Country diary: Lave net fishing is a tradition in trouble

Martin Morgan with his lave net. Photograph: Gwyneth LewisView image in fullscreenMartin Morgan with his lave net. Photograph: Gwyneth LewisCountry diary: Lave net fishing is a tradition in troublePortskewett, Monmouthshire: For hundreds of years this has been a method of catching salmon in the Severn’s churning waters. I visit one of the few fishermen still going

Every time I cross the new Severn Bridge leaving Wales, I check the state of the tide, using a buoy in the middle of the channel. I learned to sail in these cocoa-coloured waters of the Bristol Channel, with its ferocious tidal range (the distance between low and high water) the second highest in the world. You can’t work against these currents, you can only cooperate.

Today I get down to sea level itself, to meet Martin Morgan. He’s secretary of the Black Rock Lave Net Fishery, started by his great-grandfather over 100 years ago, and has known these grounds between the two Severn crossings since childhood. He’s fished the Grandstand, the Hole and the Gruggy, all using a traditional method of netting salmon – lave nets.

View image in fullscreenMartin Morgan among a group lave net fishing in the River Severn in 2015. Photograph: Graham Turner/The GuardianOutside the fishery’s fascinating museum, Martin shows me one of these wonderful contraptions. It’s a foldable Y-shaped frame, with a horseshoe-shaped net strung between the arms. The fisherman uses the rock staff (handle) to feel his way into the channel, then, using a yoke made of pine, opens the arms (or rimes), constructed from pollarded willow. Putting the net down into the ebbing tide, the fisherman threads his fingers into the mesh, feeling for vibrations of trapped mullet, flounder or salmon.

The season finished in August and Martin, one of only a few remaining lave net fishermen, is despondent about the fishery’s future. They are, he says, “hanging on to this ancient fishery and all it represents with our fingertips”.

The craft has been practised here since the 1600s, but with declining stocks, tightening legislation and a lack of young people to take skills forward, it has dropped 80% since 2020. No salmon have been caught since 2019. Martin feels that increasingly severe Natural Resources Wales regulation is throttling a sustainable practice, and is aimed at the wrong target. He adds that salmon numbers here won’t rebound “until our rivers become a place where these fish can thrive”.

Out on the Severn, the silt from time to time reveals putchers, cones woven from hazel and willow – remnants of how salmon used to be caught. We look over the churning waters as the traffic roars above. Martin’s sadness at this ending is painful to witness.