First catch your Salmon...

Easier said than done.

Truth be told, I am not much of a fisherman.

Actually not much of a Stalker either, but let's not go there.

So here we are. It was Monday of our week on Harris - by the Grace of the Hunting Gods, we had somehow made the 700 miles in the most atrocious weather conditions in my memory, but here we were.

Amhuinnsuidhe is one of those places where the 'mythical' Macnab is a possibility.

If you have not already done so, the book by John Buchan explains it all, and is a rather lovely way to spend a day on the hill from the comfort of your own fireside...

The Macnab is a sporting challenge not for the faint of heart, nor come to think of it, those devoid of a sense of humour.

To successfully complete the 'Macnab', you have to catch a Salmon, shoot a brace of Grouse and then a Red Stag - all in one day and all by your own hand. The odds of completing such a feat are as remote as the place you find yourself in, for the bloody attempt.

It is a funny thing (remember what I said about a sense of humour), but you pay for the 'chance' of a Macnab.

The 'chance' of a Macnab involves handing over a pillowcase full of cash, just for the chance. Still got that sense of humour?

If you fail to catch your Salmon, then you do not 'get out of the traps' - and you have handed over a pillowcase full of cash for the privilege of not catching a fish. Just so you know.

Because I didn't...

Anyhoo.

The Estate Manager (who had met me on the Sunday night outside the larder) had asked me what rod and reel I had brought.

"Rod and reel? Honestly, I am not a real fisherman and so did not bring a rod and reel (actually, I do not own a Salmon rod)"

"So, you have driven 700 miles to have a go at the Macnab and you didn't bring a rod?"

His heavy red eyebrows raised almost imperceptibly, as only a Highland Estate Manager's can - which told me all I needed to know about what he thought about a bloke from the "Smoke" who did not bring a rod on a fishing holiday.

"That's no problem at all sir. The Ghillie will sort something out for you in the morning. He will 'chap' your door at 7. Be ready".

FFS.

I had been driving for two days and wanted a bloody drink. 7 my arse!

In the blink of an eye, it was seven in the morning, and the Ghillie was bagging on the door like an early morning drugs bust.

The sun was barely up, but that, apparently, was enough. The runs and lochs are walkable from the Castle and its associated cottages.




Not being of a religious bent, these times are for me, the nearest I get to a God I do not believe in. It was just beautiful.




The young Ghillie set up his own rod and reel (I should have made a note of what it was, I didn't and that was a mistake) and before I was fully awake, I was flogging some of the most beautiful waters in the Country.




With the young lad by my side, I worked the Beats as directed, and I worked them and worked them...





"If you get a take. Do not strike the rod, just gently raise it. It is not the same as Trout fishing".

The Ghilie (they all seem to do this), smoked a succession of roll-ups throughout the day.

I had no idea what he was on about, but mentally logged his advice.

I was fishing with no expectation of catching, but was rather just enjoying the whole experience. I didn't need to catch a fish to enjoy the day.
Now then. Where is that bastard fish!

Suddenly the tip of the rod bent. For someone who was not bothered about catching a fish, my heart was now pounding like a 'wrong un' at the school gates.

Keeping an outwardly calm appearance, I told the Ghillie to get ready with the massive net that he had brought. I played this fish for all it was worth, and after what seemed an age, brought it safely to the bank.

When I looked down at it, glistening in the sunshine on the grass, I could not help but notice that it was only slightly larger than the fly upon which it had impaled itself.

It was a smolt and funny thing, (remember what I said about a sense of humour) does not count at a Salmon to get you 'out of the traps' on the Macnab.

Before I could take a 'trophy' photo, the Ghillie gently placed it back in the water and it was gone in an instant. I felt the tears welling up in my eyes.

I wanted to say, "You bastard! That was my first ever Salmon!"

What I actually said was, "I have brought a couple of cigars (I am not a real smoker), would you like one?"

We paused in our endeavours and smoked a comedy lardie each - beside some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.

When I die, there is not a chance in Hell I am going to Heaven (see what happened then?) - but I am pretty sure I have seen Paradise.

