12 July 2015 News/Editorial
That the Tweed is very different to many other Scottish rivers is not just because part of it is in England.
To get here does not involve quite the pilgrimage, almost a migration, which can be seen on Sundays, changeover day, at this time of year.
We have just returned from 3 days on the Findhorn, and nowhere is the migration more visible than at the House of Bruar, just north of Blair Atholl on the A9.
It is an extraordinary sight.
Much uniform is involved.
The cars are Discoveries, Audis and Mercs, the clothes predictably middle, even upper middle, class, mainly English and “county”, the barouches parked under the covered areas to save the moving menagerie (labradors, spaniels, terriers, the odd parrot... and other beloved pooches) from the heat of the Perthshire mid-summer sun, the other contents being every sort of fishing kit, anti-midge (on the Findhorn, they are in fine fettle!) spray/cream, even golf clubs in case of drought on the beloved target river.
Bruar is the perfect stopping off place, for a break, some coffee and cakes, some retail therapy, before the final 60 mph (watch those average speed cameras) push further up the A9.
It is easy to mock, to poke fun at it all, but it is a most serious business.
Which brings us to the point of all this.
Which is…... money.
It pours up the A9 to some of the most underpopulated and remote communities in the land, because fishing, together with stalking and shooting, are often the only sources of reliable external funding, on which many jobs and livelihoods depend.
There must be a concern that with all the political backdrop of Scottish Land Reform and the Wild Fisheries Reform, that the customers, the annual, mainly English, migrants up the A9 on whom it all depends, a number of whom I have just seen at the House of Bruar, will feel alienated by some of the more extreme mood music surrounding the Scottish independence agenda.
It is in nobody’s interests that this could become so.
NOTE
Salmon fishing on the Tweed alone is worth Ł18 million annually and 500 jobs to the Borders economy…...and a multiple of that for the whole country with all the other salmon rivers in Scotland.
our twitter feed