Hook:
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12-18
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Thread:
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Red Pearsall’s gossamer silk
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Body:
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Tying silk
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Hackle:
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Medium partridge
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In his treatment of Hills’s A Summer on the Test (1924) in Two Centuries of Soft-Hackled Flies (2004), Nemes cites Hills’s passing comment on the pattern: “One of the softest, most compressible, patterns is the partridge hackle, and, whether this be the reason or not, I consider it the best sunk fly on the Test. Its body, of silk, can be of many colours. I find the old Cumberland pattern, the orange partridge, best, and next to that the red.” By Nemes's account, anglers on the Test seemingly drew little distinction between the red and orange bodies, although the Partridge and Orange has endured as a more distinct, popular fly for generations of anglers.
In The Soft-Hackled Fly Addict (1981), Sylvester Nemes names the Cumberland, a fly which John Waller Hills seemingly only mentions in passing. Nemes notes that “Hills believed this fly to be the most effective sunk fly on the Test, particularly on hot days and in slow water,” and he provides this dressing for Hills’s fly:
Body: Red or orange silk floss
Hackle: Medium partridge
Rib: Narrow gold wire
Dressed with a rib, the Cumberland becomes the
Orange Partridge that Harfield Norman and Edmond Lee list in their Brook and River Trouting (1916). In
his River Keeper (1934), which
Nemes also notes, Hills recalls a similar, ribbed pattern favored by the
riverkeeper William Lunn, the Red Partridge Hackle.
In list of his thirty North Country flies,
included at the head of Fly Fishing:
The North Country Tradition (1994), Leslie Magee attributes the dressing,
the Crimson Partridge, to an unnamed 1887 publication by James Blades. Robert
L. Smith includes the Crimson Partridge, one of James Blades’ patterns “taken
from T K Wilson’s angling articles in the Dalesman
magazine of 1949,” in an appendix at the end of his The North Country Fly: Yorkshire’s Soft Hackle Tradition (2015). He additionally notes that the Crimson Partridge is a
“splendid fly in a full brown water from the beginning of the season to the
end.” Many of the manuscript and publications that Smith includes list the fly less as a dressing for hot days and slow water, like Hills, and more of a dressing for discolored water.
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