204 THE SALMON RIVERS OF SCOTLAND 



may question this report, till convinc'd by the truth of ocular 

 demonstration ; that these northern rivers are the riches of 

 the country." 



The gallant Richard is nothing if not obscure in most of his 

 writing, for he is a victim to the vice of verbosity, and what, 

 with fulsome floweriness, has been called fine writing. The 

 passage quoted is by no means so bad as many others which 

 occur in his Memoirs. One has to practise much patience to 

 gain the good points. " Many times five hundred " may, I 

 suppose, be translated like certain passages in Old Testament 

 history which relate of prodigious slaughters in battle. One 

 can say that they refer simply to a very great number. 



THE NESS AND BEAULY ESTUARY 



includes what is commonly called the Inverness Firth and the 

 Beauly Firth, a shallow sea basin extending in a north-easterly 

 direction from Beauly to the narrow bottle-neck between 

 Chanonry Point and Fort-George. The scour of the tide at the 

 narrows is very considerable, and a deep channel is here 

 hollowed out, the current forming a fine natural lead in for 

 fish. At this point most remunerative netting used to be 

 carried on as well as at Fortrose inside the narrows. It is 

 naturally a point where fish congregate, and where therefore 

 fishing by means of fixed engines becomes a danger to the 

 upkeep of a proper stock of fish. 



In fixing the estuary limits scheduled in the Salmon Fisheries 

 (Scotland) Act, 1868, the policy followed by the administrative 

 Commissioners appointed under the 1862 Act was to push the 

 estuary limits beyond any place where fish in approaching 

 fresh waters naturally congregate. For this reason the limits 

 of the Ness and Beauly estuary were not drawn across the 

 narrows already mentioned, but were drawn some little distance 

 outside from the centre of " The Three Burns " a point, by 

 the way, rather difficult to define to the buoy off the White- 

 ness Sands. 



Net and coble fishing has regularly been practised at the 

 narrows on the Chanonry Point side, and this cannot, of course, 

 be objected to. At the same time I have noticed that the 

 temptation to work a sweep net as a fixed engine has not 

 infrequently been too strong for the fishermen here employed. 



