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Sale. The word can meltdown airline websites and at fashion boutiques result in impromptu, but highly entertaining bouts of wrestling. But what about good old-fashioned, every-day value for money? It doesn’t seem to carry the cachet of the ‘sale’ ticket, not in parts of northern Tasmania, anyway.

I found a couple of ‘bargains’ hidden not far from the big-ticket item of Cradle Mountain, yet there were so few people about that, in between self-congratulatory pats on the back, I couldn’t help but ask the obvious: where the bloody hell are you [all]’?

Frenchman Remi Bancal’s CV includes Paris’ Ritz Hotel and the legendary Mietta’s in Melbourne. He and wife, Ginette, moved to Tasmania in 1999 and ran Peppers Calstock in Deloraine before opening a four-room B&B, Glencoe, in a converted farmhouse in 2006.

Glencoe is as you might expect, furnished with Gallic elegance including bespoke art and a guest library. The themes running through the freshly renovated rooms are inspired by Provence. So is the cuisine in their café. The Bancals are slow food advocates but Glencoe has a far more unusual exemplar. One that couldn’t be further from French cafés and coffees you need to bill to your credit card.

Eating at Glencoe is a bargain. Three courses for 45 bucks. The food is sourced from locals and the vegetable garden out the back. The intimate café has a menu which offers lunches including salad (from the vegie garden) with cold smoked salmon ($16.50), but come evening Remi opts for centuries’ old practice. You eat what the chef cooks.

In a small place like Glencoe the ostensible simplicity works a treat. Remi buys the best local ingredients and cooks them into dishes he thinks will do the strap of lamb or rump of goat justice.

During my visit I savour a pork terrine with apple chutney, beef provencal, then crème caramel. All of it is considerably finer than beer from an ice-choked cooler on a 40°C day. But there are plenty of empty tables.

An extensive wine list, with plenty of local vinos, runs with the food. But if you feel like you’ve saved a fortune on dinner you could splurge on something from the Bancal cellar. There’s a 1996 Chateau Cantemerle Haut Médoc ($168).

There is a farmhouse-meets-café-chic style here. The Bentwood chairs meld with the Bancals’ languid-style, though a good part of their Je ne sais quoi seems to be a generous side order of passion. Importantly this crucial ingredient is free (you’ll never find ridiculous side order charges like six bucks for upmarket olive oil here).

Breakfast is something of a treat too. Remi bakes the bread and brioche each morning. The effort is not attributable to any marketing genius. It’s just part of the way the Bancals see the world: baking your own bread is the way it should be.

You can have breakfast by the open fire in winter or, if it’s warm on the outside, in the garden at tables under the beautifully aged elm tree while planning what part of Tassie you will spend the day exploring.

Glencoe proves quite central. Cradle Mountain is about a 40-minute drive west. The home port of the Spirit of Tasmania, Devonport, is about 25 minutes north. Lake Barrington and Sheffield are a scoot down the road.

In Highways to a War, the book by Tasmanian author Christopher Koch, one character muses: ‘I seldom leave Tasmania or [my] town. People say it’s a place where nothing happens. I say a hundred and fifty years have happened . . . Battles, revolutions, concentration camps, bombing raids and many other consequences of history are far off in another hemisphere; the town remains untouched, dozing among its hills.

Dozing is a compliment to a small town, a sign it hasn’t been pressured into all that progress guff, and the description could be of Sheffield, though the town did get busy once when many of the exterior walls of buildings on the main thoroughfare were enlivened with bucolic-themed murals.

On the back roads that twist through lush farmland about Sheffield, Mt Roland is often a gobsmacking backdrop. Elsewhere the Great Western Tiers and other great stacks of Jurassic dolerite make Tasmania one of the most mountainous islands on earth. But the island is also noted for its fishing.

The prescient 1918 Complete Guide to Tasmania gushes about ‘English trout being very plentiful and large catches of fish weighing up to 6lb and 8lb each are caught every season’. It doesn’t, however, mention Natone Hills Fly Fishery.

This may have something to do with the fishery only being introduced to the world in 2005 (While it is newish I knew I was onto something when another guide book, circa 2004, didn’t even mention Natone).

From Glencoe I drive at an easy pace on back roads, some of them like English-style lanes. There are even the odd-rows of Hawthorn hedges.

It’s about an hour’s drive to Natone and Ian and Christine Atkinson’s dairy farm. Ian is a fourth-generation farmer and runs the last of 60-odd dairy farms in the district. I arrive soon after the morning milking and am invited inside for coffee.

The view from the dining room window looks over lush sloping paddocks toward a forest of stringy bark gums carpeting the low lands. This is a fine place to sit and not just because of the view: Ian and Christine possess a country charm as warm as a fire after a day in the cold. 

