The Story of a Lost River

Silt Road

The story of an obsession: Charles Rangeley-Wilson goes on a quest to find a hidden river, uncovers our vanished wilderness and the history of an English landscape lost from view

A rich dowsing-out of a lost river and its stories; a passionate pursuit of landscape ghosts.

A work of extraordinary power and resonance

Passionate, persuasive and personal…it is an elegy to a fascinating world of which many of us have lost sight

Superb book… Its story is an acute example of the criminal disregard our nation has had for these remarkable rivers

Silt Road is that rare ting: a book that is able to marry exacting research with imaginative fluency, told in language as pliant and revealing as water

Sometimes fascinating, often very beautiful, occasionally shocking and sombre… Fans of Robert Macfarlane’s Wild Places will love it (5 star review)

Rangeley-Wilson’s historical excursions are fascinating

Captures lyrically the note of melancholy in the English landscape

Through a slightly eclectic mix of historic record and rueful reflection, [Rangeley-Wilson] has crafted a book which joins the elite of angling books; it holds its own among great books, not just angling books

By turns learned and lyrical, this is a great swirl of a book – luminously well written, and as intriguing as a cabinet of curiosities.

Charles Rangeley-Wilson has a lyrical eye for country, the heron-like patience of the experienced waterman, and the flinty cussedness of the first-rate researcher. Silt Road is a captivating elegy for a lost river, and for the lives through which it flowed.

This remarkable account of a venerated and mistreated English chalk stream is a thousand-year-old detective story of rare beauty and brilliant insight, as though John McPhee had channelled Gilbert White.

James R. Babb, Editor, Grays Sporting Journal

The author's passion, underpinned by his deftness of touch, makes the book an utter joy to read

You will be moved and altered by what you read in this groundbreaking book

The language in Silt Road is gorgeous. Throughout the book there are so many fine rhythms – truly musical, poetic beats and phrasing

Henry Hughes, Professor of Literature, Oregon University

Local history raised by water power to the status of allegorical memoir... In searching for the Wye, the author is also looking for something that is 'far more deeply interfused'

The author has a fine eye for the telling detail, and an even finer ear; the human noise which drowns out the gentler sounds  of nature has seldom been anatomised better

This is an intimate exploration of the interaction between humans and landscape down the ages

Charles Rangeley-Wilson is an award-winning writer. He is a passionate conservationist, founder of the Wild Trout Trust and the Norfolk Rivers Trust and advisor to WWF on English chalk streams. He is the author of two books of travel and fishing writing, Somewhere Else and The Accidental Angler, which was also televised by the BBC. His other work for BBC includes the critically acclaimed film Fish! A Japanese Obsession. He lives in Norfolk with his wife and two children.

At the foot of a chalk hill a stream rises in a silent copse, and is soon lost under the car parks and streets of the town its waters once gave life to. Captivated by the fate of this forgotten stream Charles Rangeley-Wilson sets out one winter’s day to uncover its story. 
 
Distilled into the timeless passage of the river’s flow, buried under the pavements that cover meadow, marsh and hill he finds dreamers and visionaries, a chronicle of paradises lost or never found, men who shaped the land and its history.

The Accidental Angler

The breakthrough book by one of the country's finest fishing and travel writers.

Whether battling titantic monsters on a tropical atoll or chasing phantom sea-trout in Southampton, Rangeley-Wilson attains cultural and sociological insights into all manner of people and places.

Charles Rangeley-Wilson ... is fishing's high-priest. To the common passion for the pastime, he adds an exceptional ability to write well...And he has an acerbic eye

He has a good eye for river landscapes and for the otherworldly movements of fish... There's a charm in this woozy prose, which has a knack for snagging interesting turns of phrase

His obsession becomes ours... Compellingly written

Rangeley-Wilson is widely held to be one of the best angling wirters in the country... Adventurous, entertaining and at times bizarre, these stories encompass a vast range of places, people and fish and are enormous fun. The ideal gift for any angler

Charles Rangeley-Wilson is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. As well as having presented BBC TV's The Accidental Angler, he is The Field's fishing correspondent and contributes regularly to Gray's Sporting Journal, America's leading literary outdoor magazine. He was a founder of the Wild Trout Trust, and is the author of one previous book, Somewhere Else. He lives in Norfolk with his wife and two children.

Fishing can take you to the heart of a landscape in a way few other forms of travel can match. Whether in the world's most outlandish and awe-inspiring places or just at the end of your road, fishing will introduce you to crabby weather and crabbier locals, moon-phases, rip-tides, floods, droughts, remarkable tales, and of course fantastic slippery beasts. 
 
In The Accidental Angler you'll battle titanic monsters on a tropical atoll and make-believe sharks on the mushy-peas-and-gravy Wash. You'll chase inscrutable grayling through back gardens in Provence, or phantom sea trout in downtown Southampton. And you'll dance in Brazilian carvinals and find secret rivers hidden beneath the streets. 
 
Join Charles Rangeley-Wilson - angler, conservationist, television presenter and traveller - for the trip of a lifetime, on a journey that will make the familiar new, and the strange familiar.

Somewhere Else

A beautifully crafted, darkly humorous collection of fly-fishing stories destined to become, like Thomas McGuane's The Longest Silence, a classic of the genre.

