LOCH LEVEN
I had a friend once, an angler, who in winter was
fond of another sport. He liked to cast his louis
into the green baize pond at Monte Carlo, and, on
the whole, he was generally "broken."
He seldom landed the golden fish of the old man's
dream in Theocritus. When the croupier had gaffed
all his money he would repent and say, "Now,
that would have kept me at Loch Leven for a fortnight."
One used to wonder whether a fortnight of Loch Leven
was worth an afternoon of the pleasure of losing
at Monte Carlo. The loch has a name for being cockneyfied,
beset by whole fleets of competitive anglers from
various angling clubs in Scotland. That men should
competitively angle shows, indeed, a great want
of true angling sentiment. To fish in a crowd is
odious, to work hard for prizes of flasks and creels
and fly-books is to mistake the true meaning of
the pastime. However, in this crowded age men are
so constituted that they like to turn a contemplative
exercise into a kind of Bank Holiday. There is no
use in arguing with such persons; the worst of their
pleasure is that it tends to change a Scotch loch
into something like the pond of the Welsh Harp,
at Hendon. It is always good news to read in the
papers how the Dundee Walton Society had a bad day,
and how the first prize was won by Mr. Macneesh,
with five trout weighing three pounds and three
quarters. Loch Leven, then, is crowded and cockneyfied
by competitions; it has also no great name for beauty
of landscape. Every one to his own taste in natural
beauty, but in this respect I think Loch Leven is
better than its reputation. It is certainly more
pictorial, so to speak, than some remote moor lochs
up near Cape Wrath; Forsinard in particular, where
the scenery looks like one gigantic series of brown
"baps," flat Scotch scones, all of low
elevation, all precisely similar to each other.
Loch Leven is not such a cockney place as the majority
of men who have not visited it imagine. It really
is larger than the Welsh Harp at Hendon, and the
scenery, though not like that of Ben Cruachan or
Ben Mohr, excels the landscape of Middlesex. At
the northern end is a small town, grey, with some
red roofs and one or two characteristic Fifeshire
church-towers, squat and strong. There are also
a few factory chimneys, which are not fair to outward
view, nor appropriate by a loch-side. On the west
are ranges of distant hills, low but not uncomely.
On the east rises a beautiful moorland steep with
broken and graceful outlines. When the sun shines
on the red tilled land, in spring; when the smoke
of burning gorse coils up all day long into the
sky, as if the Great Spirit were taking his pipe
of peace on the mountains; when the islands are
mirrored on the glassy water, then the artist rejoices,
though the angler knows that he will waste his day.
As far as fishing goes, he is bound to be "clean,"
as the boatmen say--to catch nothing; but the solemn
peace, and the walls and ruined towers of Queen
Mary's prison, may partially console the fisher.
The accommodation is agreeable, there is a pleasant
inn--an old town-house, perhaps, of some great family,
when the great families did not rush up to London,
but spent their winters in such country towns as
Dumfries and St. Andrews. The inn has a great green
garden at its doors, and if the talk is mainly of
fishing, and if every one tells of his monster trout
that escaped the net, there is much worse conversation
than that.
When you reach Kinross, and,
after excellent ham and eggs, begin to make a start,
the cockney element is most visible at the first.
Everybody's name is registered in a book; each pays
a considerable, but not exorbitant, fee for the
society--often well worth the money--and the assistance
of boatmen. These gentlemen are also well provided
with luncheon and beer, and, on the whole, there
is more pleasure in the life of a Loch Leven boatman
than in most arts, crafts, or professions. He
takes the rod when his patron is lazy; it is said
that he often catches the trout; {1} he sees a good
deal of good company, and, if his basket be heavy,
who so content as he? The first thing is to row
out to a good bay, and which will prove a good bay
depends on the strength and direction of the wind.
Perhaps the best fishing is farthest off, at the
end of a long row, but the best scenery is not so
distant. A good deal hangs on an early start when
there are many boats out.
Loch Leven is a rather shallow loch, seldom much
over fifteen feet deep, save where a long narrow
rent or geological flaw runs through the bottom.
The water is of a queer glaucous green, olive- coloured,
or rather like the tint made when you wash out a
box of water-colour paints. This is not so pretty
as the black wave of Loch Awe or Loch Shin, but
has a redeeming quality in the richness of the feeding
for trout. These are fabled to average about a pound,
but are probably a trifle under that weight, on
the whole. They are famous, and, according to Sir
Walter Scott, were famous as long ago as in Queen
Mary's time, for the bright silver of their sides,
for their pink flesh, and gameness when hooked.
Theorists have explained all this by saying that
they are the descendants of land-locked salmon.
The flies used on the loch are smaller than those
favoured in the Highlands; they are sold attached
to casts, and four flies are actually employed at
once. Probably two are quite enough at a time. If
a veteran trout is attracted by seeing four flies,
all of different species, and these like nothing
in nature, all conspiring to descend on him at once,
he must be less cautious than we generally find
him. The Hampshire angler, of course, will sneer
at the whole proceeding, the "chucking and
chancing it," in the queer-coloured wave, and
the use of so many fanciful entomological specimens.
