The Traditional Fisherman's Forum

A new boat marina is being built on the Trent and Mersey canal near Billinge in Cheshire. While it is nice that the canal is being developed, for me there is a twinge of sadness about this new boat yard. It is being placed exactly on top of where I first learned to catch carp with my Dad as a young boy.

The area was known locally as The Graveyard, for in the middle of a shallow bay created by a cut out bank lay an old barge that had been abandoned and left to rust away. Apparently there had been more boats at one time, but the others had been removed by the powers that be. However they left one for the birds to roost on. I remember fishing there as a boy and watching the geese coming in to roost as the sun went down, behind the near by barn of the dairy farm whose land we fished on.

Today it is a noisy building site. I could hear the works going on, so I went for a walk down the tow path for a nosy. This is what I saw a few weeks ago. The bay has been made wider and work has obviously begun on making it deeper too. There are cranes on the far bank and a gravel road has been put in to link the boat yard with near by country lanes.


The remains of the old, floating barge with a digger in the background. I'm sure it will be gone soon and with the new boat yard there will be a new name. I'll keep calling it the Graveyard though and I'm sure other anglers will too, much to the puzzlement of the boaters.




This is just one of the carp I have a photograph of. Although I didn't know it at the time it was caught using the best traditional methods. A rod, a reel, a hook and floating crust. Nothing else. At this age I knew of no other way to catch a carp. This was taken somewhere around 2002, I think.



This part of the canal is close to the famous Anderton Boat Lift - the only working boat lift the the whole of England and Wales. It links the Trent and Mersey canal with the largely navigable River Weaver. The canal therefore sees a lot of summer traffic and I'm sure there is demand for moorings.

The boat lift:





Things change though and we must be accepting of this. For a year or two the far bank has not been available to anglers as the farmer got fed up with some of the less considerate ones. I got used to that. I'm sure I'll do the same when the boat yard is finished. But I will always have the memories of "The Graveyard" as it used to be and my first few carp no matter what happens to the space where it once existed.

That photo of you was taken in 2002 ? Holyshamoly but I feel old ! !

I wonder if they will allow fishing in the new marina ?

I like that boat lift, what a wonderful piece of engineering.

Nice post there MD, I enjoyed that a lot.

Thanks both.

Back on '02 that boat still had a cabin on the back. It's all but gone now, as you can see in the photograph.

I used to fish this place for eels in the early 1980's when I was active in the National Anguilla Club and if my memory serves me correctly they were many rotting longboats that must have been abandoned there when the commercial trade on the canals ended in 1960's.I cannot remember connecting with any big eels but it was a perfect habitat for eels to thrive in.Probably non there now.

Penninelad wrote:I used to fish this place for eels in the early 1980's when I was active in the National Anguilla Club and if my memory serves me correctly they were many rotting longboats that must have been abandoned there when the commercial trade on the canals ended in 1960's.I cannot remember connecting with any big eels but it was a perfect habitat for eels to thrive in.Probably non there now.

There are eels in the Weaver, PL. I think I caught six from the river its self and one from a pool very close by this year. I've never had one out of the canal, but I don't fish it much these days.

You're too young to have nostalgia

Nice post.

Dave Burr wrote:You're too young to have nostalgia

Nice acccount MD. Enjoyed reading that

That's a very nice account and some good pictures. Sad in many ways though when you look back at these sort of memories and then see the effect of 'progress'.
I too used to fish the Trent & Mersey canal during the late 60s but the section that I fished was in South Derbyshire near Barrow on Trent. In those days I remember there were Roach, Bream, Perch and Pike. The secret for decent Perch was to fish right up by the bank where there was an 'undercut' caused by the boat traffic in those days. The perch used to lurk under there virtually at your feet and they were decent too, about 1 to 2 lbs. One of those was the very first fish caught with my then new Mk IV Avon. I used to have a picture but it's long lost now. I don't know what it's like there these days but at least from Google Maps it looks about the same.