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Updated: June 9, 2025
It cannot be learned by diagrams; no man, indeed, can become a proficient in it who has not grown up from childhood in the practice of it. Yet its use is absolutely indispensable to the salmon angler on the Spey. Rocks, trees, high banks, and other impediments forbid resort to the overhead cast.
Justice A.L. Smith the present tenant of Elchies, is free of poor Henry's cabinet. It is a popular delusion that Speyside men are immortal; this is true only of distillers. But it is a fact that their longevity is phenomenal. If Dr. Ogle had to make up the population returns of Strath Spey he could not fail to be profoundly astonished by the comparative blankness of the mortality columns.
None of the greater rivers of Scotland makes so much haste to reach the ocean as does the turbulent and impatient Spey. From its parent lochlet in the bosom of the Grampians it speeds through Badenoch, the country of Cluny MacPherson, the chief of Clan Chattan, a region to this day redolent of memories of the '45.
In the beginning of April, the duke of Cumberland began his march from Aberdeen, and on the twelfth passed the deep and rapid river Spey, without opposition from the rebels, though a detachment of them appeared on the opposite side.
The Duke is a masterful man, whom no factor need attempt to lead by the nose; but on the margin of Spey, from the blush-red crags of Cairntie down to the head of tide water, he owns his centurion in Geordie, who taught him to throw his first line when already he was a minister of the Crown, and who, as regards aught appertaining to salmon fishing, saith unto his Grace, Do this and he doeth it.
They might have opposed the duke of Cumberland at the passage of the Spey; they might, by proper conduct, have afterwards attacked his camp in the night, with a good prospect of success.
Several important bridges were also erected at other points to connect existing roads, such as those at Ballater and Potarch over the Dee; at Alford over the Don: and at Craig-Ellachie over the Spey.
We staunch adherents to the traditional Spey blacks and browns, we who have bred Spey cocks for the sake of their feathers, and have sworn through good report and through evil report by the pig's down or Berlin wool for body, the Spey cock for hackle, and the mallard drake for wings, have jeered at the kaleidoscopic fantasticality of the leaves of their fly-books turned over by adventurers from the south country and Ireland; and have sneered at the notion that a self-respecting Spey salmon would so far demoralise himself as to be allured by a miniature presentation of Liberty's shop-window.
Unlucky were they who wore trews, for the same clung damply to knee and haunch and froze, while the stinging sleet might flay the naked limb till the blood rose among the felt of the kilted, but the suppleness of the joints was unmarred. It was long beyond noon when we reached the head of the pass, and saw before us the dip of the valley of the Spey.
Merely as a wayfaring pedestrian I have followed Spey from its source to its mouth; but my intimacy with it in the character of a fisherman extends over the five-and-twenty miles of its lower course, from the confluence of the pellucid Avon at Ballindalloch to the bridge of Fochabers, the native village of the Captain Wilson who died so gallantly in the recent fighting in Matabeleland.
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