Grabbing the chance to walk with giants

For wildfowlers it’s the sound of geese at dawn, for the rough shooter it’s the haunting shriek that snipe make when they rise from the reeds, but for me it’s that heavy splosh as a bar of silver leaps from the water and falls back again. I’d only been sitting on the bank for a couple of minutes when it happened and I only had to sit there for five or so minutes more, watching the river mouth, to confirm for myself that it was true — the west coast of the Hebrides was having a great salmon year.

Before we arrived, our party had become increasingly enthusiastic as the June and July count zoomed upwards until the salmon figures for two months had swept past normal numbers for the entire year. But it wasn’t only the lure of salmon