We then spent a couple of hours on the loch with the boat (he forgot the seat cushions and that became a pain in the arse - literally) but we did not have cause to light another cigar...







I ended the day with a strange desire to go out and purchase my own Salmon rod...but without the required Salmon to successfully compete the Macnab.

For what it's worth. This season at this Estate there has only been one 'successful' Macnab - a young lady from the USA.

C'est la vie.

 

[willie_gunn]

I often wonder how hard it was back in Buchan’s time. Surely a lot easier than now?

I am sure it must have been a heck of a lot easier!

These days the odds are increasingly stacked against catching a salmon. Whilst inshore netting might have decreased, there are still far fewer fish in the river with more anglers trying to catch them. There is the increase in the salmon caught out at sea, the numbers caught by predators (seals, otters....), the increase in disease and genetic dilution from farmed salmon, the impact of water extraction and diversion for hydro, etc. And that's before we get to the potential effect of fertilisers, climate change, pollution, etc.

Reading the old salmon fishing books there seemed to be plenty of days when an angler might have 10, 20 or even more fish on the bank. It would be remarkable indeed if that were to happen today. For example I've recently finished reading "A River Runs Through Me", by Andrew Douglas-Home, recounting his family's history of fishing the Tweed, and it is thoroughly depressing to read of how rapidly the number of fish have diminished on the same stretch of river over such a comparitively short time period. Even in my lifetime the decline in salmon numbers has been noticeable, to the point where even seeing a fish on some beats, let alone catching one, is something to be celebrated.

So far as a Macnab, where I stayed in Sutherland if the conditions were right and the river was in spate then catching a fish before breakfast, whilst not guaranteed, was certainly not uncommon. Getting a stag was then the easy bit. The brace of grouse, though, would require a lot of miles on the Hill, with a good chance of seeing nothing, as the days of that estate being managed for grouse were long gone. There was a successful Macnab on the neighbouring estate though.

 

[User00036]

I was staring down at the river in Galway, Ireland, a guy was wading & casting to the piers under the bridge, I noticed a largish fish 12-15 lbs lying behind the pier, so I signaled to the man to cast there, shouted left a bit, right a bit, let 2 more feet of line out, which he did & I could see the fly right on the tip of its nose. All the fish had to do was open its mouth & the fly would have gone in, & fish on! but No, not a chance. Kind of put pay to my notions of taking up Salmon fishing.
But wishing you "Good luck & Tight lines!"

 

[Mungo]

A friend tells the story of a (very wealthy) acquaintance of his - recounting how he had four Ghillies trying to hook into a Salmon for him, in order that he could 'land' it, and so go on to have a half-decent chance at the Macnab.

As my friend (a true sportsman) said - "What's the point?"

Well quite!

The fun of poaching (again as wonderfully captured by Buchan) is in doing it yourself!

Have you read The Return Of John MacNab, by Andrew Greig? I’d say if anything even better than the original.

I have several times come close to various localised versions of a MacNab, the most challenging being an Edinburgh McBypass - I’ll leave you to figure out the requirements of that (suffice to say it’s best done at night, and there’s a readable chance of getting the armed response unit called on you).

 

[Sealgair nam fiadh]

Got a pike, a brace of mallards and a roe buck in a day once, I think it was called a Mac cheap !

 

[CookM]

I read your account twice,no failures in this tale.
If it were easy every time we would not try as we do in the field.
Thank-you for sharing it.

A McNab well it would have been 'Andy.......

Cue howls of disdain.

I'll get my coat.

 

[Freeforester]

I often wonder how hard it was back in Buchan’s time. Surely a lot easier than now?

As a youngster, we used to watch literally hundreds upon hundreds of salmon, sea trout and decent brown trout ascend the weir on our local water just outwith town, - every hour! - the river itself a principal tributary of the Deveron, where the largest fly caught salmon in the U.K. was grassed, in 1923 (though a larger one was reported to have been netted near the river mouth when I was still attending school). Some of the lads would run in across the weir and lift a struggling fish of note (12lb and bigger) and put it up and over the weir top in order to continue its journey home - usually the red and black ones got such assistance, whereas a nice silver one may have be ‘invited home to dinner’, lol!

