THE BEAULY DISTRICT 193 



swasion 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 Eichard 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, might be 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 Com- 

 missioners 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 Whiteness 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. 



N 



