Country Life Trending: Feargal Sharkey, one of the most recognisable pop voices of the 1970s and 1980s, talks to Country Life about his life, his passion for fishing, and how campaigning for clean rivers has become an obsession. Paradise comes at a cost: you must defend it. This is my uppermost thought as I walk along the River Lea, outside the Hertfordshire village of Stanstead Abbotts, with Feargal Sharkey. Trout are rising, water voles are scuttling, a kingfisher is reported downstream. The scene can’t look so different from when Izaak Walton walked to Amwell Hill in The Compleat Angler, but that is only because this stretch of the river is owned by the Amwell Magna Fishery, the oldest angling club in the country. It pursued the Environment Agency (EA) to the doors of the High Court a couple of years ago to compel it to fulfil its legal obligation to protect water quality.