By the end of the 1970’s the numbers were fast dwindling: by and large the river and nearly all tributaries still had plenty of water flow, though the acidity of it was increasing all the while, as well as the velocity of spate rise and fall, both due to forestry practices (- bad ones, still at play to this day!). The bulk of the smolts however would have been lost before they got long started in the sea proper - many smolts instinctively spent their first year around the West coast of Scotland feeding on herring, sand eels, etc, but where they would come into contact with vast quantities of sea lice emanating from the farmed salmon cages and surrounding waters in the hitherto rich feeding grounds of the sea lochs; this parasitic onslaught did for not only the smolts (6-9 lice are sufficient burden to kill a wee soft skinned smolt just not long from the river) but for the herring and other inshore feedstock of the growing Salmon or sea trout there too. Man’s rapacity at the pelagic fishing further off shore did not help either. Predators became protected.

While the weir has now long been broken in order to enable easier passage of the fish back up the river, the real problems which have a continuing impact on their number go unchallenged. By the early Eighties, you’d be lucky to see a single fish in an hour trying to make its way upstream. Few now pass by the ‘Craw Stane’ in the upper part of Strathbogie, where our ancestors carved the salmon’s effigy into the sunny side of the stone, along with that of the mammoth, below it.



But back to the question - How hard was it then, then? Miss Morison’s 63lb fish was her fifth of the day; in my youth one farm tenant on the nearby Fiddich water used to drive the motorbike with sidecar down to the waterside, and fill the sidecar with fish by means of a ’graip’ - a fork-ended implement much like a shovel except for the business end - and drive them home to boil up to fatten up the turkeys they sold at year’s end; in the sixties and seventies, fishing guests lodging at the local hotel and fishing the better beats would think nothing of having a day or two ‘off the river‘ to go for a ‘run’ in the car with a picnic, if for no other reason than to make a change from catching fish all day; farm servants here in the earlier part of the 20th century often had a stipulation that they may be fed something other than salmon at least one or two days a week… a local farm hand and others I knew talked about the side tributaries being so choked with fish that one could have walked across their backs to cross the stream…

About ten years ago I had occasion to go to the fixed netting station along the coast near the river mouth here in one of the last years it was still operational (the SNP risked EU fines running to hundreds of thousands of Euros per month, just to help keep the stations going for a few more seasons [ - even though the wild fish were by then seriously threatened] and thereby ‘stick it’ to the “toff” riparian lairds and their guests, but in the end the word was out as to why nothing was being done, and they were shut down), to procure a table fish for a guest; I enquired how the season had been going -‘nae great’ said the station hand - ‘I’ve only had fifty this morning’… imagine the “net” worth of those fish in the river, both as a caught but released thereafter ‘prize’ for the diehard anglers, and to the wellbeing of the river’s continued stocks.

It’s not wholly bad, Lady ff often is invited to fish an evening at the end of her father’s fishing party week on one of the better beats of the Spey, where she has been known to add to the tally of up to whiles over 70 fish for the week (they’re keen and able fishermen and women, mind), 48 was their week tally this season past, but this was more or less the high point in a rather dismal year, and again even the Spey is a shadow of its former glory.

One wonders what our ancient Iron Age forebears would make of our folly today?

 

[Pine Marten]

It always seemed to me that the salmon part of the MacNab made it so unlikely to succeed as to not be worth trying, athough given the opportunity of course I'd give it a go!

I have only caught one salmon in my life, by mistake, when I was 17, on a Rapala. I'd caught a couple of nice brown trout on the banks of Lake Ullswater, but the 3rd one almost wrenched my spinning rod away. A big silver flash ploughed by underwater and I could guess what had happened there. It was particularly memorable because it was Good Friday and my parents had driven off to try and find some fresh fish for dinner, which obviously failed. But that was a bit of a moment of triumph on their return! However I also remember being disappointed that frankly it didn't taste of much, presumably having not eaten anything since returning from the sea. Still. I caught a salmon once and that's more than most.

