My best years trouting were definitely when I was in my early teens. Sadly, my original diaries of these days are no more and the intervening years have fogged much of the specific detail, creating a melange of memories with tangles here and there like a birds nest in a spool of leader material. It’s true that everything in life was rosier then. Summers were warmer, birds sang sweeter and more loudly (this may of course actually be true as there has been a huge decline in wild songbirds since the seventies, but I’m sure you’re following the point) and most of all, the fish rose freely in pristine streams.

To be honest though, in most of central Lanarkshire where I lived the waters were anything but pristine. The torrents of sludge and human detritus mixed with heavy industrial pollution from the many steel mills centred around the Motherwell area ensured that the rivers were pretty much lifeless. One of them, the small River Calder, occasionally ran a bright, pastel blue colour. That was on the odd days when it wasn’t running an Amazonian brown. During the occasional hot summers that bless Scotland, my friends and I would swim in it; well, you could actually describe it as less like swimming and more like going through the motions. The things you do when you’re a kid…

The closest you could get to “clean” water on the River Clyde started above the big industrial polluters in Motherwell and, more specifically, above a place called Netherton where the last of the council owned sewage plants discharged. From there on up the grayling were to be found, and thereafter the trout.

Things have changed a lot, of course, and the decline in heavy industry in central Scotland, though an economic tragedy, has meant that the river water quality has improved immensely. So much so, that salmon and sea trout now run the Clyde and its many tributaries. Nature has a high bounce - if she gets adequate clearance.

I used to trek to the River Clyde every Saturday and almost every Sunday too. In those days, fly fishing books and bus timetables formed the bulk of my bedtime reading. I studied all of the possible routes to the river, matching all of the times of the relevant services. Inevitably, it was the earliest bus, no matter the route and equally inevitably it was any route back through the steel town of Wishaw on the way home because the main bus stop was next to the fish and chip shop; what passes for Scottish Soul Food was exactly what I needed after a long day fishing.

I recall one night waiting at the bus stop, bag of chips in my hand, and being approached by an older fisher. There were always lots of fishers at bus stops in those pre-car-for-every-household days. They would have their thigh boots rolled down to their knees and be festooned with landing nets and rods and wading sticks and rucksacks with a variety of hats jammed on their heads. It must have been a nightmare for the other bus passengers as we all traipsed on, scything our way down the aisle. For many years I sported a custom made rod bag (made of course by my Mum) which had a huge sack-like bit at the bottom for all the gear and a tie-on slim top bit that covered the tops of the rods. It looked, for all the world, like a gun case and I was eyed strangely on more than one occasion by policemen and asked all the time what I had shot that day. Even now, I can’t decide whether it was just my Mum’s practical approach to the problem of transporting rods and reels or whether she just had a wicked sense of humour.

But anyway, this old guy asked me how I’d done and I proudly showed him my supermarket plastic carrier bag with three small brownies swilling about in the bottom. “No bad” he says and then he opened an old white sack he was carrying which was literally stuffed with fish. There must have been 30 or more trout in there.

I have to wonder, now, what the other passengers thought of the stink of so many dead fish plonked next to them for the journey home, but at the time I was suitably impressed and not a little embarrassed that I had been so comprehensively outgunned by an old guy with a bait rod. It wouldn’t be the last time for that emotion either; fly fishing snobbery can strike at any age and it doesn’t always fill the creel.

Back then, I had a couple of friends that fished; John “Titch” Mitchell, and sometimes my own brother John would tag along, but mostly I fished alone. Tom McGuane wrote that there is a difference between loneliness and solitude, and young though I was (although I hadn’t even heard of Mr McGuane at that time) I already knew that to be true. All the fun of fishing with a buddy was on the way there, on the bank when tackling up, during a convivial lunch and, finally, as company on the way home. That was it. The rest of the day was simply a personal pleasure; at least it was for me and still is, truth be told.

One of the bus drivers on the main route up the scenic Clyde valley became friendly with me. He was a garrulous, ginger-headed chap whose name now escapes me. He would let me ride up at the front of the bus with him, chatting all the way along the picturesque winding route by the river. He would also ask what time I was coming home to make sure that his bus waited if I wasn’t at the stop exactly on time. Hard to imagine that happening today and, sadly, any adult taking so much interest in the comings and goings of a teenage boy would also nowadays be viewed with great suspicion. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any parent letting a twelve or thirteen year old boy head off at daybreak on his own, to return god-only-knows when. I mean, we didn’t even have a home telephone in those days far less the ubiquitous modern-day mobile phones, without which no child is allowed to venture a hundred yards from their front door.  There could be a lesson in there for all parents; kids need to grow after all.

