FISHING AT HOME AND ABROAD 



There are upwards of two hundred lochs, great and small, in the up- 

 lands of Galloway, yet char are found in only three of these, viz.. Loch 

 Doon, Loch Dungeon and Loch Grannoch. Of course char may have — 

 — ^nay, certainly have — ^been introduced by man to certain waters where 

 they are not indigenous, as happened to be proved to me in a singular 

 manner. Loch Ossian lies at a height of 1,270 feet above the sea, in the 

 heart of Corrour Forest, Inverness -shire. One summer evening the ladies 

 brought down tea from the lodge to regale the men of the party withal. 

 One of these had been fishing in the loch, and turned out the contents 

 of his basket, consisting of a great number of small trout. In looking over 

 these my eye fell upon a char, and then I saw another. I was greatly in- 

 terested, not to say excited, because there was no record of char in Loch 

 Ossian or the other lochs connected with it.* The two fish were taken 

 home and carefully bestowed in spirit to be despatched next day to Mr 

 Boulenger of the British Museum. But in the morning my host. Sir 

 John Stirling Maxwell, had an interview with his head stalker and asked 

 him whether he had ever seen or heard of char in Loch Ossian. " Never," 

 was the reply, " till Sir Herbert put some there five years ago." It seems 

 that I had sent one hundred yearling char to be turned into the loch, but the 

 circumstance had totally disappeared from my memory; so that, if Sir John 

 had changed his servants in the interim, these char would have been pro- 

 claimed as indigenous in Loch Ossian, and possibly might have developed 

 enough variation to be recognized by some naturalists as a new species. 



In Great Britain the char is found in various lakes between the limits 

 of Snowdon on the south, and the Orkneys on the north. I am not aware 

 that it has been found in the Shetland Islands; but it has been reported 

 from North Uist in the Hebrides.! Many of the Sutherland and Caithness 

 lochs contain char; also Loch Tay, Loch Assynt, Loch Rannoch and other 

 lakes in central Scotland.;}: In southern Scotland I can indicate only Loch 

 Doon in south Ayrshire and Lochs Grannoch and Dungeon in the Stewarty 

 of Kircudbright as inhabited by char, though it is certain that they once 

 abounded in Loch Leven, whence they disappeared after the area of the 

 lake had been reduced by drainage works in 1830, from 4,312 acres to 

 3,543 acres, and its depth diminished by 4J feet. 



*Char abound in Loch Treig, which lies parallel with Loch Ossian, but is separated from it by Carn Dearj 

 (3,433 feet) and Beenin-na-lap (3,066 feet), both lakes ultimately draining into the Spean and so into the Lochy river. 



tDay's British and Irish Salmonidte, p. 245. Day also records char in Loch Inch, Wigtownshire; but that is an error 

 for Loch Insch in Strathspey. 



XTht English Lait District Fishtries, by John Watson, p. 206. 



150 



