CAMPAIGN ON BADLANDS
WHERE THE HUNTER CAN BECOME THE PREY.
The deprivation of the inner city; the slums, the one-time planners dreams of the sixties turned sour. Giant tower blocks forming a fierce landscape on cheaply built overspills. Grim reminders of past failures.
No many with boarded windows, yet still inhabited by squatters, and in use as dens of iniquity. The squalor, scandal and deprivation; drug addicts, prostitutes, meths drinkers, society’s unfortunate people. Areas of another time; unreal in the merry England of Sherringham and his contemporise. More reminiscent of the Bronx in Harlem or the Ghettos of Fort Apache and the like.
Badlands pit was around an acre in size. An old mill lodge of the Lancashire cotton era, now a former shadow of itself as it now lay in a rather melancholy state. Littered with rubbish, both on the banks and in the water, it was horrendously disfigured by the surrounding malaise. The place was a toilet. Prolific and abundant weed covered the entire area. Old railway sleepers with oil drums tied together with rope floated where school children had built long forgotten rafts during the previous school holidays. Plastic carrier bags and large lumps of foam rubber adorned the remaining spaces. In the depths lay numerous shopping trolleys, old bicycle frames, car wheels and even a Reliant three-wheeler sat nestled below the dam, a fate unbefitting to this once picturesque little pool.
It was towards the end of the sixties, as a young lad, that I had bailiffed the pool, which at the time was controlled by the once mighty Greenhall Whitney Angling Association. A smaller spring fed backwater ran into the main pool. The main pool being approximately 0.25 acre in size. The small pool was noted for its crucian carp; while the larger one was famous for its giant tench, along with a few big pike, carp perch and the odd eel.
Being a near impossible water to bailiff, by the early seventies the club controlling the pool had all but given up the lease and left the pool to its own devices and fate. Badlands had become a free-for-all en sundry. Mother nature had reclaimed the backwaters, whilst the unscrupulous dumping of toxics had destroyed many of the pools inhabitants. The mill, which once served Badlands, had long since ceased business, whilst a few small units on the original site remained in dereliction. The pool was left in its unfortunate state, but being spring fed, did maintain a good quality Ph and indeed half a dozen carp did survive these years.
“Old Chestnut” was an obliging quarry, first seeing twenty pounds in around 1981, when Andy had made its first acquaintance. Indeed, this leviathan had satisfied a number of group anglers over the years. “The Bull” was a bit wilier, but again, he too made the occasional sort to the bank.
I had never really done any intensive work on Badlands for the carp, although I had taken pike some twenty years earlier with Alex. Having recently climaxed by catching “Bent Tail” on the Brow, late in the August saw me in search of another local twenty and Badlands had been beckoning me for some time.
The grappling hook was a rather barbaric looking device and consisted of four large tarmacers rake heads welded back to back around a heavy 1-inch diameter steel bar. This was attached at each end to a piece of chain that, in turn was tied to a long length of heavy-duty woven nylon rope. Although this arrangement was quite heavy to throw out, I found that by placing the tool in the margins, I could then walk round to the other side of the pool and drag the instrument across the bottom.