I had a talk with my folks recently about this. We all remembered clearly an incident when they had simply dropped me off in the middle of a tiny village called Diurinish in remote Wester Ross and then went off to sight-see whilst I fished in the wee river that flowed through it. They were gone for hours and when they came back, a local woman directed them to where I was fishing. I’d gotten scared when her herd of cows had ambled after me as I crossed their field to get to another part of the burn which ran into the sea because I'd seen a sea trout jump in it. Anyway, she’d taken me in, given me a cup of tea and a scone and then walked me safely back across the field.



When we’d finished recounting the tale, we all looked at one another in silence, contemplating the number of possible outcomes that event could have had. I was, after all, only twelve years old at the time and none of us had ever been in the area before. I just saw it on the map, noticed that a river ran through it and asked them to stop and leave me there to fish in peace. Given the fear of strangers that grips society nowadays, most people would think that it’s a miracle I survived. There could be a lesson in there for all parents; kids need to grow after all. Mind you, I’m not sure that I’d feel comfortable doing that with my own Jamie or Scott.

I can’t remember exactly how I found it, but at one time or another I stumbled upon the little River Mouse and became an instant addict. When I say “river”, I am describing a body of water that you can literally jump over in certain places. Back then I had it largely to myself, at least at first, as most of the “serious” fishers would stick to the main River Clyde. You did get the occasional other angler coming over to fish there and I do have a very strong recollection of one arrogant sod who gave me some abuse before marching into the pool in front of me, casting as he went, and spooking all the trout in the process. He claimed to be an official of the Angling Association. More like Asshole Association – not that I’m bitter.

The Mouse joins the River Clyde in the pretty little village of Kirkfieldbank which lies below the market town of Lanark. There was, and possibly still is, a caravan site (aka trailer park for US readers) at the meeting of the two and there was a little shop where I’d visit and stock up on sweets and juice to supplement my lunch rations. The woman who owned the shop lived in the caravan next door and she was always happy to see me, chatting away to me in a motherly sort of way.

Of course, I was a "proper" fisherman by then - dry fly only unless the conditions dictated otherwise. As mentioned earlier, I had learned all of my technique from books on chalk-stream fishing – which is actually the complete the opposite of the spate driven Mouse environment, but I wasn’t to know that. For years I searched in vain for a mayfly hatch, but the nearest thing was the small olive green upwing flies, the fewer, but larger, march browns and the odd sulphur-bright yellow sally which sailed majestically down the streams in late May or early June.

Nowadays, American fishing writers refer to all upright-winged aquatic flies as mayflies, but to me back then, a mayfly meant the inch long white creatures that inhabit the chalk-stream and limestone waters in the South of England (and, paradoxically, the limestone lochs of Northern Scotland around Durness). Of course, I had read about so-called “duffers fortnight” when trout as long as your arm would come out of their hidey-holes to feast on mayflies and so could be caught by anyone. I wanted some of that. Mayflies were clearly mystical. But it was not to be on the River Mouse at least.

Around that time I also learned to tie my own flies, mostly out of necessity as shop tied ones cost so much, and the simple spider patterns of the Clyde suited me quite well: Greenwell’s Glorys, simple Green Olives, Coch-y-Bhondu (pronounce it coakeybundi and you won’t go far wrong) and Black Spiders. I tied them using a pair of surgical forceps (I pinched them from my Dad's toolbox and I still have them) for a tying vice, which in turn I clamped into his woodworking vice, and, using some cotton thread from mum's sewing box plus any bits of fur and feather I could lay my hands on, I fashioned my flies as best I could. The Mouse trout, thankfully, were not terribly fussy creatures and readily ate them, despite my sloppy tying and make-do-and-mend materials.

Casting was tricky because of the trees all around the river bank, but the longest cast I had to make was no more than 15 feet or so. Presentation was everything of course; plonk it down in a heap or let the stream drag the fly and you were lost. In order to hook the fish, I learned the basic and now habitual skill of feeding the line back through my hands at the same pace as the current swept it towards me so that when a fish rose I could strike on a tight line.

