Casting into angling history
I’m sure it’s age, but I do feel more and more drawn to making pilgrimages these days. Sporting pilgrimages, that is. And it’s the pursuit of wild quarry in wild places that holds the strongest attraction, whether venturing on to a Scottish firth at dawn, hoping to be under the pinkfeet, or exploring a corner of rough ground that may hold a couple of woodcock.
I’ve enjoyed shooting driven pheasants as well as catching rainbows in my local fishery, but I’m often left feeling that there’s something missing. Hunting shouldn’t be easy. As Colin Willock put it in Landscape with Solitary Figure: “To qualify for the title of hunter, the sportsman must pay with his own efforts. It is the pleasure and the work of the pursuit that counts.”
“The sportsman must pay with his own efforts”
Perhaps because there’s an ancestral
