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Appendices to Fourth Annual Report 



ascend for one that does now. I walked up the banks of the Ruglas, 

 which has the second largest drainage area in the island, coming next to 

 the Howmore. There is good spawning ground in its bed, and I saw 

 both trout and flounders in it, the latter having come up from the sea 

 through the tunnel, which, of course, cannot be interfered with as it 

 protects the machair land from floods ; but there can be no possible 

 objection, except that of expense, to making the open cutting which I 

 recommend. Between 40 and 50 years ago, when the river flowed 

 in its own natural channel, the Ruglas and the lochs connected with its 

 basin produced far more sea-trout than they do at present ; and a man 

 still living in the neighbourhood remembers having seen a couple of cart- 

 loads of sea-trout taken by the net from the lower Kildonan Loch— the 

 loch nearest the sea — and carried to ]Milton Farm. 



The Rev. Alexander Campbell, formerly Roman Catholic priest at Bomish, 

 who has hved for many years on the island, told me that he remembered the 

 Ruglas as a boy. It is about 20 years since the tunnel was made. The tunnel 

 and the straightening and altering the natural course of the river have ruined 

 the fishing. The old mouth of the river joined the sea a little to the north of 

 the present mouth. At one time, before these two operations had been carried 

 out, the Ruglas was almost as good a river as the Howmore. Not one sea- 

 trout now comes up for a dozen that used to ascend. He thinks that if the 

 open cutting to the north of the tunnel were made, as suggested, it would 

 certainly effect a very great improvement in the fishing. It would cost about 

 £b(). He remembers a great haul of fish taken from the Ruglas by the net 

 many years ago. The tacksman at Milton had the fishings on the river at 

 that time at a very cheap rate. 



The Strome. 



In the evening, a gentleman staying at the Loch Boisdale Hotel, 

 brought in from a place called the Strome, a basket of 15 trout, weighing 

 18 lbs., caught chiefly in the salt water in the ebb stream flowing below 

 a concrete dike, built across a narrow salt - water channel, one of 

 the numerous ramifications of Loch Boisdale. These were all yellow 

 trout, with the exception of 3 finnocks, or smaU sea-trout. One 

 of the yellow trout weighed 5|- and another 3 lbs. This remarkable 

 circumstance of such fine yellow trout having been caught in the salt 

 water, determined me to go and inspect the place, which I did the next 

 day in company with the gentleman who had had so good a days sport. 

 The Strome is about 3 miles from Loch Boisdale, the shortest road 

 being to walk across a rough marshy moor. At Strome, a lofty dike or 

 dam of concrete, with sluices in it, has been erected across a narrow arm 

 of Loch Boisdale, into the head of which a stream, called Am-lige-Mor, 

 flows out of a large fresh water lake, termed Loch Allan. It is as large 

 as the Ruglas, and there is splendid spawning ground upon it, between 

 the head of the Strome and the sluices on the road from Loch Boisdale to 

 PoUachar. Xear Pollachar, there is a smaU but good fronting loch, 

 called Loch Kilbride, with a short stream running from it into the sea at 

 Salliwick Bay. This stream is at present very much choked up but 

 might be easily cleared out. It is only at certain times of the tide that 

 trout will take at Strome, and we arrived much too early, and walked up 

 to the sluices on the stream about a mile above the concrete dam. This 

 stream and the narrow salt water bay into which it falls are said to fish 

 best during the flood. On the way back I tried the salt water, in a 

 narrow place where the tide ran strongly between a small island and the 

 shore, and got 2 yeUow trout and afterwards a lithe. We got back to 

 the concrete dike about the commencement of ebb, when the ebb stream 