Occasionally, the wee river would be in a coloured spate after heavy rain and then the technique was switched from the upstream dry-fly method to the upstream worm method; read in yet another fishing book. I would turn over boulders beside the stream until I found a small worm, then, using a short length of nylon of about 2 foot connected to the end of my fly line and a small piece of lead shot pinched about 6 inches above a size 16 hook, I would make my way carefully upstream dropping the worm into the flow ahead of me. To help me see the takes, I tied a piece of bright red wool to the top of the leader. When it twitched, I set the hook. If it stopped in its bumpy passage, I set the hook. If I just got that certain feeling that something had changed, I set the hook. And every so often, the unmistakable pulse of life was there - but how I never took my eye out with all the fruitless strikes remains a mystery to me to this day. Kids have a karma all of their own.

Upstream worming produced the most memorable days trouting that I ever had. I arrived in the morning to a heavy spate and I almost went home, but since I had travelled all that way, I tackled up anyway. That day I took trout after trout after trout to small worms until, by 2.00pm the water level had dropped and cleared a little. A hatch of olives came on and I switched to the dry fly taking even more trout.

My tally for the day was fifteen and I floated home on an air of triumph, only to have it deflated by my Dad teasing me because I had released all of them and had nothing to show for my efforts. Back then, all of the “keepers” (fish above 8 inches – I carried a small piece of string marked in black ink at each inch and with a red mark at the 8 inch point) would generally be despatched and taken home as combined trophy and fresh food. But after a while, I noticed that my parents and siblings didn’t always eat the catch and many were being wasted. So I stopped killing them, unless a neighbour asked for one. Fishing in those days was an additional food source to most of us in reality, and the high ideals of catch and release were a long way off. I just thought it stupid and pointless to kill something and watch it thrown away, that was all. Still do.

But I think it was in these early trips that my now abiding attention to ritual in all matters fishing started. My day would start early and end late –  always finishing with me writing up my now vanished early diaries – and I recall what a “typical” day would have been as if I were going tomorrow.

At the junction of the two rivers, Mouse and Clyde, in a long deep, slow, pool that was virtually fishless, but was still worth the odd cast, I would start my day. Then there were a couple of runs and splashy riffles before I would get to the first proper fishy pool; a long glide that seemed to glow a beautiful, soft, green colour from the reflection of the overhanging trees and high grassy banks. The fish would lie along this far bank and if I was stealthy, I could sneak up behind them and flick a fly ahead of them into the stream where they lay.

The next decent pool was my favourite. I called it the Blue Caravan pool, for the simple reason there was a blue caravan standing beside it; imagination usually loses out to pragmatism in my mind.

There was a big overhanging tree half way down the pool and underneath this, as you would expect, was where the big trout lay. A big trout on the Mouse was anything above 9 inches, which in fact was a respectable trout on most waters in those days. The trick in this pool was to cast the fly, usually a small Black Spider, so that it hit and bounced off the branches of the tree. A risky strategy when resources with which to tie replacement flies were limited, but a hugely successful one nonetheless. The fly would then drop onto the surface of the stream and, if I’d been careful and quiet in my approach and not spooked the fish, like as not the Black Spider would disappear in a perfect little dimple. With a quick strike, the fish would be on.

If I was lucky. Hooking small brown trout on a dry fly is almost an art form in its own right.

Past the overhanging tree was a fast stream and in the slacker water to the side of this there was always a fish or two lying. This always puzzled me; first, it was only 4 or 5 inches deep and second, it was right beside a raw sewage outfall from the caravan park. I had always read that trout need pristine water to survive, but here was a small micro-environment that was very polluted, yet always held trout. Needless to say I never ate any of the fish that came from that particular stream; but the wisdom of age has indicated to me that there was nothing to stop fish from there moving 4 yards across the stream to the lie under the tree, take a small fly dropping from a branch and so being caught and eaten by me. Don’t go there, please…

That was it for the lower pools; from there, I would walk round the remaining caravans and cross the road to what I called the Corner Pool. This was beside an old mill building which had a beautiful, but dangerously unsafe, old arch bridge over the river. I could sometimes take a trout out of the tail of the run as it swung on its right hand bend, and I distinctly remember that was where most of the grayling I caught in the Mouse resided, but it was only a stop-off before the trek up to the main event - The Canyon.

