The Agivey begins where two smaller rivers meet in the foothills of the Sperrin Mountains. The Ashlamaduff and the Formill come down off the slopes above Glenullin, threading through wet upland pasture and sheep-cropped hills, and where they join the Agivey takes its name and its character. From there the water moves eastward through Glenullin parish, falls through Errigal Glen, and pushes on toward Garvagh. The upper river is small and intimate - the kind of water you can step across in summer with one long stride. The brown trout here are wary, native, the fish that have lived in these streams since the ice retreated. They hold in the slack water behind boulders and watch every shadow that moves above them.

Garvagh straddles the Agivey at the point where the river leaves the hills and enters the wider valley of the Lower Bann. The town's famous horseshoe weir bows across the river in a graceful curve, holding back enough water to power the old mills that once gave Garvagh its industrial weight. Below the weir the river quickens, pushes through the village under the road bridge, and turns north toward Aghadowey. Hunter's Mill stood here once, one of many corn and flax mills that dotted the Agivey banks in the 19th century. The river was hard-working then. Today the water is mostly left to the fish and to the few anglers who know what they are doing - a healthier sort of busyness, returning the river to closer to what it was before the mills.

The Agivey is one of Northern Ireland's officially designated game-angling rivers. Salmon return from the Atlantic up the Bann and turn into the Agivey to spawn, fighting their way past Glasgort Bridge and the long pools below Bovagh. The Agivey Angling Association manages access, regulates beats, and keeps records that go back generations. Fly fishing is the classical method; spinning and worming have their adherents on different stretches. In one episode of John Wilson's *Go Fishing* television series, the venerable English angler chose the Agivey as his location for the salmon episode - a quiet endorsement that put the river briefly on the map of British coarse fishing. The Brown Trout Inn at Aghadowey takes its name from the river's other principal quarry. To sit on its terrace in early summer, listening to swallows over the water and a salmon now and then breaking the surface for a fly, is to understand what 'unspoilt' actually means.

The Agivey is a river of bridges. From its source down, in approximate order: Lisnascreahog Bridge, Brockagh Bridge, the venerable Errigal Bridge, the Ford Footstick. Then the middle river - Green Bridge, Ballynameen Bridge, Killyvalley Bridge, the disused Railway Bridge of the old Derry Central line, Moneycarrie Bridge. The lower river crosses Bovagh Bridge, Cullycapple Bridge, Brickhill Bridge, and finally Glasgort Bridge before the water joins the Aghadowey River - sometimes called the 'Wee Agivey' - and the combined stream pushes out into the Lower Bann at the broad confluence near Ballymoney. Each bridge has its own story, its own pool below it, its own preferred lie for a salmon. Anglers measure the river not in miles but in bridges, and the local knowledge of which one fishes best in which conditions is the kind of expertise that takes a lifetime to acquire.

Bovagh House sits beside the Agivey downstream of Garvagh. Once a country estate, it now operates as a bed and breakfast - the kind of place where guests fish the river by day and eat dinner overlooking the same water by evening. The river passes through the estate grounds in a wide, slow curve, with mature beech trees leaning out over the pools and the occasional sandstone outcrop breaking the bank. Cullycapple Bridge and Brickhill Bridge come next, and then the Brown Trout Inn marks the point where the water turns east one last time. From here it is only a few hundred yards under Glasgort Bridge before the Agivey loses its identity into the Bann. But for those last miles - through farmland and old estate woodland and under the cluster of bridges that gave the river its modern shape - the Agivey is one of the prettiest small rivers in Ireland.