Even then,
thirty long years ago, the old stagers used to tell us that "the waiter
was owr sair fished," and they grumbled about the system of draining the
land, which makes a river a roaring torrent in floods, and a bed of grey
stones with a few clear pools and shallows, during the rest of the year.
In times before the hills were drained, before the manufacturing towns
were so populous, before pollution, netting, dynamiting, poisoning,
sniggling, and the enormous increase of fair and unfair fishing, the
border must have been the angler's paradise. Still, it was not bad when
we were boys. We had Ettrick within a mile of us, and a finer natural
trout-stream there is not in Scotland, though now the water only holds a
sadly persecuted remnant. There was one long pool behind Lindean,
flowing beneath a high wooded bank, where the trout literally seemed
never to cease rising at the flies that dropped from the pendant boughs.
Unluckily the water flowed out of the pool in a thin broad stream,
directly it right angles to the pool itself. Thus the angler had, so to
speak, the whole of lower Ettrick at his back when he waded: it was a
long way up stream to the bank, and, as we never used landing-nets then,
we naturally lost a great many trout in trying to unhook them in mid
water.
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