A TOAST TO GARRY

The River Garry is finally being given the boost it needs to increase salmon numbers in the River Tay

Good news for the Tay as the River Garry is given a much-needed boost

The Tay, one of Scotland’s great salmon rivers, is about to become greater. After years of wrangling, t he upper Garry tributary is to be ‘re-watered’. Water will again flow over the embarrassingly bare boulders that disfigure the landscape alongside the A9 north of Bruar. The long-time Tay fishery board chief, Dr David Summers, whose vision has cherished this prospect for so long, estimates that re-awakening 13 kilometres of the main Garry stem, plus seven kilometres of tributary, will boost the Tay system with another 1,500 salmon annually. That is a big number.

This is the first big reclamation of salmon habitat in Scotland from the far-ranging hydro developments of the 1950s. For a while SSE’s plan involved compensating the Tay with yet more water diverted from the Spey (some is already re-routed to Perthshire) but that has been abandoned. The final plan is a salmon plus-plus story.

Hydro-electric generation, worth 11% of national output, has a huge role in Scottish river flows. Tom Johnston, the Scottish Secretary in 1951, famously said he wanted ‘light in every glen’, so dams were constructed and salmon blocked from many natural spawnings in a giant cobweb of changed flows. Rivers and lochs were diverted through tunnels, their water even channelled from coast to coast. Scotland’s water was indeed a valuable resource.

Today’s public has no conception of the degree to which Scottish rivers have been recruited to maximise hydro generation and help industry. The Spey at its source is diverted to serve Fort William’s aluminium smelter, east coast salmon water enabling west coast industry. Even the north, seen as pristine, helps the east, with the Naver’s Vagastie headwaters tunnelled off to feed Loch Shin’s power station.

Loch Garry’s abstractions started in 1937, with biologists pointing out that some of these abstractions are from small burns. They could constitute half the flow. Half the salmon habitat.

One reason so little of this history survives in the common psyche is that the generation that lived with the original drive for hydro is gone. The explosions, landslides, excavations, and loss of life when building the early dams are dim folk memory. What were unprecedented innovations then are now accepted as landscape features. That lochs like Loch Awe are lifted and cinched by huge concrete impoundments is viewed as normal.

The game-changer for the Garry was Europe’s Water Framework Directive of 2000. Rivers were to be restored to natural flows. The 17-year argument which followed, mostly a ding-dong between SSE and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), gingered up by the Tay fishery board, was finally concluded with SSE losing minimal generating power, what David Summers once described as the output of two wind turbines.

The upper Garry is currently marooned boulders, sterile for salmon after the gravel which is the salmon’s nursery habitat was previously deemed ‘ waste’ and carted off to landfill and is now having to be replaced. Siltation from the hills will provide more of what is called the ‘ conveyor-belt’ of gravel. Nature will re-build the salmon nursery.

The tenacity of the Tay fishery board has been crucial. At one point some members became SSE shareholders and appeared at annual general meetings in t-shirts demanding the Garry be re-watered. There is also international context, with America recently undergoing similar reconfigurations. On the Penobscot, Maine’s principal surviving Atlantic salmon river three mighty dams have been removed since 1999 to huge local acclaim. ‘River herring’ populations have rocketed from zero to two million. The USA, however, could afford the power loss as it has abundant low-cost shale, while we do not – maybe that is why SSE has just raised its prices by 14 per cent.

Water, salmon, and power are more complex, inter-connected subjects than they may appear. Meantime the Garry, where physical restoration will be completed by autumn, will breathe again. It was where the big Tay salmon once spawned. We can toast that.

‘ Nature will re-build the salmon nursery’