A photograph that turned up in the Bideford and District Community Archive shows a man and a fish. The man has a late 1960s hairstyle, with a fringe and his hair growing over his ears. It’s reminiscent of the early Beatles and he’s wearing an arran pattern sweater – very fashionable at the time. The fish is a large salmon caught at Torrington. Are such fish still caught in the Torridge? 

As so often happens, people working on projects at the Archive set off to find one thing and then investigate another because the collection has such a range of interesting local stories.

It turns out that in 1933 there were twenty-two salmon boats and thirty-six licences at Appledore permitting netting from sites around the beaches in the estuary. In the 1960s Torridge salmon were still being despatched to top London restaurants by train from Bideford station. But the number of salmon was in decline and so were the salmon boats. When the threat to salmon stocks became critical, the National Rivers Authority further reduced licences before imposing a total fishing ban between 1990-1995. 

A survey carried out by the West Country Rivers Trust in 2018 showed salmon were still spawning in the Torridge and its tributaries. Good densities of salmon fry and parr were found at breeding sites on the Rivers Lew and Okement, near Hatherleigh. However, the upper reaches of the Torridge itself were found to be less well populated. Can improving water quality help reverse this deterioration in fish stocks? A Biosphere water quality monitor on the River Umber in Combe Martin provides real time information on water quality, including the bacterial load. They plan to install one on the Torridge Bridge. 

But water quality may not be the whole story. In the 1950s salmon fisherman ‘Captain’ Jack Pile, from East the Water recalled earlier stories of deep ‘pits’ in the river downstream of Bideford Bridge. Here the salmon could ‘lay-up’ waiting for the tide before migrating upstream to spawn. He claimed it was building the Ironbridge at Landcross when the railway extended to Torrington that changed the river. The pits became filled with mud and sediment – and the salmon, well there were less of them. Storm overflows and pollution in our rivers has been back in the news recently. More water quality data will be valuable but it might not bring back the fish.