Fishing and Shooting: Some good books on Scotland's fishing

Drew Jamieson used to write about fishing in this paper and I suspect knows all about barometric pressure, the angle of a fly's dangle and all those other signs that tell a natural-born fisherman the fish are on the rise. Or possibly the run.

On the whole I live in reasonable hope that kind friends who can spot which way the wind is blowing will ring up to say "come on down, the water's fine" and relieve me of many hours' fruitless flogging.

Drew, however, used to be secretary of the Scottish Anglers National Association and his day job for 20 years was managing the fishing on lochs, lakes and man-made reservoirs such as Carron Valley, Megget and Harperrig that supply Central Scotland with drinking water and fishermen with trout.

It put him in a unique position to write about this often ignored or not even noticed aspect of fishing in Scotland. So he logically called his first book Trout from the Tapwaters. It was a good idea and he is almost certainly the first person to have bothered to collate the history and huge amount of material gathered by scientists, fishermen and managers from their study, official and otherwise, of these now wild places.

But as in his latest book, The Tartan Trout, he is as interested in the people who fish and what they have done to improve their own favourite lochs or stream and rivers, as he is in the science and history. Books about fishing in Scotland tend to be all about salmon and how and where to catch them whereas these two books are rather a celebration of local trout fishermen.

The Ellem Fishing Club in the Borders, the world's oldest club, was founded in 1829 and is still with us, casting away happily unnoticed on its native Whiteadder. Angling, as John Buchan wrote, "was not only a sport but a social institution, for they (the anglers] had their little fraternities, their suppers and their songs."

Hard on the tail of The Tartan Trout comes a third book, The Salmon of Wisdom, which again is terrific on people and places.

Usefully or not, the author has made all three books downloadable from the internet or available as CDs. I can understand he didn't want to go to the considerable expense of printing but when most of us have been on computers all day, turning to an ibook for escape at almost the same price as a conventional book is not the same as thumbing through paper pages, or being able to leave it open by the bed or loo to come back to later. Mind you, there is something to be said for being able to skip electronically from chapter to chapter.

Go to www.changenrj.com and look for the "Angler's Companions" link on the right-hand side of the page.

#149 This article was first published in The Scotsman on April 03, 2010