The day another magical slice of old England died: GRIFF RHYS JONES laments Britain's last eel fisherman hanging up his traps
Lost art: Peter Carter with one of his wicker traps
Eelomaniac, eelophile, fanaticeel... whatever the word is, I am potty about eels. Their rich, fatty meat is delicious. You can stew it, smoke it, fry it or serve it in jelly and I’ll gobble it up.
I even have a 4ft-long eel with glinting eyes, stuffed and mounted in a box above my dining table, where it terrifies my guests.
So the news this week that Peter Carter, the last professional eel fisherman in England, is to stop laying down his hand-crafted traps made me deeply sad. This is a tradition that stretches back 5,000 years, to the Bronze Age in Britain — and now it has ended in 2016.
No one can blame Peter. He was a loyalist to the last but, as he said: ‘It breaks my heart but I can’t live on empty pockets. So the last wicker eel hive and grigg [his traps] have been lifted from the river. I will not be making any more.’
As it happens, I once went fishing with Peter. I was filming a series called Rivers for BBC1, about seven years ago, and we punted out on his boat across the Cambridgeshire Fens to collect the hives and griggs, which are woven from willow.
The griggs are made to an ingenious design dating back at least 1,000 years, like giant raffia bottles: the eels can swim in but they can’t get out.
For bait, he used the smelliest meat he could find — road-kill was most effective, and the full moon and new moon were the best time for catching the eels. Don’t ask me why — it’s an eel mystery!
Even then, Peter told me that he could make as much money weaving traps as decorations for tourists to buy, as he could from fishing. And there was no guarantee, as we poled across the shallow waters, that we would find a single elver — a baby eel — that night.
Back in the Eighties, Peter reckoned, he could scoop 150lb of eels out of the river in one night. Now, he was lucky to gather 50lb in an entire month.
Little wonder that he was the last man scraping a living at this age-old job... though as a boy, he said, there had been so many rival fishermen on the Fens that they would bribe him with bags of sweets to sabotage each other’s traps and let the eels out.
Peter wasn’t the only eel fisherman I’ve known. We have a house somewhere on the muddy border between Suffolk and Essex, and not far from our place there lived a grand old man who was the harbour-master of the nearby creek.
This marvellously determined chap would go out on his flat-bottomed boat with eel traps and a blunderbuss, because he was one of only two people round our way licensed to use a duck punt gun.
At dusk, once the ducks had settled down to roost in the reeds, he would stuff his shotgun, which looked like a cross between a cannon and a tuba, with all sorts of metal fragments — tin tacks, ball bearings, shrapnel of every kind.
He would fire it off with a tremendous bang, which, apparently, sent his boat skimming backwards at about 20mph, and then he’d spend the rest of the night emptying his eel traps and splashing around looking for dead ducks. He’d come home with a boat piled high with eels and feathers.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3412857/The-day-magical-slice-old-England-died-GRIFF-RHYS-JONES-laments-Britain-s-eel-fisherman-hanging-traps.html#ixzz3yAIJMJOu
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