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}