In March 2023, the distinguished writer Adam Nicolson told a rapt audience in Cambridge about a recent encounter with chalk-stream salmon. Owned by Everyone is hugely grateful to Adam for sharing his account of that strange meeting, which is published here for the first time.

When salmon at sea in the English Channel come near the coast, making their way back to breed after their years out in the feeding grounds of the North Atlantic, they taste the river waters to which they are drawn. Most seem relatively unchoosy: there is little genetic distinction between those that go to rivers in the far south-west of England and those that head across the Channel to Brittany or Normandy. For those fish, it seems, almost any river will do. 

But there is one group that is different. Almost without exception the salmon born in the rivers that have flowed over the chalk of southern England will not enter a river of any other kind. It is chalk water that draws them in and as a result chalk-stream salmon are genetically distinct from all others, their uniqueness preserved by this habit of constancy and a life-long commitment to the wonders of the chalk stream. 

Imprinted in their memories are all the qualities of their particular water: alkaline, full of dissolved minerals but with almost no sediment load, reaching the sea over many miles of clean flint gravel bed, derived from springs that emerge from deep aquifers in the rock, running through valleys fringed with water mint and water forget-me-not, often thick with life-sheltering weed, not subject to the flashes and surges of rivers that run over harder rocks, but flowing steadily south through the parklands, villages and water meadows of the English chalk country.

At Testwood, on the outskirts of Southampton, the River Test, the greatest, most famous and most expensive of all England’s chalk streams, reaches saltwater. Beneath the overhanging alders, the tide floods in from the estuary and comes up against the pilings of the reinforced banks. Any migratory fish are held in the pool below the river hatches, waiting for the water to rise. Only as it comes to the top of the tide will they make their way upstream into the channels of the river itself. 

Peter Farrow, the Head River Keeper here, lives with his family beside the pool in the kind of perfect red brick Regency cottage Jane Austen would have felt happy in.  ‘It is the best ghillie’s house in the country,’ he says. ‘Even now I still pinch myself thinking I’m in a dream. And someone’s paying me to do this.’

As we sat drinking his tea, sea-trout fresh in from the Atlantic were coming up and out of the water beside us and smacking back on to the surface of the pool.  What do you feel when you hear that? I asked him. ‘I’m at home,’ he laughed. ‘When I first came here, I remember it was June. It was a hot night and that top corner room there, that was my bedroom at the time. I had the window open, the tide came up like this. This still quietness. Just like this. And then you hear it: b-dash, b-dash, b-dash. The fish were jumping all over the place. It was bouncing. I had to shut the window because they were keeping me up.’

Beside the only place in England where wild sea fish migrating inland have a way of interrupting a good night’s sleep, Peter showed me his salmon: deep in the pool, a few feet down, four or five cool, silvery-white bodies, their backs just darkened, each about three foot from head to tail, waiting for the tide. Sea-formed, swaying creatures, their muscled bodies wafting in the current below the hatches. Each of them 12 pounds or so, born in the chalk waters and now returning to them. 

Adam Nicolson has written books about places, poetry and history. He is married with five children and lives on a small farm in Sussex. One recent book, Life Between the Tides, described his making of three small rockpools on the coast of Argyll and the lives of some of the creatures that came to occupy them; another, How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, was published in 2023. Adam’s article on chalk streams appears in the May 2024 issue of National Geographic Magazine.

By way of postscript, Adam writes: ‘I do know that if England itself were ever to wear a crown, it would be made of chalk-stream water.’