The Solway Firth

Four environments sit inside one firth and the tide moves between them twice a day.

THE OPEN SAND FLATS are the dominant ground: fine sediment, worked by the tide, holding worms and small crustaceans and therefore flatfish and the species that follow them in on the flood. At low water they are dry for a considerable distance.

THE SCARS are beds of mussel and other shellfish on harder patches within the sand. They are the only structure available over much of the firth, and they hold a different invertebrate community, which is why the fishing concentrates on and around them.

THE CHANNELS drain the flats and hold water throughout the cycle. They are where fish sit at low water and the route by which the flood arrives, which makes them both the productive ground and the specific hazard.

THE MERSE AND SALTMARSH form the landward edge, flooding only on the biggest ranges, and grading into the brackish inner firth where several rivers enter.

The species list turns over almost completely between the warm and cold halves of the year, which is more pronounced here than on most British coasts because the water over shallow sand warms and cools quickly.

FLATFISH — flounder, dab and plaice — are the constant, feeding over the sand and moving with the tide.

BASS AND MULLET work the flood in the warmer months, following the water onto ground that was dry an hour earlier and feeding on what it uncovers. This is classic flood-tide fishing and it is short-lived on each state.

COD AND WHITING dominate the cold half of the year, and are the traditional winter shore quarry.

THORNBACK RAY use the deeper channels and the outer firth.

And the rivers entering the firth carry migratory salmon and sea trout, which are of considerable cultural and legal significance and are governed entirely separately from sea angling.

Almost everything here is shore fishing, and almost every decision is a timing decision rather than a tackle one.

BEACH LEDGERING at range is the standard approach on the outer firth, where the water is a long way out at low tide and the fishing is on the flood.

CLOSER-RANGE FISHING works where channels approach the shore, because the fish are in the channel rather than distributed across the flats.

THE FLOOD IS THE FISHING on most marks. Fish move onto uncovered ground with the rising water, feed on what it exposes, and leave again. A session here is frequently a two-hour window inside a six-hour tide, and knowing which two hours is the whole of the local knowledge.

SMALL-BOAT WORK on the channels is a tidal exercise, not a distance one, and getting the timing wrong means grounding on a falling tide.

BAIT COLLECTION over the flats is substantial in its own right and carries the same hazard as everything else here.

Haaf netting is the Solway's distinctive fishery and it is genuinely unlike anything else surviving in Britain. A person wades out into the flooding tide carrying a large rectangular net on a wooden frame, stands facing the current, and holds the net against the flow so that fish moving with the tide swim into it.

The word comes from Old Norse and the technique is attributed to Norse settlement of the firth, which places it among the oldest continuously practised fishing methods in the country. It works here and nowhere else in Britain because it requires exactly this combination: a huge tidal range, flat wadeable ground, and a strong predictable flow carrying migratory fish.

It is licensed, it has been the subject of long and contested regulation as migratory salmonid stocks have declined, and the number of people practising it has fallen substantially. It is included here as culture and history rather than as an activity a reader might take up, and what is currently permitted is a matter for the relevant authority.

A visitor meets several terms that are either local or used differently from elsewhere.

SCAR for a shellfish bed on hard ground, which elsewhere might be called a bed or a patch. On the Solway it is the standard word and it denotes a fishing feature as much as a geological one.

MERSE for the saltmarsh, a Scots term used on both shores here.

HAAF for the net and the fishery, and by extension for the ground where it is practised.

BORE for the visible front of the advancing flood on the largest tides, a word shared with the Severn and a few other funnel estuaries and describing the same physics.

And the channels themselves carry local names that are used as directions and as hazard references, which is worth knowing because a local warning may be phrased entirely in them.

The Solway is administered by two different national fisheries systems, because the border runs down it. That is unusual in Britain and it has a practical consequence a visitor will not expect: the rules applying to the same body of water may differ according to which shore you are standing on, and moving across the firth can move you between regimes.

Sea fisheries matters are handled by the relevant national and regional bodies on each side. Migratory salmon and sea trout are governed under separate arrangements again, with their own licensing and their own long history of specific regulation. Shellfish gathering is controlled on public health grounds through classification and closure, which operates independently of any fishery rule and can change at short notice. The haaf net fishery has its own licensing.

FishingHQ does not state what any of these currently require. The obligation is to establish the position with the authority responsible for the specific shore before fishing, digging or gathering.