About the site

Blagdon lake sits on the north side of the Mendip hills in the historic county of Somerset in the heart of England's West Country.

For anyone considering fishing on Blagdon there doesn't appear to be a great deal of current information available, so I've tried to construct this site for anyone interested in the lake, its history, wildlife and the flies and tactics which we use week in, week out.

Who writes this

I've been fishing Blagdon for nearly 30 years, both from the bank and latterly boats. Fishing was an inevitable fate for me on two counts:

For the first, my Great Uncle, one Roland Skinner was one of the quarrymen who cut the granite which was crushed and mixed with cement to form the facing blocks of the dam. Roland joined the Estates department of Bristol Water (then responsible for the maintenance of the lake grounds) after the building of the lake was completed and he lived in sight of the lake and fished it almost until his death. Some of my fly patterns which I still use owe their existence to Roland's extremely keen observations.

For the second, according to my mother, I was delivered just in time (5AM) for the Doctor to leave the local maternity hospital and get a full morning in on the lake. With a background like that, I couldn't do anything else other than fish.

Aside from that, I fish chalk streams in Wiltshire for Grayling in the closed season, have fish various competitions and England team eliminators and intend to fish just about every weekend through the season with my regular boat partner Orm Bristow (he's fished Blagdon for over 40 years now...) and other locals.

If you want to put faces to the names, we're normally in one of the village watering holes (see the "Pubs" section) Saturday and Sunday evenings.

By the way - it's true what's said about people who fish Chew and Blagdon. You either tend to be a "Blagdon man" or a "Chew man", but I can't think offhand of anyone who could claim to be both!