The Canyon is a deep, rocky gorge that the river has been carving for millennia and will, most likely, still be carving in millennia to come. Initially, I had no idea how far The Canyon ran back in there for. To a young teenager, it was bona fide adventure territory.

The Canyon started with a rushing channel through some huge boulders. I never chanced going in there during a spate – it would have been far too dangerous. However, when the conditions were favourable, turning right and following the river course took me into a different world. It was always cool in there, the light was subdued and there was rarely any wind. The dippers sung more loudly than usual, partly to be heard above the rush of the water and partly as the result of their song bouncing and echoing off the sheer granite walls. Places like The Canyon give you hope that human beings can’t possibly ruin everything.

To fish The Canyon, you tied on a chunky Black Spider or a Coch-y-Bondhu and cast ahead of you into almost any riffles you fancied. You couldn’t use typical Clyde-style flies in there and whatever fly you tied on had to be a bushy concoction because the turbulence of the streams made it impossible to see it otherwise. There could be trout anywhere and they were invariably hungry and eager to come to the fly. Rises came thick and fast sometimes but I was lucky if I hooked one in five, so adept at hitting the fly and spitting it out in a flash were these little trout.

Each week I would venture further and further in there, learning more and more about how to catch the trout as I went and recording it in the lost diaries. Eventually, after many weeks of this exploration, I discovered a stunning little sunlit glade which my pragmatic, unimaginative, teenage mind christened “The Glade”. For a number of weeks I would get as far as that point, but the last scrabble into The Glade itself involved getting over a fallen tree and climbing up a fairly steep and narrow run with tumbling water to my right and precious few hand and toe-holds. It wasn’t exactly the north face of Annapurnah, but it was difficult enough to keep me out of there for a while.

By taking down my rod and packing all away to free my hands, I finally made it over the top. It was worth all the effort. The light was cool and green and the river was deep and slow alongside the right-hand sheer wall of The Canyon face, which dropped from sunlit heights above into black depths below. There was an open space on the left bank where I could sit and enjoy my lunch and listen to the swifts shrieking above me along the ridge.

What I remember most, though, was the smell of wild garlic or ramsons. This heady perfume hung in the still air of The Glade and stuck to my clothing so that I could smell it for hours later. I only have to close my eyes even yet and I can smell it. The ramsons grew there in profusion, but were most concentrated in the small patch of raised gravel under some hawthorn trees where I sat to have my lunch. A cheese sandwich, the great taste of Lilt and the smell of wild garlic with a Mars Bar dessert…heaven. Well… I was young and it was a long time ago…

But I never did catch a trout in that pool, despite the fact that it was stuffed with them. The trouble was that a number of them would lie just on the edge of the outflow - an impossible place to cast your fly and not have it drag wildly over their heads. Once spooked, they’d tear off into the body of the pool putting all the others down in their panic.

I discovered eventually that The Glade was about halfway up The Canyon and there was just as much water above it where I learned to winkle out the trout as there was below. Each visit saw me venturing further and further on past The Glade. The further away I got from the caravan park, the more spooked I could make myself; what if I fell and broke a leg? I never saw another soul in there during most of my early trips. What if I did meet someone and things got nasty? In the early seventies, industrial Scotland held a fair amount of unsavoury characters and it was easy to get smacked about simply for wearing the wrong colour of clothes. Some of those guys probably went fishing.

Fishing The Canyon was one part adventure, one part fun and one part bravado.

Eventually, after a few seasons fishing The Canyon, I ventured far enough to discover a new pool that had a pretty waterfall at the head of it and was shaped like a miniature Roman amphitheatre. It was still in The Canyon itself, but it was certainly blessed with much more sunlight and the temperature was therefore noticeably higher. After taking a couple of standard sized fish from below the fall, I climbed over the rocks and fallen trees at the head to find myself at the edge of a corn field. I had emerged from the other side of The Canyon. The mystery, it appeared, was over.

Although I went again a few more times, that was pretty much that for me. When I knew where it went and how it ended, the magic of the place was somehow diminished. I don’t know if that says anything terribly profound about me, but it was somehow enough. Besides, on a few of my later trips, I had started to meet the occasional other angler and, to cap it all, they were mostly fishing with floats and bait. The Canyon was no longer my sole, fly-only, province. Also, along about then, someone pointed me in the direction of a small loch with wild brownies in it where the fishing was free (unheard of) and since I’d never tried loch style fishing before I was compelled to go and…well, you know how it can be.

