Crossing the wet road, I hurry past the agricultural merchant’s yard with its red machinery and silver trailers. The rain drums on my umbrella as I reach the trampled spot on the bank where I can look out over the Tyne. It’s this rain that’s made the river rise, triggering the autumn run of salmon and sea trout below Hexham’s graceful nine-arched stone bridge.
I’m on my own today, but in finer weather it’s a popular place to watch the spectacle of leaping fish. There are two steps to the weir, the first being the greatest hazard as they hurl themselves, bruised, onto the concrete shelf in between. Some choose the easier fish ladder, bounded by concrete walls, its cascading waters ruched like a theatre curtain, but many still press on against the main flow, driven by the urge to spawn high up in the valleys where they were born.
A wren creaks loudly in alarm from a tangle of rose hips. Jackdaws cluster noisily on a ledge of the bridge. Willow leaves, snatched from the trees by the gales, spangle the gravel edges of the downstream island. It’s heaped with rocks, scoured out by flooding, pale tree roots dangling from its torn banks.
The churning falls are mesmerising in their spew and tumble, honey-coloured, beer-coloured, cream and ivory, as I wait for that moment of thrill. Suddenly a fish catapults itself into the air, arcing through the thrumming, spilling weir, powering across the shallows, its body half out of the water like a surfacing submarine. It loses momentum and slides back but then slithers across the concrete to make it up over the second terrace and into the calm above.
Salmon and sea trout are very sensitive to pollution so their numbers show how clean the river is now; about 40,000 make the annual migration. I imagine a sea trout’s journey up the Tyne past Waters Meet, branching there to the South Tyne, then up the smaller East Allen, before narrowing to the little burn by my house, wondering how long it will take to reach the gravel bed where its life began.
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