Good trout-fishing in Scotland, south of the Pentland Firth, is almost
impossible to procure. There are better fish, and more of them,
in the Wandle, within twenty minutes of Victoria Station, than in any
equal stretch of any Scotch river with which I am acquainted.
But the pleasure of angling, luckily, does not consist merely of the
catching of fish. The Wandle is rather too suburban for some tastes,
which prefer smaller trout, better air, and wilder scenery. To
such spirits, Loch Awe may, with certain distinct cautions, be recommended.
There is more chance for anglers, now, in Scotch lochs than in most
Scotch rivers. The lochs cannot so easily be netted, lined, polluted,
and otherwise made empty and ugly, like the Border streams. They
are farther off from towns and tourists, though distance is scarcely
a complete protection. The best lochs for yellow trout are decidedly
those of Sutherland. There are no railways, and there are two
hundred lochs and more in the Parish of Assynt. There, in June,
the angler who is a good pedestrian may actually enjoy solitude, sometimes.
There is a loch near Strathnaver, and far from human habitations, where
a friend of my own recently caught sixty-five trout weighing about thirty-eight
pounds. They are numerous and plucky, but not large, though a
casual big loch-trout may be taken by trolling. But it is truly
a far way to this anonymous lake and all round the regular fishing inns,
like Inchnadampf and Forsinard there is usually quite a little crowd
of anglers. The sport is advertised in the newspapers; more and
more of our eager fellow-creatures are attracted, more and more the
shooting tenants are preserving waters that used to be open. The
distance to Sutherland makes that county almost beyond the range of
a brief holiday. Loch Leven is nearer, and at Loch Leven the scenery
is better than its reputation, while the trout are excellent, though
shy. But Loch Leven is too much cockneyfied by angling competitions;
moreover, its pleasures are expensive. Loch Awe remains, a loch
at once large, lovely, not too distant, and not destitute of sport.
The reader of Mr. Colquhoun’s delightful old book, “The
Moor and the Loch,” must not expect Loch Awe to be what it once
was. The railway, which has made the north side of the lake so
ugly, has brought the district within easy reach of Glasgow and of Edinburgh.
Villas are built on many a beautiful height; here couples come for their
honeymoon, here whole argosies of boats are anchored off the coasts,
here do steam launches ply. The hotels are extremely comfortable,
the boatmen are excellent boatmen, good fishers, and capital company.
All this is pleasant, but all this attracts multitudes of anglers, and
it is not in nature that sport should be what it once was. Of
the famous salmo ferox I cannot speak from experience.
The huge courageous fish is still at home in Loch Awe, but now he sees
a hundred baits, natural and artificial, where he saw one in Mr. Colquhoun’s
time. The truly contemplative man may still sit in the stern of
the boat, with two rods out, and possess his soul in patience, as if
he were fishing for tarpon in Florida. I wish him luck, but the
diversion is little to my mind. Except in playing the fish, if
he comes, all the skill is in the boatmen, who know where to row, at
what pace, and in what depth of water. As to the chances of salmon
again, they are perhaps less rare, but they are not very frequent.
The fish does not seem to take freely in the loch, and on his way from
the Awe to the Orchy. As to the trout-fishing, it is very bad
in the months when most men take their holidays, August and September.
From the middle of April to the middle of June is apparently the best
time. The loch is well provided with bays, of different merit,
according to the feeding which they provide; some come earlier, some
later into season. Doubtless the most beautiful part of the lake
is around the islands, between the Loch Awe and the Port Sonachan hotels.
The Green Island, with its strange Celtic burying-ground, where the
daffodils bloom among the sepulchres with their rude carvings of battles
and of armed men, has many trout around its shores. The favourite
fishing-places, however, are between Port Sonachan and Ford. In
the morning early, the steam-launch tows a fleet of boats down the loch,
and they drift back again, fishing all the bays, and arriving at home
in time for dinner. Too frequently the angler is vexed by finding
a boat busy in his favourite bay. I am not sure that, when the
trout are really taking, the water near Port Sonachan is not as good
as any other. Much depends on the weather. In the hard north-east
winds of April we can scarcely expect trout to feed very freely anywhere.
These of Loch Awe are very peculiar fish. I take it that there
are two species—one short, thick, golden, and beautiful; but these,
at least in April, are decidedly scarce. The common sort is long,
lanky, of a dark green hue, and the reverse of lovely. Most of
them, however, are excellent at breakfast, pink in the flesh, and better
flavoured, I think, than the famous trout of Loch Leven. They
are also extremely game for their size; a half-pound trout fights like
a pounder. From thirty to forty fish in a day’s incessant
angling is reckoned no bad basket. In genial May weather, probably
the trout average two to the pound, and a pounder or two may be in the
dish. But three to the pound is decidedly nearer the average,
at least in April. The flies commonly used are larger than what
are employed in Loch Leven. A teal wing and red body, a grouse
hackle, and the prismatic Heckham Peckham are among the favourites;
but it is said that flies no bigger than Tweed flies are occasionally
successful. In my own brief experience I have found the trout
“dour,” occasionally they would rise freely for an hour
at noon, or in the evening; but often one passed hours with scarcely
a rising fish. This may have been due to the bitterness of the
weather, or to my own lack of skill. Not that lochs generally
require much artifice in the angler. To sink the flies deep, and
move them with short jerks, appears, now and then, to be efficacious.
There has been some controversy about Loch Awe trouting; this is as
favourable a view of the sport as I can honestly give. It is not
excellent, but, thanks to the great beauty of the scenery, the many
points of view on so large and indented a lake, the charm of the wood
and wild flowers, Loch Awe is well worth a visit from persons who do
not pitch their hopes too high.
Loch Awe would have contented me less had I been less fortunate in
my boatman. It is often said that tradition has died out in the
Highlands; it is living yet.
After three days of north wind and failure, it occurred to me that
my boatman might know the local folklore—the fairy tales and traditions.
As a rule, tradition is a purely professional part of a guide’s
stock-in-trade, but the angler who had my barque in his charge proved
to be a fresh fountain of legend. His own county is not Argyleshire,
but Inverness, and we did not deal much in local myth. True, he
told me why Loch Awe ceased—like the site of Sodom and Gomorrah—to
be a cultivated valley and became a lake, where the trout are small
and, externally, green.
“Loch Awe was once a fertile valley, and it belonged to an
old dame. She was called Dame Cruachan, the same as the hill,
and she lived high up on the hillside. Now there was a well on
the hillside, and she was always to cover up the well with a big stone
before the sun set. But one day she had been working in the valley
and she was weary, and she sat down by the path on her way home and
fell asleep. And the sun had gone down before she reached the
well, and in the night the water broke out and filled all the plain,
and what was land is now water.” This, then, was the origin
of Loch Awe. It is a little like the Australian account of the
Deluge. That calamity was produced by a man’s showing a
woman the mystic turndun, a native sacred toy. Instantly water
broke out of the earth and drowned everybody.
This is merely a local legend, such as boatmen are expected to know.
As the green trout utterly declined to rise, I tried the boatman with
the Irish story of why the Gruagach Gaire left off laughing, and all
about the hare that came and defiled his table, as recited by Mr. Curtin
in his “Irish Legends” (Sampson, Low, & Co.).
The boatman did not know this fable, but he did know of a red deer that
came and spoke to a gentleman. This was a story from the Macpherson
country. I give it first in the boatman’s words, and then
we shall discuss the history of the legend as known to Sir Walter Scott
and James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.