Six or seven years ago, though, I went back.

The old ruined mill in Kirkfieldbank has been sold, refurbished and converted into a family home, complete with a gate and a PRIVATE sign so that you can no longer get access to The Canyon from that side. The river is now pretty badly polluted from the outflow of, of all things, a rainbow trout farm further upstream.

There are still some brown trout there, though, and I managed to catch a few of them during an olive hatch in the pool above The Canyon, which I reached by driving down a narrow road on the other side of the hill.

I could see The Canyon itself over the lip of the falls and past the fallen trees. I scrambled over some dead-falls from the previous winter and had a look in there. It was just as dark and cool and mysterious as I remembered.

I didn’t go in.

From "Walker" magazine in 2007

There are those who say that golf is a waste of a good walk…and who am I to argue as I’m neither a walker nor a golfer. I have to say that as pastimes they leave a void in me that only one thing can fill: fishing. For me, fishing adds a spiritual dimension to any walk which wholly justifies the energy expended. Ok, so we’re not talking “spiritual” in the sense of the Camino of Santiago de Compostella, but there is a certain depth that is added to the average stroll when you have a fishing rod in your hand or you are headed in the direction of a days fishing that makes birds sing sweeter, roses smell better and sunshine break through clouds.

Truth be known, probably the only time I walk anywhere is when I am off fishing and as walks go I have lots of favourites. Like the stroll down from Tulchan Lodge in Speyside, past The Churchyard pool down to Head of Wood; or from the Hotel Finesterra to the harbour in Cabo San Lucas which you take at a brisk walk in the cool of a morning but revert to a saunter in the searing heat of a Mexican afternoon; or the promenade out across the long jetty at Tropic Star in the middle of the Panamanian rainforest. On a good one I can get up to, oh, a full mile from my room or car. There is, however, one place right here in Scotland that requires a little more effort than what I would consider normal…but my it’s worth it.

Up in the north western corner by picturesque Lochinver lies the Assynt Estate which has been under local crofter’s control since 1993. This is wild land with dramatic scenery and unforgiving peat hags. It’s more water than land in many ways and all of the little lochans contain trout, and all of them are controlled by the Assynt Crofters. Where else can you get to fish 27 lochans for only £20 a week and be near guaranteed fish in each and every one of them?

In all cases of course, you have to get out and walk to get to them. And I have to confess it’s a lot of fun, especially the first time when you simply don’t know from looking at the map what the country will be like and what you will find. For example, I spent ages poring over an ordinance survey map looking for any water connected to the nearby sea on the off chance a sea trout or a grilse would sneak in. I finally identified one and planned my trip in meticulously. After about an hour of walking through the heather and peat I came to the lochan, complete with a stream that dropped some 20ft out of the back of it vertically down to the Atlantic. I’m big enough to admit that I enjoy map reading less than I enjoy walking.

These little hill lochs are shallow and the fish feed pretty much tight to the edges looking for wind-blown flies, so there is no real need to wade. Mind you I didn’t think of that initially and the first couple of times I went in I wore chest waders and had the full kit of fly fishing vest and tackle bag. After a few miles it was like wearing a sauna. It made things a bit fragrant when you took them off too. I soon wised up and rigged up a small 8 ft rod, stuffed a spare spool of 4lb leader material and a box of bushy trout flies in a shirt pocket and set off wearing wellies.

The lochs are all broadly similar in format: peat based acidic water which is impenetrable to the eye; heather-clad banks with rocky outcrops; constant wind blowing across the surface. Having said that though they all seemed to have their own character and I fell in love with one called Grilse Loch. I never saw any grilse mind you, although it’s possible as there was a little feeder stream connecting it to the River Inver which is a noted salmon river, but I did catch many a wild brownie in there. It’s simple hill-loch technique: you cast out into the little bays and usually across the ripple created by the prevailing breeze (or near gale on some days) and you work big bushy flies through the surface layer. When the fish are on the rises will come thick and fast but it can be the devil itself to get a hook into them so adept at spitting out the fly they are. In size the fish are not impressive, but their spirit more than makes up for that with spectacular acrobatics thrown in for good measure. And when I’ve caught two pan sized ones and have them sizzling on the portable barbecue by the lochside for breakfast, I almost feel that I could get into this walking lark after all.