The River Ribble is a typical
Yorkshire Dales river with a prolific population of brown trout,
grayling and unusually for the Yorkshire Dales, salmon and sea trout.
The River Ribble is also a very fertile river with good hatches of fly
throughout the season. The River Ribble rises in Three Peaks country,
near the very famous Ribblehead Viaduct, on the Settle to
Carlisle Line.
I fish the River Ribble in the Settle area, a
typical Yorkshire Dales market town, with a backdrop of high limestone
cliffs and wooded steep sided hills. Here, in the western Yorkshire
Dales, the river is quite small and a stealthy approach is often
required. The trout and grayling can be quite big in the Ribble; at one
time I had my personal best grayling of 2½lb from the river just above
Settle.
The River Ribble here is perfectly suited to fly fishing, with
fast runs interspersed with long smooth glides where trout and grayling
are often to be seen taking surface flies and just waiting to take your
well presented dry fly. The River Ribble can rise very quickly
following rainfall in the hills above, but it also drops quickly after a
few days of dry weather.
Downstream of Settle the River Ribble becomes slow and deep,
certainly not suited to fly fishing and beyond this it flows out of the
Yorkshire Dales and into Lancashire. Obviously the 'Yorkshiremen' of old
knew a thing or two and kept the best for themselves when drawing up the
county boundaries! Unlike all the 'main' Yorkshire Dales rivers, the
River Ribble flows west to the Irish Sea (the others all flow east to
the North Sea, via the Yorkshire Ouse). It is for this reason that the
River Ribble enjoys a run of sea trout and salmon (the distance to the
sea is much shorter going west), but our quarry is the brown trout and
grayling. I leave the migratory fish to those that enjoy a day out fly
casting!
There is very little, if any, day ticket fishing on the upper River
Ribble. All the better stretches are under the control of angling clubs
who do not sell day tickets.
