By
Bill Currie
Good fishing has more than a little of Nature’s bounty in it, and I suspect that this was the main message from my friend on the fishing committee. He really did mean that good fishing lay half a mile away from the public road. That half mile - the half mile filter - is a real protection. Only those dedicated enough to leave the road and walk will find waters which retain the character of the unspoiled landscape. Of course there is a compromise, I am glad to say. It would be impossible to expect that there were many lochs or burns, probably none, which lie totally unfished, but thousands still have qualities which hark back to their days of being wilderness waters. For much of my fishing life, these have been a great delight to me and to thousands of other anglers willing to walk off the road.
It sometimes happens in strange circumstances. Some years ago I was offered a week’s fishing on one of the most famous Hebridean salmon fisheries, - Grimersta, on Lewis. It was an early week, the last week of May. The chain of famous lochs which form this remarkable fishery were devoid of salmon, - or seemed to be, although I did manage to raise and lose one on the little Macleay’s Stream connecting the lochs on beat three (but that is another story). The case was, quite simply, that the fattest and most preserved of salmon fisheries was lying dormant. As the week went on, we began to make plans to escape, and, rather like leaving the public road, we decided to walk to some of the trout lochs in the hills nearby.
One of these forays took me up the Langavat river at the head of Loch Airigh na h-Airdhre on beat four to the large Loch Langevat itself. I do not think stout Cortez, getting his first glimpse of the Pacific from a peak in Darien could have been more impressed than I was. The eight miles or so of Langevat reached away, apparently indefinitely. I fished along its banks and it seemed that everywhere, in every second wave, there was a solid trout willing to take my flies. Time has possibly compressed the event, making it seem more productive than it was, but I know that I had a dozen trout inside the first hour and several were a pound in weight. I even began to hope for one of the Langevat monsters I had heard about. One of the boatmen on the Grimersta system told me he had taken a six pounder there not long before we visited it.
This and a hundred other experiences like it help to define starting points in fishing. They also help us to understand why we fish. The starting point of fishing is usually, physically or figuratively ‘well off the road’. In some ways our fishing lies in another world, secret, not always accessible, sometimes closed. It is a world which grips the imagination compellingly and winds you into its own rules.
I dare say this theory of where fishing starts could be called the Arcadian fallacy. You almost expect the loch over the hill to be in the middle of pastures with shepherds dancing to their oaten flutes. There is a trace of that in my idea, but the Arcadia I find in my Scottish fishing is a blend of an actual environment ,- a Scottish moor; a clear hill stream - and something else. I do not know exactly what that ‘something else’ is, but I have tried to write about the feelings of discovering fishing in one of my recent books on fishing ‘The River Within’. One chapter is called ‘ The Road To Fionn’ and it tells of walking up the course of the short, lovely Little Gruinard river in Wester Ross, crossing the hill and coming on an arm of Loch Fionn ( The Fairy Loch) and fishing and walking round its north western bays. Again it was a day of good trout and marvellous landscapes. I will not re-tell the story of the Road to Fionn here. Read it for yourself ! I have put it up on my own site.
One thing off-road fishing forays teaches you is that fishing like this is unique. I mean, you quite simply cannot step into the same river twice. When I was a student I worked on the island of Mull as a forester and I fished all sorts of hill lochs in my spare time. In the north of the island between Dervaig and Mishnish I walked up to a loch which lay in a deep, tight glen, almost as if it was a volcano with water in its heart instead of fire. In was in some ways an eerie place, very quiet, very shut in. I fish round the shores covering the clearest of clear water - very unusual for the Hebrides. I had a great evening with a bag of trout of good weight and colour. I think I fed everybody in my lodgings with that catch. Years later, a friend of mine decided to live on Mull and I gave him precise directions on how to find the Volcano. He is an expert fisher, but he returned from that high, clear loch saying that it was absolutely empty of trout. I wrote about this and others went up and found it either ‘closed for the day’ or seemingly unpopulated.
I have not dared to go back to that high loch. I have so often found that places of high atmosphere, generous places, seem unrecognisable when you return. It’s like going back to the small town where you were brought up and finding most of the shops boarded up. These notions of something lost, as well as something much loved, lie at the heart of much of the fishing conservation work I do. I am conscious that the half-mile-off-the-road rule is much more like a five-mile rule now. In another form, the rule urges you to seek out unlikely or difficult bits of fishing to feel again that you are in touch with Arcadia. Last June I was visiting the Spean Bridge area and stayed in a log lodge on the south bank of Loch Lochy. The south side of this deep loch runs parallel with the main road from Fort William to Inverness, but the other side is backed by a forest and the steep sides of the hills which form the northern wall of the Great Glen. That side is pretty difficult to fish. The trees and shrubs hang over and often trail their branches into the water. Loch Lochy has only a narrow, boulder strewn band of shallow water before it plunges to great depths. This means, of course, that it is not really a very good trout loch. Trout need shallow bays where fly life abounds. I decided to put on my chest waders and ease out into the loch along this shoreline. I took my eleven foot four inch Sage two-piece rod, a marvellous, subtle piece of carbon, and I roll-cast and spey-cast my trout flies down this woody bank. It was, as they say, no picnic. But the trout were there after all. They were not big - the best being about ten ounces in weight and the average six ounces or so. I got nine of which I kept four. The next day my wife and I went over to the sands of Ardtoe beach near Ardnamurchan and we dined off these four trout cooked over a small fire among the rocks. Need I say more ? The Scottish wilderness is sometimes miles away, but sometimes just separated from us by the barrier of awkwardness. Fishing in Scotland takes you well off theroad in physical terms - and that is a delight - but it also takes you well off the beaten track in other ways. In each case, the quality of the journey is special, undefinable and memorable.
You can find more articles in the archive under A Line On Scottish Fishing.
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