The Atkinsons have stocked two of the largest dams on their arresting property with trout and I have fetched up to learn to fly fish. I’ve remained curious about a sport some purists consider closer to art than abstract oil paintings.

The wonderfully weird names of lures including ‘woolly buggers’ and ‘green nymphs’ fuelled a good part of the interest, but for some reason fly fishing charges are even more exorbitant than Paris cafés - you can pay up to $500 per day for a guide to take you fishing and there is no guarantee of a fish. No verdant nymph would ever get me to stump up that sort of cash. At Natone, however, I can have lessons and fly fish for a 50.

After the coffee and the yak, Ian takes me down to a whopping dam. It’s stoked with 300 brown and rainbow trout but the mob of heifers grazing in a nearby paddock are far more noticeable. A great chunk of natural bush is behind us. There is a 3km track around it and if you make time for a walk there’s a good chance of liaisons with wallabies, echidnas and native birds. A platypus burrow is on the opposite bank of the dam. Tassie’s unique freshwater crayfish (now protected) also have their bungalows in the dam.

The Natone Hills Fishery was conceived by Englishman Alf Haines who along with his wife, Jenny, bought a plot of land between the Atkinsons’ dams. Alf thought the place would be a good base for beginners but also for accomplished fly fisherman and while his dream has realised, Alf recently moved onto the great fishery in the heavens. A local, Grayden Haines (no relation to Alf or Jenny) provides the fly fishing expertise and has more than 50 years worth of experience in his tackle box.

Grayden has me casting in the paddock first. My fishing rod is beautifully uncomplicated and only once in the first 30 minutes of practising does the line get caught about my neck.   

Some of the first of many challenges in fly fishing is to throw a tight loop and make the line lie straight on the water. When I ask Grayden how long a beginner will require his services he is diplomatic. “I stay here all day,” he says. 

Ian lands the first fish within about five minutes. Jenny whisks it off to the barbecue. A snack for morning (Later, the fish is garnished with tomatoes and cucumber from the community vegie garden below Jenny’s house. But the fish is the highlight and eats almost like an oyster: it is so tender chewing seems unnecessary).  

Grayden normally divides his time between other beginners but I am the only customer. I fast-track to the dam bank and as Grayden ties a fly onto the line some fish breach the water, tease us with their brio and ructions.

On my first cast I pray for a miracle. Divine intervention, act one, occurs when the line doesn’t land on the water in a complete tangle. I am all out of credits a moment later and reel the fishless fly in. Around the same time Ian plays a whopper, a 12 pounder he thinks, but it drops off the line. 

When Ian hooks a second fish I really should offer to help net it but am preoccupied with fishing my fly out of the nearby tussocks. With time I gain some casting proficiency, but become much more competent at coveting the ostensible ease with which Grayden and Ian cast their gracefully looping lines. 

I remain fishless, Natone’s 16lb record unthreatened. “You really should have dark clothing,” says Grayden. “You need to blend with the background. These fish have got absolutely brilliant eye sight.” I could take some solace in my white T-shirt but getting the cast, this beautiful craft, right became almost as absorbing as catching a fish.

About 50 per cent of first timers catch a fish according to Jenny. Now Grayden is a fly fishing purist and not keen on seeing anyone fish without a fly on the end of the line. Ian is not so devout and is up for visitors dropping a regular line in the dam with a worm on the end of it, particularly if there are young children fishing. “There is not a law in the world that stops a kid catching a fish,” says Ian. 

There are two types of accommodation by the fishery. Ian and Christine have a house across the road from where they live and charge a mellifluous $60 a night (breakfast, I kid you not, is included). Ian has lived in this district all his life and has been making noises about holidaying across the road, but the house, not surprisingly, seems too popular with families (it sleeps six) for that. “We’re not into big business,” says Christine. Ian, candid as ever, reckons that with the prices the factory pays for his milk he is used to giving things away. “We like to have people come and stay,” continues Christine. “We’re not going to change.” Jenny has a recently-completed lodge by her house. Both places are an easy walk to the fish-stocked dams.

And for those of you who do catch a fish and plan on returning to Glencoe, Remi will cook your trout: “Roast, sashimi, whatever,” says the epicurean Frenchman.

More information:

Glencoe is at Barrington in northern Tasmania. Room rates from $155 per night. Evening meals at Glencoe must be booked in advance.
 www.glencoeruralretreat.com.au

Trout season in Tassie runs from 1 August to the end of April but the Natone Hills Fly Fishery is open all year. No licence is required for private fisheries. A day at Natone with lessons and meals costs $120. Half days from $50
www.natonehillsfishery.com.au

For more information on Tasmania: www.discovertasmania.com