Whilst I was away on holiday in Devon I took my copy of Quest for Carp by Jack Hilton with me. Having previously had a copy it'd been a few decades since I had read it and I eagerly flicked to chapter four entitled 'Wildies'.
'The chalk pit' as Jack calls it, where these wildies lived, was one of the first carp waters that I ever fished back in 1980 when I first started carping and it's just down the road from 'Valley pool' and not very far from my childhood home in Shelford, South Cambs. The one thing I will always remember about the place will be these fish, 'the wildies', as they were still around back then and ancient!
Long, dark, torpedo shaped carp and all big! Many around their top ever weights of 10-14 lb and in 1980 that was big!
Alas carp like these are rare and the 'King carp' strain far more abundant, however it is said that eventually through successive spawnings they revert to the original (Sazan) wild strain that was first discovered on the Danube River about 2000 years ago.
So this fish is about as close as I have ever come I think to a 'wildie' as I never managed one from Jacks 'Chalk pit'.
This pool contains some 'specials' and this is one of them and I can be seen catching it in the second episode of the series 'Living the Dream'.