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A Journey down the River Dee with Jon Beer
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Llangollen
The salmon are returning to the cool headwaters of the
Dee and its tributaries where they were born and where they, in their
turn, will spawn amongst its clean gravels. They share this nursery
with their closest relative, the brown trout, which thrive in the fast,
fresh waters of the upper river. Most of these trout will spend their
lives hereabouts, hovering in the current to intercept the aquatic insects
so beloved of the fly-fisherman. But not all. Some, with the gypsy in
their soul, will follow the adolescent salmon down to the sea. In the
spring these young sea trout smolts of the Dee and the Alwen will slip
down the broad reaches of the river beneath the A5 bridge at Corwen.
Here the Dee swings east and gathers its prodigious strength to punch
a gap between the Clwydian Range and the Berwyn hills at Llangollen.
The white water begins at the dramatic Horseshore Falls
where some of the flow slips away as the beginnings of the Shropshire
Union Canal. Most of it crashes down the falls and on through a Grade
4 canoeists' adventure playground of chutes and stopper waves down the
site of Llangollen Town Weir. This is one of the steepest sections of
the Dee: at Pontcysyllte, just five miles downstream, the river is now
over 120 feet below the canal which vaults spectacularly over the river
in the finest, and tallest, aqueduct in Britain.
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