SALMON-FISHING 255 



with islands, bounded on the south with high green 

 hills, and famous for its trout and pike. 



It is fitting, then, that the outlet of this great lake 

 should be a correspondingly fine salmon-river only 

 three Irish miles of fishing water, it is true, but 

 a river of noble proportions, with splendid pools and 

 ideal salmon-streams. The water, moreover, is always 

 clear, and before the drainage-gates at Belleek were 

 put in the river never varied rapidly in height, and 

 wet season or dry, was always more or less fishable. 

 For busy men, who wanted to snatch a fortnight's 

 holiday on a salmon-river, this was an invaluable 

 attraction. No chance, on the Erne, of watching 

 a turbid bank-high flood in which fishing was im- 

 possible, or, perchance, a dead low-water trickle in 

 which nothing but a bait in the evening would have 

 been of the slightest use. One could always rely in 

 those days on some good fly-fishing water, and from 

 June to September, on a fairly good stock of fish. 



To some extent this has been changed by the by- 

 anglers-freely-anathematized drainage-gates, put in 

 at Belleek some ten years ago. The falls were blasted, 

 the three miles of canal-like river above Belleek 

 dredged to a deeper level, a fish-pass constructed, 

 and great hydraulic-power gates put in where the 

 falls used to be. Thus it happens that the height 

 of this noble river has been made subservient to the 

 prosaic exigencies of commercial enterprise, and is 

 now under the absolute control of an official at 

 Belleek, who obeys the mandates of a soulless and 

 invertebrate company, dead to all ideas of sport, and 

 whose whole philosophy is contained within the four 

 corners of a printed balance-sheet. 



A ten-foot flood can be sent down the Erne at any 



