Illuminated by Water by Malachy Tallack

Author:Malachy Tallack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

A text message arrived from my brother, with a map attached. It was a screenshot, a rectangle of land and water, cropped from a digital Ordnance Survey chart. The space it covered wasn’t large – just two or three square miles at most – and it wasn’t somewhere I knew. Or not precisely. Of the dozen or so names that were present on the map, I recognized only one of them for certain: a narrow Atlantic inlet at the north of the picture, which located it with some degree of specificity. But even without that clue, I’d have known that it was somewhere in Shetland. Just the look of the words, the juxtaposition of Norse and English names: it could hardly have been anywhere else.

Protruding from one side of this image was a little road, a track, which petered out in the space between the sea and a steep hillside. South and west of there, a hundred and fifty metres up the hill, were four small lochs, dotted unevenly around. Planted in one of them was a purple flag, a digital X to mark the spot.

I have fished in Shetland for thirty years now, on and off, and I had never heard of any of these lochs. Not once. Their names were entirely new to me. To some extent that’s not so remarkable; there are at least five hundred lochs in the islands, and I’ve visited only a fraction of those. But I’ve spent a lot of time looking at maps, and a lot of time listening to anglers tell stories; and in all those years I’d neither noticed nor heard of these lochs.

What was particularly surprising, then, was the message behind the purple flag. It told me that this loch held treasure. The night before, my brother had been staying in the area, on a weekend break with his family. On a whim, once the children went to bed, he’d taken his fly rod and walked up the hill, and cast into the first water he found. Judging by the excited texts I received that night and the following morning – after he got up at 5 a.m. to go back a second time – this was a place that I really ought to have known about. There were big fish feeding in the margins, he said, cruising in stony, shallow water. He couldn’t get them to take. Not that time. But they were there, and so he’d return.

Growing up in Shetland, fishing meant freedom. It meant being able to wander and explore and to stop at any loch you fancied and cast a fly. It meant a choice of waters that would take years, even decades, to exhaust. Of those five hundred lochs in the islands – nearly all of which hold trout – the vast majority are open to members of the local angling club. I know of only three or four, in fact, that are not.

This is how most of the fishing in my life has been done: with the great luxury of whim.

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