PLAYGROUND OF THE GODS
An ambitious owner is transforming Mull’s pristine Benmore Estate into the perfect environment for serious sportsmen and those who just want an outdoors holiday, as Richard Bath found when he took his son Lochie for a stalking and fishing induction
Benmore Estate is not only a haven for serious sportsmen, it is an idyllic place for newbies to enjoy the great outdoors
‘Radford planned to turn this estate into a playground which would make any ten-year-old fall in love with the great outdoors’
Half a century ago, after an epic battle with a bar of silver fresh in off the tide, an excited ten-year-old pulled his first salmon out of the house pool on the isle of Mull’s gloriously pretty little spate river, the Forsa. No sooner had Neilson Bisset, the experienced ghillie assigned to guide the youngster, helped him land the fish, than the boy turned to him. ‘One day I’m going to buy this place,’ he said.
That boy was as good as his word. Over the next thirty-five years Tim Radford morphed from a wide-eyed nipper celebrating his first fish on the fly, via expulsion from Gordonstoun, to become a telecommunications squillionaire, providing him with the resources to complete the purchase of the 32,000-acre Benmore Estate in 2005. Radford knew exactly what he wanted to do with the estate. Built around the grand laird’s home of Knock House – which was once a wedding present for Queen Victoria’s daughter – he planned to turn the estate into the sort of playground which would make any ten-year-old fall in love with the great outdoors.
In that intention, he has succeeded in spades. Benmore, which is named after the only Munro on Mull, is a playground for families who want to explore the outdoors together. Knock House can take up to 24 people, and is often crammed with three or four families, with ten Benmore employees there to make sure that they can take part in all the pursuits the estates has to offer. These range from the traditional pursuits of stalking, wild fowling and fishing to more esoteric pursuits which are more likely to appeal to all the family: sea fishing, kayaks, sailing boats, paddle boards, clay pigeon
shooting and golf, which takes place at the nearby Craignure Golf Club.
Above all, the energetic Radford, who is surprisingly hands-on, is piling resources into the estate’s infrastructure with the intention of making Benmore into a retreat where families – especially those with millennials who have the attention span of goldfish – can start to appreciate the joys of fishing and stalking together, just as he once did. To that end, the group of ghillies is a deliberately mixed-age crew which goes all the way from twentysomething rugby- and motorbike-obsessed Angus MacLeod up to the more sedate figure of sixtysomething seasonal Kiwi ghillie Roland Findlay.
Our two-man party was a microcosm of exactly the sort of experience Radford hopes to be able to show visitors to Benmore. I have stalked, shot and fished plenty down the years, but while my youngest son, Lochie, has shot before, he has always resisted picking up a fly-rod and is the only one of my three children never to go stalking. Benmore provided a chance to cram the full panoply of fieldsports into one four-day post-lockdown burst.
‘Benmore provided a chance to cram the full panoply of field sports into a four-day burst’
We arrived on Mull in early August with a simple plan: a day on the river, one on a loch and another spent stalking before rounding off with some sea fishing. The plan was to work out what, if any of the above, my offspring – who turned 20 days before – might like to pursue.
Our guide on the river was Andrew Gorthy, a self-confessed fishing obsessive who lives a stone’s throw from the Forsa, one of the estate’s two rivers (it also has one bank of the Ba). Spending time with Andrew provided an invaluable insight into the sheer scale of his boss’ ambitions for Benmore and the Forsa in particular. With an explosion of fish farms and predators, plus a leak of concrete into the water when the council built a bridge across it (concrete kills salmon instantaneously), this gorgeous spate river has had a rough time of it of late.
Radford, though, has big plans for the Forsa, and has already built a multi-million pound hatchery which Andrew is running. They have already started restocking by releasing smolts into the river and together they have hatched a ten-year plan with the aim of turning this river with 46 pools, five fishable miles and a catch last year of 38 salmon (the biggest of which was 10lbs) into something as sought after as the Helmsdale or Naver. Just in case he ever loses sight of the prize, Andrew’s inbox regularly receives articles from his boss about the stocking programme on Iceland’s Ranga river and the Delphi in Ireland.
Yet none of that was on our minds as we chugged along the banks of the Forsa until we reached the hut by the Falls Pool. The day before it had been in spate, the swirling torrent breaking the river’s banks, but today it was a little overcast, with the water level gradually dropping – perfect for fishing. Just how good quickly became clear as after little more than a minute Lochie hooked a sea trout of about a pound and a half, a grin spreading across his face as he hauled in his catch. More nibbles concentrated his mind, and given that this was the first time he’d ever picked up a fly rod, under Andrew’s instruction he was making spectacularly fast progress with his casting.
