110 A HUNDKED YEARS 



"Our father, Sir Hector, took much interest in our 

 fishing and shooting, even planning our expeditions 

 and sometimes taking a drove of us on ponies to fish 

 in the then celebrated Ewe, a seven-mile ride from the 

 Tigh Dige. We were always off by 6 a.m., so as to have 

 fresh salmon cutlets for breakfast in the old inn. He 

 would land six or eight fish before we went to gorge 

 ourselves, keen with hunger, at breakfast with dish 

 after dish of fried slices of salmon. One day I remember 

 he landed, besides many others, two fish each about 

 40 pounds weight, one of which took him right down 

 into the sea, whence it was landed. Nowadays salmon 

 are all killed (at least, on the Ewe) ere they approach 

 that weight, for there are nets everywhere. In the 

 old times there was a haul of the salmon-net, twice a 

 day or so, at the mouth of the river opposite Pool House, 

 and once in the evening in the pool below the cruives. 

 Heaps of salmon were caught every day but Sunday in 

 the cruive-boxes, and I once helped to draw ashore over 

 three hundred in one sweep of the net from the cruive 

 pool. 



** I must admit that I removed the cruives to please 

 the Government Drainage Commissioner, who would 

 not in 1847 sanction drainage in Kenlochewe till the 

 cruives, which he said dammed up Loch Maree, were 

 removed. Since then there has been no trouble taken 

 to make pools in the river. The salmon scoffed at our 

 efforts and rushed up to Loch Maree, very few resting so 

 long in the river as to get hungry, and running fish 

 seldom care for fly or bait. I never would have removed 

 the cruives had I imagined the river, which is not a 



