Washed away

In his first column for Scottish Field, our new angling writer explains why Highland fishing hotels are an endangered species – much to the dismay of fishermen the land over

Irecently enjoyed once again something I had almost forgotten. The bar was buzzing, drinks were materialising in clutches and the atmosphere was fizzing; this was a Highland fishing hotel in early May.

I started a conversation with a man from Northern Ireland. Word was already about – the Ulstermen were the ones taking the fish. Our talking jogged along nicely as we chatted about the wind, the cold – you know, normal Caithness subjects – before another two Ulstermen appeared. I departed to address my pint, leaving the Irishmen together.

The other pair were already marked men. They were quiet, projecting faraway stares in a dark corner. At dinner they drank Fanta. When addressed, they gave monosyllabic replies. But they didn’t need to talk – they’d had four spring salmon that day.

The next morning, members of my fishing party shuffled in for breakfast. There were no Ulstermen present. The ghillies reported that they had set off for their beat at 5am. Now, 5am in Caithness in May is not for the faint-hearted, but at least we now understood; they caught more because they fished more. It half-excused our modest catch – by the time the rest of us reached the water, they had been lashing line into the stiff wind for half a day.

That is the joy of a fishing hotel like the Ulbster Arms in Halkirk. Ephemeral legends are born. It is where fish are heavier and longer the next day than on the day they were caught;

‘It is where fish are heavier and longer the next day than on the day they were caught’

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where truth is a clumsy intruder. The language, the passion, is shared and barriers between people dissolve. The tough bit is the stairs to the bedrooms.

Few of these places survive. The 1905 catalogue of the Sutherland Estates’ sale of its sporting properties lists 15 fishing hotels. The Ulbster Arms, servicing the River Thurso, is one of the last in the Highlands. The evolution in fishing holidays has seen them replaced by lodges and wilderness fishing camps.

For the anglers, a serviced fishing lodge has the appurtenances of a hostelry cornered by friends. Maybe the housekeeper remembers you from last year. You hope it is for the right reasons. There is privacy in a lodge, which a hotel cannot guarantee. You pay as a group, so the cost is often lower.

But lodges can lack the buzz. You don’t meet new anglers the same way, and you don’t share entirely new experiences.

At a fishing camp in Russia more t han twenty years ago, I shared my tent-cabin (half-canvas and half-timber) and made a lifelong friend. We fished the same wilderness tributaries, swooping down onto the tundra in clattering ex-military helicopters, and reheated ourselves in front of the cabin’s puffing belly stove like latter-day boy scouts. Fishing camps are modelled on fishing hotels, with a communal dining-room.

It is often lamented in the Highlands that fishing hotels are dwindling. Increasingly, owners have tended to attach accommodation to fishing beats to beef up their income or conceal the fishing rent. One thing missing when anglers are sequestered away in private houses is the old-time (and sometimes alarming) spectacle of mass commiseration and the drowning of communal angling sorrows, with supine tweedy figures littering the public rooms.

If the management of fishing hotels is taken on by outsiders unversed in the traditions, guests fall away like the whitewash on the walls.

I was recently in a famous West Coast hostelry that offers fishing on dozens of trout lochs in the surrounding hills. Its sitting-out rooms were replete with grizzled tawny fish specimens; bent cane-rods hung scimitar-like above fireplaces; and weather-beaten anglers crouched over the fly selections. But it was run like a service station on the A1. The food, rather than sustaining body and soul, seemed designed to do damage. Six Finns were having dinner and I had to overcome the temptation to apologise to them for this particular Highland experience.

The River Thurso is serviced by its fishing hotel because no lodges exist. On occasion, less is definitely more.