A BOOK OF FISHING STORIES 



rich arable farms there are often deep glens or little ravines 

 cut by the streamlets running through them. The sides of 

 these glens are usually waste ground, growing gorse, fern, or 

 perhaps coppice, once regularly cut in rotation for hurdles, 

 firing, or the tannery, but now practically valueless, owing to 

 the general use of wire fencing, modern methods of baking, 

 and the substitution of chemicals for oak bark. In any one of 

 such glens or combes it requires very simple engineering to 

 construct a series of pools which, varying in extent and depth 

 according to the contour of the ground, will yield excellent 

 sport when stocked with trout. In pastoral and moorland 

 regions the difficulties to be encountered are much slighter. 

 There are tens of thousands of acres in the northern counties 

 of Great Britain yielding an annual rent of no more than six- 

 pence an acre. The annual value of such land is a negligible 

 quantity. Create a lake of lOO acres in extent, and the loss of 

 grazing rent is only fifty shillings per annum. Add to that the 

 interest and sinking fund at 6| per cent, on the cost of con- 

 structing the necessary dam, which, in broken and undulating 

 ground, will seldom exceed ^(^500, and you have to meet an 

 annual charge of ,(^35, whereof ^{^32, 10^. will be wiped out in 

 thirty years, leaving a permanent loss of ^^2, los. representing 

 the former grazing rent. It will go hard if, considering the 

 clamant demand for good fishing, you fail to recoup yourself 

 handsomely for the outlay. 



But this is an ambitious scheme ; a lake of 100 acres is a 

 large sheet of water. Operations on a much humbler scale 

 will ensure sport where now there is none. Think of the 



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