A trout fishing beat on a Norfolk chalk stream has come up for sale – for nearly £ 100 a yard. Double bank fishing on 1,300m of the River Wissey, near Northwold, is up for grabs for £ 100,000.

The clear, fast-flowing river supports wild brown trout and the new owners could also stock it to boost the chances of a rise. Martin Freeman, an Ipswich-based agent who specialises in fisheries, said: “It’s rare to find chalk stream fishing in East Anglia. It’s a pretty piece of river with some wild trout. “It could be taken by a syndicate of six people paying £ 15,000 or 10 people paying £ 10,000 for a piece of trout fishing in perpetuity.”

The Wissey, which is a tributary of the Great Ouse, is one of Norfolk’s most unspoiled rivers. It boasts a small run of sea trout and is believed to be one of the few East Anglian rivers where otters survived after they were hunted and poisoned almost to the point of extinction before they became protected in the 1970s. Fishery records show up to 140 brown trout a season have been caught from the beat. Small numbers of sea trout are also caught each year.

In 1991, the then National Rivers Authority removed a 7lbs sea trout from that stretch of the river and stripped the fish’s eggs. Once hatched, the juvenile fish were returned to the river and some have made their way to the sea, via the Great Ouse and Denver Sluice, or the Relief Channel, and returned.

The Environment Agency classifies the beat as Grade A chalk stream. Beats on southern chalk streams like the Test and Itchen literally change hands for millions. Fishing them is the preserve of the nobility for obvious reasons, with anything other than an upstream dry fly considered unsporting.

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