Sharring for Eels

A couple of weeks ago I watched The Hairy Bikers fishing for eels, which sparked a memory from when I was a kid.

When I was a boy, I stood on the banks of a sluggish, reedy drain somewhere out in the sticks of Lancashire, watching my Uncle Bob push a pole with a strange, wavy metal plate on the end into the canal bed. It wasn’t a spear. It didn’t hook or pierce. It was a shar – a word you won’t find in many books now, unless they’re about lost things. Bob showed me how it worked: the wavy cuts in the plate trapped the eels as he pushed it into the mud. No bait, no blood – just patience and knowledge. The sort you can’t Google.

And that’s the thing. Bob didn’t have a degree in ecology or a clipboard from the Environment Agency. He had boots, a rolled-up sleeve, and a feel for the land. That pole and plate were part of a quiet tradition that’s now all but sunk. 

We like to pretend we care about heritage in this country. There’s always money for bunting and plaques and commemorative benches – but when it comes to the actual, lived traditions of ordinary people, the kind passed down from muddy hand to muddy hand, the silence is deafening. Eel-sharring wasn’t glamorous. It didn’t involve influencers or lanyards. It just worked.

The shar, like so many tools of the real countryside, wasn’t preserved because it wasn’t profitable. You can’t commodify a boy watching his uncle teach him how to read a canal. You can’t mass-produce stillness, or the moment a glinting eel breaks the surface with a furious twist. And you certainly can’t make a TED Talk out of someone quietly knowing exactly where the eels are, and how to catch them without fanfare or fuss.

Uncle Bob’s shar wasn’t just a tool – it was a link in a chain of knowledge that went back centuries, possibly millennia. And now it’s rusting in sheds, or hanging on museum walls with a little card beneath it that reads: “Obsolete eel-catching implement, 19th–20th century.” Obsolete? Only because the people who used them weren’t invited to the meetings where "heritage" got redefined to mean castles, croquet and cream teas.

We let it go. Not just the eels, but the shars, the marshes, the mud, and the memory. We allowed a living tradition to be turned into folklore – because no one thought men like Uncle Bob were part of history. But they were. And if we had any sense, we’d stop romanticising rural England and start remembering the parts of it that actually mattered.

Because once it’s gone, all you’re left with is a story. And the older I get, the more I realise that the story matters too – even if I was only ever the assistant.