SPORT ANCIENT AND MODERN 



position while wending his way towards the 

 banks, where he will emerge as the perfect 

 winged fly. 



The creeper is fixed upon two hooks 

 mounted above one another and back to back 

 upon a strand of gut, and the bait is cast up 

 stream mostly in thin water, sometimes only 

 six inches deep, and so long as the creeper 

 season lasts the fish will scarcely look at ought 

 else. 



Later on, should the water be favourable, 

 nice baskets of trout may be killed with the 

 olive and the blue duns when the sun is off 

 the water, but when June arrives, trouting is 

 mostly confined to early and late hours, and 

 those who do not object to night-fishing can 

 make good bags with the ' bustard ' (or 

 artificial moth) in warm weather. 



As a matter of fact, most of the proprietors 

 and lessees do not fish the Eden hard for trout, 

 and generally give it up when they have 

 creeled a dozen or so, but upon a few occasions 

 I have tried out of curiosity to see what I 

 could do, and in 1902 in the week or two 

 previous to Whitsun-week, I killed in three 

 days forty-seven, fifty, and fifty-six trout, 

 averaging over ^ Ib. apiece, and also returned 

 to the river ten to twelve a day, but the 

 conditions in each instance were exception- 

 ally favourable. 



The fifty-six trout were killed on the Friday 

 before Whitsun Day ; they weighed 32 Ib., 

 and were caught in heavy rain between the 

 hours of 1 1.30 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. 



In June, July and August the sea-trout 

 and herling ascend the Cumberland rivers, but 

 these sharp-sighted fish do not take well in the 

 daytime. They show excellent sport in the 

 summer evenings and nights. 



In the Derwent and in the other rivers of 



the west coast of Cumberland there is really 

 no spring run of salmon. These fish make 

 their appearance in June and July and afford 

 good sport into September. By the end of 

 September in Cumberland the summer salmon 

 fishing and sea-trout fishing are practically 

 over, and the brown-trout are getting soft in 

 condition ; thus in this county the angler's 

 remaining chance of sport with the rod is 

 centred in the ' back-end ' salmon fishing, 

 which entirely depends upon the rainfall. 



In an autumn attended by continual rain I 

 have known excellent sport enjoyed on the 

 Eden with fresh-run clean fish, but for the 

 last four or five years very few of such have 

 ascended the river to any distance above 

 Carlisle until after the annual close-time has 

 commenced. With 16 November the close- 

 time for the latest of the Cumberland rivers 

 commences, and the rods are laid aside until 

 the winter's floods shall have scoured the 

 river's banks and bed of summer growth and 

 have obliterated the angler's footprints from 

 the waterside. 



The river Eden with its excellent tribu- 

 taries, headed by such grand lakes as Ulles- 

 water and Haweswater, is a system peculiarly 

 constituted by nature to provide the necessities 

 of a successful salmon fishery, and the area 

 at the command of fish could be vastly 

 increased at comparatively small expense. 

 In the year 1900 a hatchery was erected 

 near Armathwaite by private subscription of 

 some few riparian owners and lessees. The 

 house and ponds were constructed so as to 

 hatch out 500,000 ova, and rear the resulting 

 product, and since that date it has continued 

 to do good work ; the enterprise should soon 

 increase the number of adult fish which ascend 

 the river. 



COURSING 



Until the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century there does not appear to have been 

 any public coursing in Cumberland. 1 Owners 

 of greyhounds ran friendly matches on each 

 other's lands, but the sport was in no sense 

 organized nor was there any breeding record 

 kept. It is very difficult, therefore, except in 



1 One of the earliest references to greyhounds in 

 Cumberland appears to be in the Pipe Rolls (see 

 V.C.H. Cumb. i. 389), where it is stated that in 

 the fourth year of the reign of King John, Allan 

 Wastehouse received a sum of 109 I5/. SJ. as 

 the wages for eighteen months of himself and four 

 attendants. This included the care of a stud of 

 ten dogs, called 'leporarii.' Greyhounds under 

 one name or another, such as ' canes de mota,' 



very few cases, to trace a dog's pedigree back 

 to the end of the eighteenth century. The 

 literature of the sport commenced in 1828 

 with a book published by Mr. Thomas Good- 

 lake, a south country enthusiast, and annual 

 records were initiated by Mr. Thomas Thacker 

 in 1840 and continued by him for some years. 



' currentes canes,' etc., are not unfrequently men- 

 tioned in the early historical records of Cumber- 

 land. A search through the Monastic Chartularies, 

 Close Rolls and Forest Eyre Rolls relating to the 

 county might be worth the labour to those accus- 

 tomed to such investigation. For instance, grey- 

 hounds, locally known as ' strakurs,' were used by 

 Cumberland sportsmen for poaching hares on the 

 king's demesnes as early as 1287. 



469 



