I TRAVELLED much farther than planned and fared worse than I hoped. The romantic notion to trace the footsteps of angler and writer HT Sheringham, taken more than a century before along the Thames at Isleworth, came to me several years ago. My original idea, set aside along with so many other things, was to take the train to Richmond as he’d done, cross the former deer park and walk down the east bank towards the old ferry, perhaps through the trees that sheltered the lovers he observed as he strolled homeward in the peace that follows a happy fishing trip. On a recent visit to Kew Gardens, I looked upstream from the boundary viewpoint to the shingle banks where Sheringham fished for dace, and there made up my mind to go on the pilgrimage, with a fly-rod, to see whether dace are still to be caught on black gnats from this reach of the tidal Thames.
