Roger Cox: 'These creatures are only caught very rarely – so rarely, in fact, that hardly anyone bothers to fish for them any more'

Never mind Nessie – there are real-life prehistoric beasties living beneath the waters of some of our larger, more northerly lochs.

These creatures have ferocious-looking teeth, spend most of their time at depths of 100 feet or more, and feed on very large fish, often striking them swiftly from above, the better to snap their backbones clean in two.

I'm talking, of course, about Salmo ferox – the reputedly cannibalistic giant trout (sometimes weighing in at 30lbs) that still inhabits certain glacial lochs in the Highlands.

These creatures are only caught very rarely – so rarely, in fact, that hardly anyone bothers to fish for them any more. For Jon Berry, however, they are a life-long obsession, and the subject of his new book, Beneath the Black Water.

Victorian gents hunted ferox enthusiastically, trawling for hours on end while stoical ghillies rowed them around, but the popularity of ferox fishing declined after the war. As a result, Berry was reduced to scouring second-hand bookshops for morsels of useful information about how best to catch them.

It's the arcane nature of ferox fishing, though, allied to the mysterious, ancient origins of the fish themselves, that he finds so appealing.

"We knew the presence of ferox trout in the Highlands could be attributed to the advances and retreats of the great glaciers during the last Ice Age," he writes. "Ferox trout belonged to a landscape that was once home to reindeer, bears and mammoths."

Berry's fixation began in 1997 when, still in his twenties, he caught a ferox completely by accident on Loch Shin – a mean six-and-a-half-pounder. Since then, he and a select group of fishermen have been scouring remote bodies of water all around the country in search of these near-mythical creatures.

His story mostly consists of near misses and fruitless afternoons spent bobbing about in the rain, but by the time he eventually tastes success, he seems to have achieved a sort of fisherman's enlightenment: "We had realised that the joy was not in the capture but in the simple pursuit," he writes. "There was an unquantifiable sense of peace to be found in the repetition of the method and in the wilderness around us."

It's a brilliant book, full of profound, lightly worn wisdom. Buy it.

Aletter arrives from Mr Bob Redwater of Edinburgh, referring to Four Seasons' recent interview with east coast spear-fisherman Will Beeslar, who prowls the reefs between North Berwick and Coldingham with a hand-held harpoon whenever the conditions allow.

"Your story reminded me of my youth as an 'urban hunter' in the city of Edinburgh," he writes.

"My own activities were somewhat more clandestine: I would venture out in the early mornings, while most folk were still in their beds, and cycle to various hunting grounds around the city, returning home before breakfast."

Mr Redwater says he hunted "mainly ducks, rabbits and pigeons" and notes that "plenty of butchers were keen to buy my fresh rabbits." Nothing all that exotic about his prey, then, but it's Mr Redwater's preferred hunting methods that set him apart from the crowd.

"I realise this may sound far-fetched," he says, "but I used homemade boomerangs to kill pigeons in the Meadows, and I developed a knack of throwing boomerangs from my speeding bicycle and picked the birds up Cossack-style, without dismounting."

Surely, like ferox fishing, this is an art that deserves to be revived.

As sharp-eyed readers will no doubt have realised, I suffered a rather embarrassing maths fail last week, mistakenly referring to the Scottish Islands Peaks Race as the "Three Peaks Race."

Clearly, as participants are expected to climb Ben More on Mull, both Paps of Jura and Goat Fell on Arran, the race involves four peaks rather than three.

I can only apologise to the organisers of the Scottish Islands Peaks Race for getting their name wrong, to the organisers of the actual Three Peaks Race (which takes place in Lancashire every April) for any confusion caused, and to my teacher Mr Darkes, who spent several years trying to teach me the basics of mathematics, apparently to no avail.

This article was first published in The Scotsman, 25 June, 2011