Feargal Sharkey, an ex-punk musician, is using his anger to save Britain’s chalkstreams from extinction and hold those responsible accountable.
Feargal Sharkey is furious. A punk musician is nothing without anger. While sitting by the sparkling River Lea, at Amwell Magna Fishery with a distant cuckoo keeping the beat in the distance, it’s hard to imagine anything that could make you even slightly annoyed, much less seething. Indeed Sharkey, welcoming and enormously engaging, doesn’t seem at all cross. The idyllic scene that we enjoy now was achieved by the positive, deliberate application of anger.
Sharkey explains: “When I got involved with the Amwell Magna Fishery club I discovered that the flow of the River Lea here had all but dried up. The river was being affected by eutrophication and over-abstraction. Two and half miles of beautiful and rare chalkstreams were at risk of becoming little more than a stagnant pond. And this was the last remaining stretch where there was a spawning population of wild brown trout.”
When Sharkey became the chairman of the club one of the oldest clubs in…
