Gammarids
A ribbon of meltwater in a glacial valley above Orcival, flowing through high meadow where the only sound most days is the wind and the occasional cowbell. The trout are a hundred per cent wild, local-strain, small, and protected under strict management — the sort of population that exists because someone has been careful for a long time. The season is short: by the time the snow is off the meadows it's May, and by mid-September the fish are thinking about spawning. Short rods, very short casts, very light tippet. A 7ft 2-weight is not an affectation here, it's the right tool. You won't catch many and you won't catch big ones. What you will do is remember every one of them for a long time afterwards, which is the whole point of this kind of fishing.
In freestone rivers of the Massif Central, resident brown trout feed through a spring build-up of olives and stoneflies into a long summer of caddis and small buzzers, with terrestrials becoming important from early summer; higher volcanic plateaux and colder headwaters tend to run later than the lower freestones.
- Granite