:SPORTING LIFE CLIVE GAMMON
Glencoe, according to a small, silly poem by T. S. Eliot, is where 'the patient stag breeds for the rifle.' They seemed to be doing it for sheer pleasure when I saw them at it, but Eliot was clearly less concerned with truth than with dutifully transmitting the idea that the Highlands and Islands are sad places becatise of, firstly, nasty (but romantic) things which happened in history, like the Glencoe massacre and the destruc- tion of the clan system after the '45; and,
secondly, the alleged depopulation of the Highlands so that they could be turned into a playground for rich sportsmen: grouse moors, deer forests and all that.
Actually it was sheep, not grouse or deer, that caused the crofters to be dispossessed.
After the Jacobite risings, clansmen stopped Chopping each other up and for a while, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the population of the Highlands rose. But the southern sheep ranchers had their eye on the ungrazed northern uplands; the clan chief- tains found their occupation gone and were eager to accept the high rentals that the flockmasters offered. So the crofters had to go. It wasn't until deep into the nineteenth century that the coming of the railways made the north of Scotland a sportsman's country, and it was hired shepherds that felt the pirmh of this new land use. The real depopulation had occurred a long timr before.
The sportsman's paradise era didn't last long either. It finished like a good many other things in 1914. Eliot was already out- of-date when he implied that north of the Highland line the milliondires took over.
The between-the-wars recession hit posh sport as hard as it did anything and to some extent activities like deer-stalking and salmon fishing reverted to their traditional nature: the pastime of the laird and his friends.
Now—and this latest development in the sporting role of the Highlands did not start until at least the 'sixties—there has been another shift and this important national resource is being exploited in a different way. It still costs a lot of money but whereas in the old days a rich Englishman or American rented a sporting estate, with grouse, salmon and deer, for a whole season, short-term bookings are the rule now—a week's salmon fishing, a couple of days' deer-stalking—and the visiting sportsman is as likely to be a German or a Belgian as an Englishman or a Scot. Specialist agencies handle the arrangements, packaging shoot- ing, travel and accommodation for the client. It might be destructive of one's romantic image of the Highlands to make a booking through Mac Sports Ltd,. but that's the way the haggis crumbles these days, mate. In terms of tourism and the general welfare of the Highlands, though. the money that this kind of activity brings in is not all that considerable. The visitors are rich, but there aren't very many of them. Far more promising from this point of view is the latest and most novel Scottish sporting development: the encouragement of sea angling by such bodies as the Scottish Tourist Board and the Highlands and Islands development people. Character- istically of this movement, there is a whole stand at this year's Boat Show devoted to urging the claims of Caithness as a saltwater fishing ground, and the last year or two has seen a determined effort by the Scots to poach from the Irish (who pioneered this field) some of the lucrative sea angling trade which brings each year, on average, about a million pounds into the Republic.
There are a lot of advantages, tourist- ically, to sea angling. It caters for a lot of people rather than a few. It keeps inshore fishing vessels fully employed (and their crews, of course) and as a general rule the more remote the place is, the better the standard of sport tends to be, so that areas which don't normally benefit from an orthodox tourist trade get an unexpected bonus.
And the Scots have plenty to sell in this line. The fishing can be magnificent, especially in the outer isles of Orkney and Shetland (it probably is in the Western Isles, too, but these have yet to be properly pioneered). Last August I watched Cavy Johnson, secretary of the Shetland Associa- tion of Sea Anglers, fight a vast skate for five and a half hours before being defeated (the following day he boated a 150-pounder in twenty-five minutes). And next Mid- summer's Eve, when they plan to fish right through the twilight of a Shetland night, I hope to join Johnson and his friends, ten miles off Lerwick in a lobster boat to see if we can contact once again what he now calls the Great Beast,
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