The Eel Trap

An evocative, lyrical debut memoir into the heart of our vanishing natural world, the solitary life of an eel fisherman and an urgent awakening of an environmental conscience.

As a boy in Herefordshire, Richard Fleming watched the rural world begin to slip away, along with the traditional, earth-bound skills of the country people who worked it. 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 journey back to the Sargasso Sea. But when the elver population faces a catastrophic global collapse, the idyll of an eelman’s life shatters. What follows is a moving, deeply personal awakening.

Part lyrical travelogue and part fierce ecological elegy, The Eel Trap is a testament to what we lose when we claim to own the living earth, and an urgent call to action to protect the wildness of our world.