As readers of this newspaper will already be aware, the world-famous Abbotts Barton stretch of the River Itchen in Hampshire, a beat that played an historic role in the evolution of fly-fishing, is back in the news.

The Hampshire Wildlife Trust (HWT), which owns the 158 acres through which the fishery flows, is making changes to the course of the river and wants to alter the way the fishery is run. The fishing club that has been leasing the water believes the changes are inconsistent with the history of the site and with the measures needed to run a viable fly-fishing club. As a consequence, it has ended its lease after 35 years.

The moves have resurrected longstanding misgivings about HWT in the angling community.

Suspicions are rife that the trust’s latest moves, after a decision some years ago to throw anglers off most of the river, are simply part of a long-term strategy to drive anglers from the site, little by little. The trust vigorously denies the rumours. It says that after resting the river for a year while the physical changes bed in, tenants will be sought for 2011.

Abbotts Barton, an otherwise unexceptional piece of river, is a world heritage site for anglers because of work undertaken there a century ago by G. E. M. Skues, a London solicitor.

Until the 1880s, fly-fishing had been a hit-and-miss affair employing little more than random slips of feathers on hooks that trout sometimes grabbed. Then, in books published in 1886 and 1889 Frederic Halford, working on the neighbouring river Test, showed how the hatched aquatic flies trout sip from the surface every day could be imitated with some accuracy — greatly increasing the chances of success.

In 1910, as a result of his work at Abbotts Barton, Skues published a book that showed how the nymphs of these flies could be imitated as they swam to the surface to hatch. Imitative fly-fishing as it is now practised worldwide, on the surface and below it, is based on the studies and writings of these two men.

The present lease was taken out in 1974 by Roy Darlington, a respected figure in the chalk stream fishing community. A prime aim of Darlington’s stewardship, he says, has been to keep the fishery much as Skues would have known it.

In 1980, HWT bought the land for a nature reserve. In 2000, without consultation, the trust ejected the club from the main river and many of the side streams because, it said, it wanted “nature to retrieve them”. At a stroke, it emasculated one of angling’s most revered sites, reducing 3½ miles of water to a mile of single side-stream, the Barton Carrier. A worldwide outcry ensued. The chief executive of what was at the time English Nature wrote to The Times expressing his dismay. Deep mistrust among anglers of the HWT and its perceived anti-angling stance was sown. Now HWT is further developing the reserve and says that as part of its plan it wants to create a self-sustaining population of naturally bred fish to replace the larger, farm-bred fish that have been stocked in the past.

The trust has already made wholesale changes to the carrier. Water velocity has been increased, deeps made shallow, twists and turns created between once-straight banks. Huge quantities of gravel have been introduced to encourage not only trout but salmon to spawn.

Darlington, while acknowledging the value of some of the physical changes, says new rules to be introduced along with them — less trimming of fast-growing water weeds and bankside vegetation, loss of control over stocking and an end to the culling of pike, which eat trout — remove the basic tools needed to manage a viable fishery. “It’s just too much of a gamble,” he said.

Martin de Retuerto, HWT’s project manager, said: “We’re hoping to increase biodiversity — and to appeal to trout anglers who will be content with wild fish in a more natural setting.” There are several points to be made. The first is that HWT now owns the site and, whether anglers like it or not, the trust is going to call the shots. It is equally true that the trust, thanks to the calamitous handling of events nine years ago, has ground to make up not only with the angling community but with conservationists elsewhere who see anglers as allies and work closely with them.

Next, having visited the site myself, I believe that what the trust is doing on the Barton Carrier has the potential significantly to improve the water and its reproductive capacities. While there has to be doubt that fishing can survive on the breeding of wild trout alone, it could survive on wild-bred trout supplemented by young fish reared in-river from wild trout eggs. There is an increasing demand for this kind of fishing and there are plenty who are willing to pay for it. Continuing viability, however, would crucially depend on the fishing pressure and the way it is regulated.

Among other considerations, rivers tend to have minds of their own and if more intervention proves necessary to make fly-fishing viable than the trust envisages at present, then it would have to be undertaken or anglers would indeed be driven away, the rumour-mongers would claim they were right all along and another damaging outcry would result.

So there are many questions about what is happening at Abbotts Barton, not least the extent to which water taken away from the fishery might at some point be reinstated.

But if the trust is as good as its word and its announced plans can be made to work — and with a little flexibility all round I believe the plans could be — then the trust will have achieved its goals, an historic fishing site will have been maintained and some fences will have been mended.

That is a much-to-be-desired outcome. Time — and not much of it — will tell.

• Brian Clarke’s fishing column appears on the first Monday of each month.

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