Now sabs are making a splash

I should not have known about them had I not come over all indignant about Lucy Belson, a resuscitation nurse from Westmoreland General Hospital in Kendal, a town I know only as a signpost on the M6 but which is tolerably close to Tebay Services, our favoured pit-stop en route to the southern rellies.

This blameless nurse was casting a line with a friend on a local trout fishery near Lancaster when along the bank appeared a gang of 35 masked men and women throwing stones at her rod and making it quite that plain violence was on the cards: "It's the hard way or the easy way. You've been sabbed."

They told her to pack up her gear and go. To begin with she was not so inclined and then two other anglers appeared and fighting broke out. At this point she thought perhaps it might be sensible to leave, except the gang now ran towards her waving not even cricket bats (this is Lancashire after all) but baseball bats and smashed her rod.

As she broke away she saw another woman being punched in the face and several cars being vandalised. "I was shaken at the time but now I am angry," she said. "They are cowards and I certainly won't be frightened to go back to the lake. I love fishing and I have been doing it since I was a little girl."

To which all one can do is mutter about the country going to the dogs and the government doing nothing about it and come rapidly, if regrettably, to the conclusion that the only practical way to prevent a recurrence of this sort of thing is to hunt down the perpetrators and break their legs.

Of course you are not supposed to think this sort of thing, and I am sure as a nurse Ms Belson would disapprove.

I can see, if I close my eyes and concentrate hard enough, that there is an argument which says that growing several thousand fish in a pond so that nature lovers can come and kill them at a fiver a go is not terribly easy to justify except on grounds of employment and agricultural diversification. All a bit topsy-turvy.

Still, that does not mean you can come along and throw nurses in the water. The Belson affair, however, is the first I have heard of anglers being attacked by antis, but Lancashire police have other cases on the books of anglers being attacked, mainly on canals.

Apparently, on the day Ms Belson was attacked, a gang set out to disrupt a grouse drive at Lowgill, near High Bentham, but were thwarted by police who called in the force helicopter, an armed response unit and nine other vehicles.

This is a pretty good effort on the part of the police, although I have no doubt someone has by now written to the Kendal Clarion and Bugle to complain this was what we now call a disproportionate response. But it worked because the saboteurs pushed off without taking on the police and, apparently cheated of their original quarry, went off to be beastly to fishermen instead.

The North West Hunt Saboteurs have vowed to turn their attentions to coarse fishing competitions (their website contains full instructions on where to go and how to do it) as well as disrupting shooting. I suspect this might prove a painful experience.

Far be it from me to suggest that coarse fishermen are in anyway inclined to violence, but I have a feeling that if you meddle with an ex-miner from Lesmahagow or Bolton on the banks of a gravel pit you may receive painfully short shrift. Anti-angling feeling does not yet seem to have crept over Hadrian's Wall. But if you want to see what is coming look at www.nwhsa.org.uk