The upper Loire, before it becomes the sand-flat river of French school geography, is a proper mountain stream. It rises on the Gerbier de Jonc in the Ardèche volcanic highlands and spends its first hundred kilometres as freestone granite water — pools, riffles, stony runs, the occasional deep corner where a proper fish might be holding. This is Haute-Loire country, high and exposed, the kind of water where you can fish an afternoon without seeing another angler and sometimes without seeing another human. The trout are wild and small-to-medium, the grayling modest but steady, and the hatches honest rather than famous — good Baetis through spring, caddis building from May, stoneflies in the faster runs. The water runs cold until late May because the altitude keeps it that way, so the season starts slowly and doesn't really hit its stride until the hawthorns are out. Nymph it in April and May, dry-fly it from June onwards, and accept that you are fishing for the place as much as for the fish. Nobody comes to the upper Loire to empty the water. You come because it is remote and honest and the river remembers what it is for.

• Granite