Me and Lord Mountbatten of Burma.

Lord Louis Mountbatten was the Viceroy of all India before its independence from the UK in 1947. Under a bit of a cloud, he returned the next year to his family estate at Broadlands near Romsey in Hampshire. Apparently, Winston Churchill never spoke to him again.

Romsey is a small market town on the River Test, not far from Southampton. My brother and I used to go there as children to watch the salmon migrate through the mill pool, but there was no way that we could see ourselves ever fishing there. Like the Ganges, the Test was a sacred river but here the religion was not Hindu; it was game fishing. To me, the Test was the apex of game fishing in the whole world, and as highly exclusive as a river could be in the class-ridden ‘50s and ‘60s. I don't think there was a public stretch on the entire river.

Times change. The Test is still a premier chalk-stream with first class trout and salmon fishing. You can pay several hundreds of pounds for a day on the river in summer when the fishing is exclusively upstream, dry-fly, for rising trout. Some beats offer “Corporate days” with dude-fishing at reduced rates, but places like Broadlands are still fished by a private syndicates. Of course, you can join them (price on application).

In winter, trout and salmon go upstream to spawn so the rules dictate a closed season during which riparian owners make no money. Today there are several beats where you can fish for grayling and coarse fish for £20 to £40 a day at this time of year. For a day on a sacred river, I would say the prices are reasonable for a special outing, so I decided to find out, using my brother’s 58^th birthday as an excuse.

After a week of rainy days but no floods, we set out on our respective pilgrimages from Bristol and Cambridge, hoping to experience the sublime.

At Romsey the water was murky and the river ran high but you could tell this was going to be a good day. The river just said “Fish” all over it.

There wasn't much action at first, but when the sun broke through the fish woke up, giving us a lively couple of hours. By trotting with maggots we caught grayling, dace, trout…. and a lot of minnows. The biggest fish was a surprise 14 lb river carp that took a nerve wracking 15 minutes to bring to the net. After that we hardly had a tickle. All the same, I was pleased just to see grayling and dace; species that I don't catch in East Anglia.

I didn’t feel robbed but, scenically, I was disappointed. I had expected manicured lawns, carefully pollarded trees and neat fishing huts on the bank. The holding had been raped by gravel extraction and then used for grazing by horses. Most of the remaining paths, trees, hedges and fences were looking forlorn after years of neglect. Floods had removed a lot of the infrastructure and fences and huts were abandoned in disrepair. The car park was a mud bath. In summer you pay £80 a day to fish here. I hope they fix it up by then.

So, the Test is not quite as exclusive as it used to be, and that’s a good thing, isn’t it? But how did this happen?

I suppose that competition must be a factor. The real dudes spend their fishing money in Alaska, Russia, New Zealand, Seychelles, Cuba or Chile. If you want to catch big trout near your home on a fly, you can go to a local fishery or reservoir. You will pay less and probably won’t have to book in advance.

But there is, I fear, a more sinister reason for the democratisation of the Test. It’s just not quite the river it once was.