Jeremy Paxman explores the history of Scotland's famous salmon beats — part one
AROSE BY ANY OTHER name would smell just as sweet. But, just occasionally, you wonder what the particular pool into which you are casting your fly did to deserve the name it has. Fishing on the Sutherland Blackwater — under the mistaken impression that it was the upper River Brora — I once asked the cartoonist Merrily Harpur if she knew the reason the
5ft-wide pool we were creeping around was called Plank. “Why, because there isn’t one,” she explained, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Variations on pool names on different sides of the river depend on the interpretations by various owners.
River Spey map: copyright Nigel Houldsworth (fishingmaps.co.uk).
The old Gaelic name for Kinchurdy Pool was Pol Martock or Marstock.
Norman’s Pool on Kincardine is named after gillie Norman Stone who created it. He died in April 1998, aged 42.
The names of lots of salmon pools are indeed obvious enough, as are the features which gave them their nomenclature. Though it is years since I fished the Brora, I recall various Falls there, a midge-infested Washing Pool (presumably for washing sheep), and others named after pretty clear vegetable or geological features, like species of trees. Just about
every river seems to have Bridge pools, Boat pools, Mill pools, Junction pools or Bulwark pools.
Most of them have explainable names — Round Pool or Burn Pool — or they got their moniker from someone who perhaps once owned land or caught a remarkable fish there. Doctor’s and Parson’s pools abound. I have never come across an Ayatollah’s Run or a Chiropodist’s Pool, but there are probably more named after colonels than there are now colonels in what’s left of the much-reduced British army. They tend just to be called The Colonel’s.
To bestow your name upon a pool requires something else, which is sometimes very predictable, and sometimes not. The very same beat of the River Naver has one pool (Akroyd’s Stone) named after Charles Akroyd, inventor of the Akroyd fly and fabled author of A Veteran Sportsman’s Diary, and another pool (Brown’s) named after the local tramp, who was found lying dead beside it one frosty morning. But for the most part, pool names record remarkable fish, relentless casting, or ownership. Lord March’s Pool on the Spey is named after the great-great-grandfather of the current laird of Gordon Castle — an estate which once owned the entire river from source to sea. But for me the most resonant name on t
