Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE TROUT STREAM ; ITS SCENERY AND WILD LIFE The south country trouting waters might be roughly divided into two broad classes,—the first consisting in the main of chalk and partly chalk streams, flowing in the counties of Kent, Middlesex, Sussex, Surrey, Hants, Herts, Bucks, Berks, Wilts, and Dorset, and the second of the hard stone, rock, and limestone streams which predominate in Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. But very striking are the contrasts between many streams belonging, so far as their origin is concerned, to the same class. The Barle of Exmoor Forest and the Lyn of North Devon are both rock-bound streams, but they offer in their scenery a very vivid contrast. At and above Simonsbath, where is Exmoor Forest proper as distinct from the far larger tract commonly usurping the name, the Barle flows through an almost treeless and desolate country, very different from the sheltered and beautfully wooded little gorge through which the Lyn, almost its neighbour, rushes, often in white haste, to St. George's Channel. Scarcely less striking is the contrast between the Chess of Buckinghamshire and the Test of Hampshire, both flowing through the chalk, and both enjoying among their special admirers the reputation of being " the best trout stream in the south of England." Of course it must be admitted even by the most patriotic southerner that we have in our country none of the noble river scenery that is so plentiful in wild Wales and in the north. We have nothing that answers to the Welsh Dee or Usk ; and I do not think that any Devon man who knows the Derbyshire and Staffordshire waters will claim for his " delicious land" a stream of such invariable nobility in regard to its scenery as the Dove. The truth is we have hills where the northerner has mountains ; ...