If catching a sea trout so quickly was good, Lochie almost eclipsed that feat a couple of hours later. This time we had moved down to the House Pool, a glorious spot less than 100 yards from the sea, with one edge the ten foot waterfalls which give the Forsa salmon a long, thin profile. Again, he had only just started casting into the murk when his Ally’s Shrimp fly was gobbled up by a salmon of about five pounds. For almost ten minutes it thrashed furiously, trying to get off the hook and succeeding only as it was about to be netted.
It was a salutary lesson in salmon fishing, but it’s fair to say that Lochie wasn’t pleased. The frown that remained for the rest of the day eventually disappeared, but over the next three days our conversation would be regularly punctured with a plaintive, ‘Dad, I can’t believe I lost that salmon…’
If the first day was a triumph, so was our next outing. This time we were in the care of Roland and Jordan Newbrook, a 35-year-old high-flier who became so disillusioned with banking that he decided to become a ghillie instead. We travelled by argocat up to the beautiful Loch Tuill Bhearnach in the lee of some towering hills, a stretch of water which is universally acknowledged to be Roland’s exclusive domain. The jovial New Zealander (he reminds me of a Kiwi I once met who told me that ‘I love my family, my country and the All Blacks, and not necessarily in that order’) spent 20 years as a Christchurch copper and is now a farmer who for the past 12 years has spent every summer in Mull, and he loves this loch.
So it was that Lochie was taken in hand by the father figure, while Jordan
‘As we climbed the slope, he wheezed like a 40-a-day pensioner with emphysema’
and I rowed around, hauling out a succession of game but easily overpowered wild brownies. But while I was catching fish of 1lb and under, the whoops coming from the other boat suggested that more excitement was being had elsewhere. Sure enough, Lochie had caught two of the loch’s biggest fish of the year at 3.5lb and 2.5lb. Lochie and Roland beamed in stereo; it was impossible to decide who was more pleased. That evening, after nine testing holes at a scenic but soggy Craignure golf club, Lochie and I barbecued the two fish down by the sea, a reminder that nothing tastes better than food you’ve worked for. It was a special moment.
So far so good, but there was a sense of trepidation in the air. Lochie was a bit of a gym rat before the lockdown, but for over four months the most exercise he got was moving his thumbs across his Xbox controller. He was, frankly, terrified at the prospect of climbing any of the hills I identified as possible stalking ground, and clearly hoped I was lying as some sort of major wind-up. I was not, but so shrill were his entreaties to Andrew, who was to take us up Beinn Chreagach Mhor, that he drove us to within 500 feet of the top, which we reached by an admittedly steep climb.
Even then I could hear Lochie puffing like a 40-a-day pensioner with emphysema, a sound which brought a wry smile to my face. This disappeared, however, as we hit the plateau and climbed further, only to find the cloud coming down and a veil of lashing rain moving across us, visibility closing in to mere feet. By the time we were eventually forced to go down the other side of the ridge to find some stags, crawling past a group of young stags just 50 feet below us to get to a pair of shootable stags, we were wet through to the skin.
Yet none of that mattered when I heard the familiar boom of my rifle (for weapons nerds I’m currently using a lightweight .308 CZ557 rifle and a Bushnell Legend Ultra HD 3-9x 50 Multi-X scope) from further along Beinn Mheadhon. After waiting to see if there would be a second shot, I rushed forward to see my two companions striding down the hill to where Lochie had shot a stag through the heart from about 120 yards. Once again there was the beaming smile, tinged with Lochie’s regret that Andrew hadn’t allowed him to take the royal and had insisted on the switch. That smile disappeared when Lochie had to drag the stag down to the track, even though it took barely fifteen minutes.
Our final day saw us head out in Corra Bheinn, a brand new 26ft catamaran that Benmore use for inshore sea fishing for mackerel and Pollock. Their other boat, the Benmore Lady, an immaculate 46ft-boat, takes guests to the isle of Gunna between Coll and Tiree, where they catch, among other things, tope (a small shark, their record is a 45lb specimen) and skate (their record is a 195lb monster).
With the bigger boat already spoken for, Andrew and Jordan were our guides as we skirted around the rocky shores of Loch na Keal accompanied by a posse of noisy shags and the occasional curious seal. With Ulva and the Treshnish Isles ahead of us, Benmore towering over us, and Skye’s jagged outline in the distance, we pulled out unfeasible numbers of fish as the sun beat down, stopping only to pull up some of the estate’s creels and disgorge crabs and lobsters for that evening’s meal.
It rounded off an unforgettable four days on an estate that mixed a pristine environment with enough toys to keep even the most reticent ten-year-old entertained. Tim Radford, it seems, can view this as mission accomplished. As for my very own mission, that went better than I could have ever hoped. I may struggle to ever get Lochie to climb another hill but he is so entranced with fly-fishing that we’re already planning our first overnight hike into a brown trout loch in Assynt. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is.
‘After less than a minute he hooked a sea trout, a grin instantly spreading across his face’