ELAN LAKES WILD SOUTH WALES 



determined fish-poachers in the kingdom. But their 

 peculiar partiality for this form of law-breaking, and 

 their persistence in it, is not mere cussedness, for the 

 country folk at any rate are the reverse of turbulent in 

 other things, and not much of game-poachers in an 

 ordinary sense. But Rhayader falls is famous for its 

 past scenes of conflict and for the ineradicable con- 

 viction of their provokers that the salmon is somehow 

 public property. This undoubtedly reprehensible 

 tradition is rather different from the ordinary poaching 

 attitude elsewhere, where a few offenders, half-mer- 

 cenary, half-sporting law-breakers, have the rest of the 

 community against them. 



For the Welsh traditions one must grope in the 

 mists of the past, and you cannot expect Mr. Smith 

 from Manchester, who has a rod, let us say, on the 

 Dovey, to do this. He only sees the most irrepressible 

 fish-poachers in the United Kingdom, and as such 

 damns them up hill and down dale with all the vigour 

 at his command. But you cannot make any native 

 Welshman, however respectable, regard a fish-poacher 

 as a criminal. He will deplore the practice as an- 

 tagonistic to private rights and the public interest, 

 his own sometimes included. But you might as well 

 try and make a Kentucky man regard the survivor of a 

 * little difficulty ' as a murderer as make a true Welsh- 

 man hold a fish-poacher as a serious malefactor. He 

 would tell you that if the law, which inherited tradition 

 wrongly or rightly considers unjust, winks at a certain 

 amount of salmon-poaching, the people, farmers as 

 well as the more regular poachers, will meet the law 

 halfway, as it were, and not take toll enough to 



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