn in. There’s hardly any depth to water. So our work is to get them up the rivers, as far as we possibly can, by bypassing weirs and improving passage for them and also introducing gravels for them to spawn on. But yes, I suppose it’s the water quality side, I’m coming from, rather than the water quantity. Well, the water quantity side is important because, without the water quantity, you don’t get the water quality. So it’s important that way.”