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Author and one time angling administrator Drew Jamieson has, rather cleverly, if you ask me, come up with A Scottish Angler’s Companions – Fly Fishing with the Masters (Amazon, £10) His “companions” are the fishing writers, authors and ordinary people who one way or another have inspired him over the years. It’s a format which allows him to visit and revisit rivers, lochs and reservoirs across Scotland from Orkney to Galloway in the footsteps of the famous, the eccentric and the simply companionable.
Many of these names will mean nothing outside their own locality, which doesn’t matter as they all have useful tales to tell about wind directions, the times they lived in, the flies they used, water heights and all the piscatorial rest.
And then Jamieson follows up with his own take on the water in question as he ranges about from Tweed to Awe. He’s not afraid either to invoke the ghosts of dead fishermen he fancies he has spotted on the bank in the gloaming, notably Lt-commander Terence Horsley who, like Jamieson, was a pilot and fisherman, who had taken a lease on the Finavon beat of the South Esk in Angus during the war. Stationed at HMS Condor near Arbroath, he would fly his Fairey Swordfish over “his” beat, checking on conditions, particularly the water marks on conspicuous boulders. Was the river rising or falling? It was while renting Finavon that he published one of the first statistical records to show the correlation between salmon catches and water height.
Other figures more humble, but just as knowledgeable emerge. I had no idea that the postmaster at Abington, one Matthew Mckendrick was so fed up with poachers and over fishing on the headwaters of the Clyde in the late 1880s that he and a Glasgow tackle dealer drove stakes into the river to foul nets and founded a hatchery to restock the river. Thus the Upper Ward Association came into being, forerunner of the United Clyde Angling Protective Association.
Jamieson also traces the advent of “sport” fishing. As early as 1852 a Mr Dunbar rented the salmon rights in the Thurso which he let to anglers at rather greater profit than he could make from netting. Dunbar followed on the heels of Col Thornton who had arrived in Scotland on his own yacht in 1786 replete with boats, rods, guns and hounds.
It was Thornton’s published adventures that were to popularise Scotland as a land of sporting opportunity. Nonetheless Thornton was not always happy. We find him moaning on Loch Tay that he hasn’t had a rise in five minutes ( try five hours colonel!) but in rather better mood on Loch Alvie where he hauls out a five foot four inch long pike weighing 47lbs. If you’ve run out of fishy places to explore, this is the book. n