But the Hampshire angler is very welcome to try
his arts, in a calm, and his natural-looking cocked-
up flies. He will probably be defeated by a grocer
from Greenock, sinking his four flies very deep,
as is, by some experts, recommended. The trout are
capricious, perhaps as capricious as any known to
the angler, but they are believed to prefer a strong
east wind and a dark day. The east wind is nowhere,
perhaps, so bad as people fancy; it is certainly
not so bad as the north wind, and on Loch Leven
it is the favourite. The man who is lucky enough
to hit on the right day, and to land a couple of
dozen Loch Leven trout, has very good reason to
congratulate himself, and need envy nobody. But
such days and such takes are rare, and the summer
of 1890 was much more unfortunate than that of 1889.
One great mistake is made by the company which
farms the Loch, stocks it, supplies the boats, and
regulates the fishing. They permit trolling with
angels, or phantoms, or the natural minnow. Now,
trolling may be comparatively legitimate, when the
boat is being pulled against the wind to its drift,
but there is no more skill in it than in sitting
in an omnibus. But for trolling, many a boat would
come home "clean" in the evening, on days
of calm, or when, for other reasons of their own,
the trout refuse to take the artificial fly. Yet
there are men at Loch Leven who troll all day, and
poor sport it must be, as a trout of a pound or
so has no chance on a trolling-rod. This method
is inimical to fly-fishing, but is such a consolation
to the inefficient angler that one can hardly expect
to see it abolished. The unsuccessful clamour for
trolling, instead of consoling themselves, as sportsmen
should do, with the conversation of the gillies,
their anecdotes of great trout, and their reminiscences
of great anglers, especially of the late Mr. Russell,
the famed editor of the "Scotsman." This
humourist is gradually "winning his way to
the mythical." All fishing stories are attached
to him; his eloquence is said (in the language of
the historian of the Buccaneers) to have been "florid";
he is reported to have thrown his fly-book into
Loch Leven on an unlucky day, saying, "You
brutes, take your choice," and a rock, which
he once hooked and held on to, is named after him,
on the Tweed. In addition to the humane and varied
conversation of the boatmen, there is always the
pure pleasure of simply gazing at the hillsides
and at the islands. They are as much associated
with the memory of Mary Stuart as Hermitage or even
Holyrood. On that island was her prison; here the
rude Morton tried to bully her into signing away
her rights; hence she may often have watched the
shore at night for the lighting of a beacon, a sign
that a rescue was at hand.
The hills, at least, are much as she may have seen
them, and the square towers and crumbling walls
on the island met her eyes when they were all too
strong. The "quay" is no longer "rude,"
as when "The Abbot" was written, and is
crowded with the green boats of the Loch Leven Company.
But you still land on her island under "the
huge old tree" which Scott saw, which the unhappy
Mary may herself have seen. The small garden and
the statues are gone, the garden whence Roland Graeme
led Mary to the boat and to brief liberty and hope
unfulfilled. Only a kind of ground-plan remains
of the halls where Lindesay and Ruthven browbeat
her forlorn Majesty. But you may climb the staircase
where Roland Graeme stood sentinel, and feel a touch,
of what Pepys felt when he kissed a dead Queen--
Katherine of Valois. Like Roland Graeme, the Queen
may have been "wearied to death of this Castle
of Loch Leven," where, in spring, all seems
so beautiful, the trees budding freshly above the
yellow celandine and among the grey prison walls.
It was a kindlier prison house than Fotheringay,
and minds peaceful and contented would gladly have
taken "this for a hermitage."
The Roman Emperors used to banish too powerful
subjects to the lovely isles that lie like lilies
on the AEgean. Plutarch tried to console these exiles,
by showing them how fortunate they were, far from
the bustle of the Forum, the vices, the tortures,
the noise and smoke of Rome, happy, if they chose,
in their gardens, with the blue waters breaking
on the rocks, and, as he is careful to add, WITH
PLENTY OF FISHING. Mr. Mahaffy calls this "rhetorical
consolation," and the exiles may have been
of his mind. But the exiles would have been wise
to listen to Plutarch, and, had I enjoyed the luck
of Mary Stuart, when Loch Leven was not overfished,
when the trout were uneducated, never would I have
plunged into politics again. She might have been
very happy, with Ronsard's latest poems, with Italian
romances, with a boat on the loch, and some Rizzio
to sing to her on the still summer days. From her
Castle she would hear how the politicians were squabbling,
lying, raising a man to divinity and stoning him
next day, cutting each other's heads off, swearing
and forswearing themselves, conspiring and caballing.
Suave mari, and the peace of Loch Leven and the
island hermitage would have been the sweeter for
the din outside. A woman, a Queen, a Stuart, could
not attain, and perhaps ought not to have attained,
this epicureanism. Mary Stuart had her chance, and
missed it; perhaps, after all, her shrewish female
gaoler made the passionless life impossible.
These,
at Loch Leven, are natural reflections. The place
has a charm of its own, especially if you make up
your mind not to be disappointed, not to troll,
and not to envy the more fortunate anglers who shout
to you the number of their victories across the
wave. Even at Loch Leven we may be contemplative,
may be quiet, and go a-fishing. {2}
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