"It will take a thousand years for the river to return to something like what it was" he said, "with its deep pools where fish could lie, its fast runs of shallow water over the shingle here and there, and above all, its diversity." Perhaps, looking at it on one of the better evenings, he meant thousands of years. For in some places it has been dropped down into a deep trench of something like nine feet. In other countries, too, the result of modern arterial drainage has been merely to present new problems, while spoiling the amenities of so many miles of lovely waterway.
In one part of Switzerland, they are busy reversing, or trying to reverse, futile engineering. One small part of a river system was actually confined within a narrow concrete channel. That is now being broken up. In England they suffer, according to many accounts, from, too much abstraction of water by the water boards.
And it is not only anglers who complain. How would you like the stream in which your children paddle or even swim in summer, to vanish suddenly? It happens.
Anyway, walking the other night, good balmy night along a portion of a small tributary of the Boyne system, some 15 years after the machines moved out, it was good to see some life.
Nearly dark, and where there used to be a deep hole at a 90 degree turn taken by the river, there came the dimpling of a fly landing, followed by a circle, the glimpse of a neb and a slurp as a trout took its prey.
There are few fish now, and they are more than modest in size, but not a mink has been seen for a year or two.
Kingfishers still build nearby. The Dipper, too.
The homeliest of birds. And flycatchers spiral and flip over the water, marvellously adept. Some return to flowering of the ranunculus. No recent sighting of the lamprey.
But, in spite of everything, the salmon still mounts the stream in November, and is carefully noted and documented by our devoted Fisheries Officers aided by the best of local advice from Gerry Farrell and such worthies as Peter Strong. Alder spreads like the dandelion. Willow, ash and oak, Douglas fir, the elder, and the eternal hawthorn. What more do you want on a June/July stilly night? Well, to see what healing has gone on in a thousand years from now.