About the Friends of Malham Tarn

Season 2025

Welcome to the Friends of Malham Tarn website!

Working closely with the estate owners, The National Trust, FoMT have restructured the fishing access model to allow the long tradition of day-ticket fishing on Malham to continue. After a hugely successful start, it gives us great pleasure to announce that The National Trust have extended our lease and backed FoMT to manage and protect the fishing whilst maintaining the biosecurity of the tarn for the foreseeable future.

With the quality of the support extended to us by The National Trust, we hope to be able to serve you, the visiting angler, for many more years to come.

The wardens have been humbled and encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive nature of the feedback received from visiting anglers over our first two seasons and look forward to seeing you all again in 2025.  We received more feedback last season regarding the booking system. We took on board all comments and suggestions proffered and discussed the subject extensively at our AGM.

We fully appreciate that booking your first-choice dates is not always possible, but the constraints of the current access model and the biosecurity rules make it difficult if not impossible to devise a perfect system. This season, we have restructured the booking system slightly to incorporate two main changes.

1. Dates for the month will be released on the first of the preceding month. In effect, May dates will be made available on the 1st of April, June dates will be made available on the 1st of May etc. While the wardens will endeavour to populate the booking diary as fully as possible in advance, occasionally extra dates will appear and may be promoted via the FoMT Facebook page
2. An individual may only book one boat as the lead angler per month of the season.

FoMT is a non-profit organisation. Now we have accrued all the kit (and sufficient spares) to run the fishery efficiently, and with no large items of expenditure on the horizon, the wardens voted to return the warden and public day-ticket to £25 per person for the 2025 season.

We think you’ll agree that for your permit, boat, engine, battery, net and drogue, and 8 hours fishing on the finest wild brown trout water in England, this is indeed, ‘for a song’! Please help us keep our pricing low by taking good care of the kit that we provide. Leader material and fly lines wrapped around the propeller was still a common and very time consuming problem for our wardens last season, which, as we all know is easily done but also just as easily avoided with a little care and concentration.

If you do foul the prop, please let the duty warden know at the end of the day, or sooner if your propulsion is compromised. Also, we were surprised at the number of damaged nets! Please don’t leave nets in the bottom of the boat where they are easily trodden on – extend the handle slightly and straddle across the middle of the boat where it is both easily reached and safe from harm. All equipment will be checked by the wardens upon your return and damaged or lost equipment may result in an invoice!

Tight lines to all, and thank you for your continued support!
FoMT