Chalk rivers, their clear, sparkling waters gliding over flinty gravel beds, are extremely rare. There are barely 200 of them worldwide, the lion’s share in southern and eastern England. Characterised by flower-filled water meadows, elegant weeping willows and gin-clear channels crowded with darting trout and grayling, their pastoral surroundings are as distinctly English as cricket and cream teas.
Hampshire’s River Test is arguably Britain’s finest chalk river, and the valley through which it flows stretches from the chalk uplands of the Hampshire Downs to Southampton Water on the cusp of the English Channel.
Within its watershed lies a patchwork of landscapes replete with the quintessential motifs of rural Hampshire: thatched cottages, flint-stone churches, curiously named pubs, and somnolent villages whose population counts haven’t changed
