by John Buchan
To-day, in Britain at any rate, one has to work hard for one’s fish, except in jealously preserved and fully stocked waters. Most Scottish and north-country streams are free to the public, and new methods of transport have made them accessible to the dwellers in distant cities. When I was a boy I must have fished burns which did not see an angler once in a decade. Andrew Lang used to say that you might be certain you had found your happy valley when the shepherd begged the bit of daily paper which wrapped your luncheon that he might learn the news. To-day you might as well look in the same countryside for the nest of the sea-eagle which used to haunt it. The Ettrick Shepherd tells of filling a cart with trout out of Megget of about the size of a herring; the angler would be lucky now if out of Megget on most days he got a dozen half-pounders. On a once famous Lowland stream I have seen on a Bank Holiday anglers as thick as the gudgeon fishers on Thames.
III
I do not regret it. I would be glad to see angling clubs more widely organised, so that there was a certain amount of restocking, a decent limit to a day’s catch, and an insistence on lawful lures. But I am glad to think that so many of my fellow mortals have the chance of this honest sport.
In my youth I formed a deep attachment to the democracy of the waterside. There was the ragged weaver out of work, with his ancient home-made rod, who was out to catch his dinner and kept the smallest fingerlings. He was partial to lures like salmon-roe, and was not above “sniggling” a fish. But he knew his job, for he knew where trout were to be had, and often he was an expert practitioner in the orthodox parts. But the commonest objects of the waterside were miners from the Lothian and Lanarkshire coalfields. They would come by train on a summer evening to some wayside station on Tweed or Clyde, fish all night and get back to their work in the early morning. Somehow or other they never left with an empty creel. Most were unorthodox in their methods, but not all. I remember one man whose casting with an indifferent rod first taught me what fly-fishing could be. I had many friends among them, and I have shared their supper of bread and cheese, and exchanged a respectable gut cast for one of their strange home-made contraptions, designed for the “parr-tail,” that deadliest of lawless devices. I think pleasantly of my old comrades, who were kind to an inquisitive boy. Like the Black Douglas, they preferred to hear the lark sing rather than to hear the mouse cheep, and there must have been a strong passion for sport and wild nature in their hearts to drive them to spend laborious nights after laborious days. I remember hearing Andrew Lang say that some of Theocritus could best be rendered in Lowland Scots, so I tried my hand at it and turned the twenty-first Idyll into a tale of two such anglers. Here is the result — a sketch of two of the clan.
“‘Tis puirtith sooples heid and hand
And gars inventions fill the land;
And dreams come fast to folk that lie
Wi’ nocht atween them and the sky.
Twae collier lads frae near Lasswade,
Auld skeely fishers, fand their bed
A e simmer’s nicht aside the shaw
Whaur Manor rins by Cademuir Law.
Dry flowe-moss made them pillows fine,
And, for a bield to kep the win’,
A muckle craig owerhung the burn,
A’ thacked wi’ blaeberry and fern.
Aside them lay their rods and reels,
Their flee-books and their auncient creels.
The pooches o’ their moleskin breeks
Contained unlawfu’ things like cleeks,
For folk that fish to fill their wame
Are no fasteedious at the game.
The twae aye took their jaunts thegither;
Geordie was ane and Tam the ither.
Their chaumer was the mune-bricht sky,
The siller stream their lullaby.”
Then there were the local poachers. For them trout were small beer; their quarry was the salmon out of season. They would net or spear the big red fish in the autumn streams, and salt them down for winter use. The thing was in defiance of the law, and the water-bailiffs were always on their trail, so that there were many affrays by the waterside which ended in broken heads. I have assisted in “burning the water,” which was a favourite pursuit of Sir Walter Scott’s, and apparently in his day not illegal. It was an exciting business, for the shallows would be reddened by torches made of barrel staves dipped in tar, and wild figures with a three-pronged fork, called a leister, speared the fish as they blundered upstream. Once I was arrested by the bailiffs along with the others, but in consideration of my youth was released with a hearty kick! The story got about and was remembered many years after when I stood as parliamentary candidate for the county. I was assured that I had the poaching vote to a man! Dour, sardonic folk they were, but with their own dry humour. I once met one of them tramping the highroad on a very hot day and greeted him with an enquiry after his health. “Bearin’ up,” was the reply, “in the hope that if I can thole it here I’ll be able to thole it Yonder.”
But the true angling democracy were the local anglers who fished legitimately. They were generally small tradesmen from the little burghs. But it was rare that a countryman became an expert. I have only known two, the son of a schoolmaster and the son of an innkeeper. Angling was the breath of their life; every hour they could spare they were on a stream, and they attained often a remarkable skill. They would fill a basket in the tiniest runlets among the heather, and they would catch fish from a low water, in an east wind, in a thunder-storm, and in drifting snow. Angling to such was not only a sport, but a social institution, for they had their little fraternities, their suppers and their songs. Meg Dods in St. Ronan’s Well has spoken their apologia:
“Pawky auld caries, that kend whilk side their bread was buttered upon...They were up in the morning — had their parritch, wi’ maybe a thimble-full of brandy, and then awa’ up into the hills; eat their bit cauld meat on the heather, and cam’ hame at e’en wi’ their creel full of caller trouts, and had them to their dinner, and their quiet cogue of ale, and their drap punch, and were set singing their catches and glees, as they ca’d them, till ten o’clock, and then to bed, wi’ God bless ye — and what for no?”
