CHAPTER XIII 



THE HOPE 



This river, which drains eighty-one square miles of a most moun- 

 tainous country, is formed by three small streams rising in the old 

 Reay Forest, not very far from Gobernuisgach Lodge ; these 

 uniting form the Hope, which thence flows through Strathmore 

 under the birch-clad slopes of Ben Hope for some seven miles, 

 when it expands into Loch Hope — a lovely sheet of water about 

 six miles long, and varying from two hundred to twelve hundred 

 yards in width. On leaving the loch the river has a further flow of 

 rather less than two miles to the sea, into which it falls on the east 

 side of Loch Erribol — " the little to\\Ti on a sandy beach." The 

 angling of the river somewhat resembles that of the Awe, and between 

 the foot of the loch and the sea it goes with Hope Lodge — prettily 

 perched on a high bank overlooking the loch and the top part of the 

 river, a somewhat inaccessible dwelling easiest reached by a yacht, 

 and, failing that, only to be arrived at by a long posting journey of 

 some seventy miles from Lairg, via Altnaharra, Tongue, and the 

 Morn. 



This river opens to the rod on the nth of January and closes on 

 the loth of September, the netting season being from the nth of 

 February to the 26th of August. These dates are taken from the 

 latest " Table of Annual Close Times," printed in the Fishery Board 

 Report. But Duncan Ross, who has been keeper at Hope for several 

 years, maintains that the river remains open to the rod tiU the 15th 

 of October. Why the salmon rod season of the Hope should com- 

 mence on the nth of January is a perfect mystery, for no clean fish 

 are got before the middle of June. The Fishery Board Report of 

 1884 specially states " this is a late river, and that with it the late 

 rivers begin." A few pages further on the same Report announces 

 that " the Dionard is the first of the late rivers." But both state- 

 ments are erroneous, for, as a matter of fact, the Kinloch is ab- 

 solutely the farthest east of the late rivers ; from Kinloch mouth 

 to the east they are aU early, to the west they are all late. 



Mr. Archibald Young, a former Inspector of Salmon Fisheries, 

 tried to account for this lateness and earliness by the relative tem- 

 peratures of the river and the sea water. His theory was that 

 rivers flowing into the German Ocean were early because that sea 

 was a cold one, and that the higher temperature of the fresh water 

 of the rivers tempted fish in search of warmer quarters to enter 



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