I am not a religious man by nature but if I ever I were to “find God”, then I know just where He’d be.

Ease your car west on the quiet lane that slips through the tiny Herefordshire village of Garway, follow it as it slides between stone cottages and dodges ditches. After a time, you will start to climb, steeply. Nature’s palisade of hazel, bramble and hawthorn crowds your way and obscures any view to your left, yet you will have an overpowering sense of “any second now…”

As you top the hill the road swings right, a five bar gate and a shabby sign with some chevrons, suggest that you slow your progress around the bend. Don’t! Here you need to stop your car and pull over! Take a deep breath and a long look, and like the Patriarch of biblical memory, you will know you are looking upon Promised Land. Nature’s picnic blanket has been spread in welcome for you, a patchwork of checkers of emerald, sage and gold gently unfold into the distance, cloaking the valley and smoothing out the old glaciated scars that shaped the bedrock beneath all those eons ago. Old, broadleaved woodlands hold steadfast against all elements and solidify the slopes. Farmhouses stand well worn and weathered, yet timeless with all the defiant permanence of the old red sandstone outcrops from which their blocks were hewn. Keep looking and let your eyes follow the line of trees snaking across the valley floor and the treasure of the lovely Monnow will reward you with glint and gleam through the trunks and boughs that protect it from uncaring eyes. In winter it is a gushing fiery spate carrying all before it, but in summer it becomes a reddish-silver vein of life, its waters gently stained with oxide, a precious lode teasingly hiding its bounty of trout and grayling.

I am not a religious man by nature but if I ever I were to “find God”, then I know just where He’d be: sitting down there, somewhere on that blanket, somewhere where the serpentine waters slither over the mossy boulders and gouge dark, tempting holes beneath spidery alder roots. He’d be content of course, pleased with his workmanship and, warmed by the late afternoon sunshine, he would smile at the spot where an unexpected hatch of fly breaks-up a single glassy glide, transforming it into the multifocal prisms of rises from the wild trout of the river. He also smiles on me as I seek that perfect moment when fly and cast unite in seamless geometry to attract and deceive those perfect river fish.Then, it would all be over, a beautiful perfect fish, a wild brown trout, brought to gentle hand and returned whence it came.

I do not see Him of course, yet this river, its secrets, its beauty and its serenity do make me reflect; and as I sit down to eat what is, to my earthly palate, an equally divine wedge of Gloucester pork pie and sip my angler’s sacrament of river-cold, beer, I realise that I have been “blessed” by that moment and the discovery of this river. Perhaps religion has something to offer me after all? Regardless, the Monnow has something to offer each and every one of us who love to angle for wild fish in timeless surroundings.