 

[tarponhead]

I read that Bretons rioted in medieval times because all they had to eat was salmon…

 

[CookM]

I read that Bretons rioted in medieval times because all they had to eat was salmon…

That and buckets of oysters,terrible for them.

 

[Freeforester]

I read that Bretons rioted in medieval times because all they had to eat was salmon…

Interesting, next time I’m over there in Brittany I’ll ask about that; I do know that on certain farms and estates in Grampian in the earlier part of the 20th century it was stated that the staple of salmon was not to be served to the servants more than 4 or 5 days per week, in order to reduce the risk of spread of complaint or dissent.

 

[ReasortEstates]

Great write up from your Macnab attempt!

We are holding a dedicated Macnab Week at Amhuinnsuidhe Castle this year from the 5th - 12th Sept 2026, if you would like to go for the Macnab again?

Each guest taking part in the Macnab Challenge Week will have 3 attempts across the week to hopefully complete the challenge.

If you would like more information, you can drop us an email at info@reasortestates.co.uk

View attachment 479637 View attachment 479636View attachment 479638

 

[muddy42]

There was an article in the Field about 20 years ago called "The Real MacNab." Inspired by the John Buchan book they wanted to do it properly, meaning poach a deer without the keepers noticing. Letters were sent to three landowners in the Cairngorms asking if they would help and proposing a date, signed John MacNab. The deal was that if the stalkers were caught they were fined £50 and the estate kept the deer either way. Two landowners said sod off but one was up for the challenge

So the date arrived and the stalkers knew it wasn't going to be easy with at least three estate staff and land than could be spied from the A9. Therefore they started at first light and skirted round the back of the estate, hopped over the boundary, bagged the stag, dragged it back the way they came and spent the rest of the day in the pub. That night they dumped the deer on the doorstep with a bottle of whisky. The subsequent article in the Field included a picture in SAS style with blacked out faces, however the laird identified the leader by the fact he was the only person he knew that still stalked in a tie!

 

[wytonpjs]

There was an article in the Field about 20 years ago called "The Real MacNab." Inspired by the John Buchan book they wanted to do it properly, meaning poach a deer without the keepers noticing. Letters were sent to three landowners in the Cairngorms asking if they would help and proposing a date, signed John MacNab. The deal was that if the stalkers were caught they were fined £50 and the estate kept the deer either way. Two landowners said sod off but one was up for the challenge

So the date arrived and the stalkers knew it wasn't going to be easy with at least three estate staff and land than could be spied from the A9. Therefore they started at first light and skirted round the back of the estate, hopped over the boundary, bagged the stag, dragged it back the way they came and spent the rest of the day in the pub. That night they dumped the deer on the doorstep with a bottle of whisky. The subsequent article in the Field included a picture in SAS style with blacked out faces, however the laird identified the leader by the fact he was the only person he knew that still stalked in a tie!

I'm aware of something very similar from a year or 2 back including the "poaching", the stag taken with an open-sights .303 and surprise surprise, he always wears a tie too

 

[wytonpjs]

Great write up from your Macnab attempt!

We are holding a dedicated Macnab Week at Amhuinnsuidhe Castle this year from the 5th - 12th Sept 2026, if you would like to go for the Macnab again?

Each guest taking part in the Macnab Challenge Week will have 3 attempts across the week to hopefully complete the challenge.

If you would like more information, you can drop us an email at info@reasortestates.co.uk

View attachment 479637 View attachment 479636View attachment 479638

@sh1kar

 

[muddy42]

I'm aware of something very similar from a year or 2 back including the "poaching", the stag taken with an open-sights .303 and surprise surprise, he always wears a tie too

Nice. Seatrout? And a Hardy perfect reel, lovely

The Scottish parliament should legislate for a national McNab day - where estates and public landowners must accept bookings from wannabe macnabbers (yes suitably qualified/insured/yawn yawn yes I know 'it will never work' health and safety crap, what about walkers, yawn yawn etc.) .