Sometimes they ventured into verse. There is a little piscatorial eclogue which I used to hear repeated in my youth, but the source of which I have never been able to trace. The Kips mentioned in it are the Shielgreen Kips to the north-east of Peebles which look down on the head of Leithen Water.
JUV. Canny Fisher Jamie, comin’ hame at e’en,
Canny Fisher Jamie, whaur hae ye been?
PISC. Mony lang miles, laddie, ower the Kips sae green.
JUV. Fishin’ Leithen Water?
PISC. Nay, laddie, nay,
Just a wee burnie rinnin’ doun a brae,
Fishin’ a wee burnie bigger than a sheugh.
JUV. Gat ye mony troots, Jamie?
PISC. I gat eneugh —
Enough to buy my baccy, snuff, and pickle tea,
And lea’ me tippence for a gill, and that’s eneugh for me.
IV
Piscator non solum piscatur. The motto of the Fly-fishers’ Club has always been true. Other sports have their text-books, but angling produces not only practical manuals but a great quantity of discursive literature in which many things are dealt with besides the technique of fishing. Of all sports it has the most bookish flavour.
Such literature is not only great in bulk but often high in quality Why is it that the one undisputed classic of British sport is a fishing book? Not Beckford, or Whyte-Melville, or Scrope, or St. John can vie in assured immortality with Izaak Walton. One reason is that angling is a leisurely business and permits of meditation and the culture of the literary graces. The angler has a better chance to be a philosopher than the anxious mortal in a butt on a grouse moor, or the deerstalker, who crawls breathlessly in the lee of a morose gillie. He can have an ear for Coridon’s song as well as for the plash of trout below the willows. Angling, as I have already argued, is more t
han a sport or a craft; it is a mode of life, an attitude of mind.
As a boy my approach to this literature was what the Greeks would have called banausic. I wanted advice, instruction, not aids to reflection. Therefore I put Cotton above Walton for he had something to tell me. It was before the day when expert treatises flowed monthly from the Press, but I am very certain that if such had come my way I should have greatly preferred them to any seventeenth-century rigmarole. But in one matter Walton strongly took my fancy. He was fortunate in being able, in a single stream, to catch a great variety of fish. In our Border waters there were trout and salmon, an occasional grayling and the despised eel. I longed for rivers where to these could be added in one basket tench, bream and dace, and chub and perch and pike and all the rest of them, not realising that for such variousness I must sacrifice my beloved trout. Only in some of the Welsh borderland streams, like the Teme, can one never be certain what next will rise to the fly or how one ought to strike. There you have both quality and variety; commonly one or the other must be sacrificed.
I was well on in my teens and a voracious reader before I came under Walton’s spell. But I still considered about three-fourths of The Compleat Angler wearisome, and even to-day I am impatient with Gesner, Dubravius, and the divine Du Bartas, and all his host of mediaeval gossips. I have always had a liking for books on sport with out-of-the-way scholarship, even when most of it is fantastic. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is the model. In piscatorial literature Mr. William Radcliffe’s Fishing from the Earliest Times has long been a favourite bedside book. But Izaak’s learning is dull, because it is not sufficiently select and curious. It is derived too brazenly from certain accessible folios. We can follow with interest Gilbert White’s speculations about the birds and beasts of Selborne, for we see the honest parson laboriously poking his nose into every cranny. But Izaak only gets down a tome or two from a dusty bookshelf.
There is no question about his rank in our letters. The literary classics of angling after all are few in number, for who is there besides Walton? I should select part of the Noctes Ambrosianae, and some of Andrew Lang’s Angling Sketches, but that may be a Borderer’s bias; Lord Grey of Fallodon’s Fly-fishing beyond doubt; and two Canadian books, Stewart Edward White’s The Forest and W. H. Blake’s Brown Waters. But Walton must always head the list. When he describes a spring meadow he writes almost the best cheerful prose in our literature, prose which is all air and dew and light. His seventeenth-century rival is John Bunyan when he tells of the rare amenities of the Pilgrim’s Way.
I say “cheerful” advisedly, for it is notable that most of our great prose is solemn prose, the prose of mortality. Instances crowd in on the mind. There is Bunyan when he talks of the passing of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, and Walton when he writes of Donne:
“that body which was once the temple of the Holy Ghost and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust.”
There is the Authorised Version of the Bible. There are a dozen passages in Sir Thomas Browne. There is Sir William Temple, a passage which Goldsmith in The Good-natured Man puts into the mouth of the preposterous Croaker:
“When all is done human life is, at the greatest and best, but like a froward child that must be played with and humoured a little till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.”
There is the famous passage from the “Aesop and Rhodope” chapter in Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. There is Lockhart on the death of Scott, and Colonel Henderson on the death of Stonewall Jackson. There is the last paragraph of Thomas Hardy’s Woodlanders. And not least there is Emily Brontë:
“I lingered round them under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and the harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”
St Thomas of Canterbury Churchyard, Elsfield, Oxfordshire — Buchan’s final resting place
Buchan’s grave
