The Eel Trap - by Richard Fleming (Hardcover)

About the Book

A deeply reflective, lyrical debut memoir tracing a lifelong devotion to the soil, the sea and traditional skill, the tragic collapse of the European freshwater eel and one man's quiet rebellion against our modern disconnection from nature

Book Synopsis

An evocative, lyrical debut memoir from the heart of our vanishing countryside - a story of the solitary life of an eel fisherman and the radical choice to live more in tune with the natural world.

Growing up in Herefordshire, Richard Fleming watched the rural world - and the ancient, earth-bound skills of the people who worked it - begin to quietly slip away. Driven by a desire to find what was lost, he packed a rucksack and set out for the edges of the British Isles. His journey carries him from the rugged coast of Connemara, learning to build traditional currach boats, to years spent living by the moonlit rhythms of an ancient silver-eel trap in the West Marches.

The Eel Trap is a story of a life lived half on the water and half in the dark, harvesting silver eels as they begin their epic, 5,000-mile migration back to the Sargasso Sea. But when the elver population suffers a catastrophic global collapse, the idyll of an eelman's life shatters. What begins as a devotion to an endangered craft becomes a fierce, deeply personal awakening.

Both an intimate memoir and an elegy for a vanishing natural world, The Eel Trap asks what it means to belong to a landscape rather than possess it - offering a profoundly evocative, hauntingly beautiful refuge for anyone longing to reconnect with the wild.

About the Author

Richard Fleming has been a cider maker, beekeeper, forestry worker, writer and, as a former eel fisherman, spent years working rivers, lakes and tidal docklands. His lifelong engagement with nature eventually led him to environmental activism, where he campaigned to close a major legal export loophole in the Severn elver trade. He writes his Substack column 'Countryside Insider' from his restored sixteenth-century oak-framed cottage near Hay-on-Wye. The Eel Trap is his first book.