It's the search for poetry and meaning that moves me the most... [This is]a nice, idiosyncratic work that gave me much enjoyment

At last, some fishing stories with wit, dialogue and characterisation in them. Deft, laconic, and thrilling in places, Charles' wide-ranging debut is a welcome antidote to the Podsnappery of much of the sport's literature: I reckon you could enjoy this book even if you had never picked up a rod

An intense, round-the-world fly-fishing adventure which sucks you in from first page to last... A fine collection of short stories

Charles Rangeley-Wilson is an award-winning writer. He is a passionate conservationist, founder of the Wild Trout Trust and the Norfolk Rivers Trust and advisor to WWF on English chalk streams. He is the author of two books of travel and fishing writing, The Accidental Angler, which was also televised by the BBC and Silt Road: The Story of a Lost River. His other work for BBC includes the critically acclaimed film Fish! A Japanese Obsession. He lives in Norfolk with his wife and two children.

Somewhere Else is a thousand miles away and right next-door. It's where fly-fishing takes you: a place and state of mind. 
 
In fourteen beautifully crafted stories Charles Rangeley-Wilson takes us around the world, from Arctic Quebec to upland Croatia, from the Scottish islands to the Northern Territories, always journeying into the heart of the landscape to meet ordinary, extraordinary people. Somewhere Else is a book about escaping from what you think you know, to find out how things really are.

Charles Rangeley-Wilson

At once history and elegy, Silver Shoals leads its readers from silent lakes to roiling seas in search of the fish on which Britain has always depended. A bracingly recounted and often melancholy quest, ending on a note of optimism.

Rangely-Wilson, an angler and East Anglian, reconnects us though this enjoyable fish-catching pilgrimage to the vast plenty of herring, cod, eel and salmon that once existed around Britain's shores and in our rivers; a plenty which can return to a significant extent if more people are conscious of that past, understand its lessons and take the common-sense steps necessary to bring abundance back again.

A wonderful and important book, that from its first pages draws the reader along on a fascinating, gripping, often funny journey. It binds this wide, wise book too tightly, I think, to call it "nature writing" (whatever that is these days anyway). Many kinds of writing shoal together here - cultural history, natural history, travelogue, ecology, politics - to form a brilliant and glittering whole.

[Charles Rangeley-Wilson] summarises the individual fish biographers with wonderful clarity while also managing to illuminate how gloriously entangled his subjects are with human history… [a] wonderfully insightful book

Silver Shoals glints with lovely details… And any book that can come up with the precise date when the first pan of fish and chips was served gets my vote

[Charles Rangeley-Wilson] is a vivid, exuberant writer, and a highly articulate and committed champion of his cause

This is a great read for all your fishing mad and conservationist friends

Five Fish That Made Britain

‘A wonderful and important book, that from its first pages draws the reader along on a fascinating, gripping, often funny journey.’ Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland. 
 
An idiosyncratic history of our island story told through five iconic fish 
 
 On these rain-swept islands in the North Atlantic man and fish go back a long way. Fish are woven through the fabric of the country’s history: we depend on them – for food, for livelihood and for fun – and now their fate depends on us in a relationship which has become more complex, passionate and precarious in the sophisticated 21st Century. 
 
 
In Silver Shoals Charles Rangeley-Wilson travels north, south, east and west through the British Isles tracing the histories, living and past, of our most iconic fish – cod, carp, eels, salmon and herring – and of the fishermen who catch them and care for them. 
 
 
In the company of trawlermen, longshoremen, conservationists and anglers Charles goes to sea in a trawler, whiles away hot afternoons setting eel nets, tries to bag his first elusive carp and drifts for herring on Guy Fawkes night as fireworks starburst the sky. 
 
 
Underscoring this journey is a fascinating historical exploration of these creatures that have shaped our island story. We learn how abundant and valued these fish were centuries before our current crisis of over-fishing: we learn how eels built our monasteries, how cod sank the Spanish Armada, how fish and chips helped us through two World Wars. 
 
 
Of course there is a deeper environmental dimension to the story, but Charles' optimistic perspective is this: no one is more invested in fish than the fishermen whose lives depend on them. If we can find a way to harness that passion then the future of fish and fishermen in Britain could be as extraordinary as its past.

Charles Rangeley-Wilson

Praise for Silver Shoals

At once history and elegy, Silver Shoals leads its readers from silent lakes to roiling seas in search of the fish on which Britain has always depended. A bracingly recounted and often melancholy quest, ending on a ...

Rangely-Wilson, an angler and East Anglian, reconnects us though this enjoyable fish-catching pilgrimage to the vast plenty of herring, cod, eel and salmon that once existed around Britain's shores and in our rivers ...

A wonderful and important book, that from its first pages draws the reader along on a fascinating, gripping, often funny journey. It binds this wide, wise book too tightly, I think, to call it "nature writing" (what ...

At once history and elegy, Silver Shoals leads its readers from silent lakes to roiling seas in search of the fish on which Britain has always depended. A bracingly recounted and often melancholy quest, ending on a ...

Rangely-Wilson, an angler and East Anglian, reconnects us though this enjoyable fish-catching pilgrimage to the vast plenty of herring, cod, eel and salmon that once existed around Britain's shores and in our rivers ...

A wonderful and important book, that from its first pages draws the reader along on a fascinating, gripping, often funny journey. It binds this wide, wise book too tightly, I think, to call it "nature writing" (what ...

At once history and elegy, Silver Shoals leads its readers from silent lakes to roiling seas in search of the fish on which Britain has always depended. A bracingly recounted and often melancholy quest, ending on a ...

Rangely-Wilson, an angler and East Anglian, reconnects us though this enjoyable fish-catching pilgrimage to the vast plenty of herring, cod, eel and salmon that once existed around Britain's shores and in our rivers ...

A wonderful and important book, that from its first pages draws the reader along on a fascinating, gripping, often funny journey. It binds this wide, wise book too tightly, I think, to call it "nature writing" (what ...

Books by Charles Rangeley-Wilson

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