Bog Myrtle & Peat

Tiny brownies plopped back and forth in the flat calm waters of the loch below the Chayne, and I cast my lumbering wet mayfly nymph into the water without much hope. I am a lazy fisherman. If the fish aren’t taking the fly I have on, I have a cigarette and lie outstretched on the bank until they do. Fiddling with my flies (ignore the pun) is too much like hard work, so unless I am really keen, I keep the same fly until it works, or until it gets caught in the branches of a willow tree.

It just so happened that I had tied on the copper bound nymph a few days ago and nothing had fancied taking it, but every fly has its day. A pair of teal crept secretively through the rushes nearby, surrounded by a handful of fuzzy, bee-like ducklings when I made contact with the first fish. It was just a tiddler and it slipped the line at the last moment, but the next cast brought in something worth talking about. Half a pound of stunning brownie, doomed to haunt the icy depths of my freezer.

Over the next twenty minutes, I caught three more fish, and looked on as a pair of lapwings drove a heron off their patch. A glowing red roe buck trotted past in the heather behind me, and as I folded the rod up and set off back to the car, greylag geese came ploughing in like a squadron of spitfires. It certainly is summer in the Galloway hills, and for a few minutes, I thought that all was well with the world…

That was until I drove back down the hill to my house and found a freshly killed fox cub by the side of the road. It is generally held that fox cubs are up and about as soon as the first cut of silage is taken, but this cub was big. He may have come from an early litter, but if he is anything to go by, the cubs on the Chayne will soon be up and about, and I’ll need to make a start on them.