This Clywedog has nothing to do with its famous namesake down in mid-Wales — no six-hundred-acre reservoir, no windsurfers, just a small, quiet water near Saron that the Vale of Clwyd Angling Club keeps going for its own members and their own pleasure. The lowland setting near Denbigh means gentler country than the club's Snowdonia neighbours further west, and the wild browns here fish accordingly — a little more coarse-water manners, a little less of the high-hill wariness. It's the kind of club fishery that never makes anyone's list of essential Welsh waters and doesn't much want to. Ask locally before you go; this is proper grassroots fishing, run by and for the people who use it.

• Lake
• Silurian mudstone shale