Fishing a Highland Stream 1960 (A Love Affair With A River)
By John Ingles Hall ISBN 0-670-81473-3 and
A Highland Stream 2021 (A Love Affair Continued)
By Terence Clifford- Amos ISBN 978-1-907110-94-8
For those of you who love fishing the Scottish Lochs, Streams and Rivers these two books, 60 years apart, are a must for your collection, both books refer to the river Truim, which a tributary of the Spey and is situated on the edge of the Cairngorms National Park, approx 15 miles long and 11miles of it was fully explored and charted by John Hall over a seven year period. OS Maps 42 and 35.
For those who drive up the M6, M74 to Scotland and then up the A9, the Truim lies on your left hand side by Dalwhinnie easily recognized by the tall towers of Grants whisky distillers if your as old as me in the early years, you drove up the A9 and it was much nearer to the river.
The river can now only be fished by the local people.
Both these books tell a fabulous story of the era around the stream and the people living there.
So as not to spoil it, I will leave you with the Introduction to the first book.
“There are places which it is possible to love as deeply as if they were people. Fishing a Highland Stream by John Ingles Hall is an account of one man’s love for a small river, the Truim, as in the Central Scottish Highlands, its countryside and inhabitants. Feeling and sincerity make it a minor classic, not only about trout fishing but about nature, portraying both the lure of the art of fly fishing and the fascination of the ancient ice-eroded mountains of the Cairngorms.
I came upon the book by chance, sometime after I had fallen in love with the Truim myself and experienced the lonely magic of its route, in those days in a glen where only the grazing roe deer and the shrill oyster-catchers watch your passing. Before long, I began to take it with me in my fishing bag, wrapped in a plastic cover, partly to gather points and perceptions from the authors methods, but also to see the river with his eyes as well as my own. With him, I came to look for the identical, unchanging, permanent duty owl on guard at the mouth of the Truim, this stretch above the Laggan Bridge where the water glitter and shade-dappled and the bend near the electricity pylons, which is fished to the sound of music as the wind plays upon this great harp we have stretched across the moor.
It remains a place of remembered hidden corners to which my wife and I try and make an annual pilgrimage on our way to rivers farther North. Once a year, too I re-read the book, not only for the Truim itself, and the Dalwhinnie country, but for John Ingles Hall feelings and superbly expressed regard for it. It is good to think that this new edition will bring pleasure like my own to many other people, not only fishers, but to all those who love this life and landscape of places set apart.
Sir Geoffrey Cox 1987”
Andrew Ayres
Cheltenham Fly Dressers, Grayling Society, Worcester Fly Dressers, Ludlow Fly dressers and FDG member.
Loch Ericht
And the strange stories, associated with Ben Alder Cottage or (McCook’s Cottage)
While putting a fishing book away I noticed a white paper stuck in the back of the book shelf, it was a copy out of a Scottish mountaineering journals passed to me by Roger Smith, properly 20 years ago, it was in fact about the strange happens in and around Loch Ericht.
Having just read the 1960 book on the river Truim, and done a book review on that one for the club, and also the 2021 Truim book, I thought it was fitting to add this to that reading matter as they are next to each other at Dalwhinnie.
First you must understand the Geography of Loch Ericht. It is a very intimidating Loch, 15miles long up to a mile wide in the south end its part of the Rannoch/Tummel hydroelectric scheme so the Loch water is sometimes low after pumping, it’s also dominated by Ben-Alder 3761ft on west and Beinn Udlamain 3336ft mountains, on the east and the Loch with a depth of approx. 520ft, the brown trout fishing is good with the some 10lb specimens and ferox trout if you troll in the dark depths. It’s bank fishing only, unless you have your own boat and permission to launch it, under no circumstances can you wade it’s far too dangerous as the fluctuation of the levels makes the steep banks very unstable and liable to slip.
About 40years ago I did some work for EFG (Economical Forestry Group) which involved me delivering materials to McCook’s Bay in a snow-cat, (a small tracked vehicle, from the Norwegian army for going over, snow, soft marsh wet ground) from the west side (Rannoch), there were no tracks on the east side and on the west none that went the full length of the loch, that journey is for another story At the bottom of Ben-Alder stood a cottage which is now referred to as Ben-Alder cottage or McCook cottage.It depends which book and the story your reading. Depending which article you read it’s about a very remote cottage and it’s nearest neighbour was in a cottage 5 miles away, which when I was there it was not a cottage but a shed/shelter for sheep to rest in, or to store material certainly not liveable accommodation. I have no idea how far the next neighbour was from the cottage but a long way probably more like 7 miles, McCook cottage( Ben – Alder cottage) is in a very isolated and extremely remote location.
Now if you’re in to the supernatural, ghosts, paranormal and psychic this is where all the stories start. I have put these stories in italics, as they not my words but you should be able to follow them from my previous notes.
Just after the Great War 1914-1918 Joseph McCook, a deer forester, left his lonely and isolated cottage on the north-western shores of Loch Ericht, where he and his wife with their 2 children had lived for almost 40 years. He loaded his few possessions into a boat and rowed nine miles up the Loch to Ben Alder Lodge, where he spent the last years of his working life before retiring to Newtonmore. He died there at the cottage hospital on 4th July 1933 at the age of 85.
He was a very fine type of Highland stalker, low level-headed and sensible. Thus wrote the Reverend Archibold Eneas Robertson, in 1901, was the first man to complete the Munros, and became President of the Scottish Mountaineering Club from 1930/1932. During his journeys into the Badenoch hills, he would occasionally stay with the McCook’s at Ben Alder Cottage, having called there for the first time in 1893. One of McCook’s granddaughters, Nan Micheal, who lived at the cottage until she was 15, remembered the visit of a Minster, who on a walking trip from Rannoch to Dalwhinnie, he gave her some round shiny metal objects. Never having seen coins before she threw them in to the stream!
By the early twenties the uninhabited cottage had deteriorated, no one was willing to live in such an isolated place. So the cottage was been used by travellers, walker, fisherman and poachers and bit by bit the interior woodwork was vanishing into the fires to keep it warm.
By the end of the 1920 a new sort of traveller was on the move around Loch Ericht – the navvy. In September1928 Balfour and Beatty began work on the vast Grampian Electricity Scheme, and over 1000 men mainly from the Western Isles and Ireland, started boring tunnels and building dams on Loch Rannoch, Ericht, and Tummel. Construction camps were erected at both ends of Loch Ericht. On the western end a Roman Catholic chapel was also built. The old right of way from Rannoch to Dalwhinnie became very busy once again, and Ben Alder Cottage became a regular halfway house, with tramps and navvies meeting and swapping stories by the bothy fire. And very soon there were ghosts in the cottage where McCook had livered with his family for 40 years. A good account of these was in the Happy Hawker written in 1937 by Ian and Elizabeth Mcpherson. Ian had become a ghillie on the Ben Alder Estate and to frighten away unwelcome travellers had invented a ghosts at McCook cottage.
The cottage was haunted by a woman who once took refuge there from a severe storm. She was storm-stayed until hunger crazed her she killed and eat her child. She was seen passing through Rannoch so wide-eyed with despair no one dared cross her path. Some said she returned to the wastes of Rannoch, driven by remorse and was lost in the morasses of that place.
Thus after centuries of peace and quiet the Badenoch hills were visited by a new group of travellers. First the working men, the surveyors, engineers and navvies, and then in the twenties gave way to the Thirties, came those out of work, of those seeking some brief escape from hard times in the towns and cities. In 1938 Robert Grieve (then an apprentice civil engineer) but became Sir Robert Grieve and was the chairman of Highland and Island Development Board, with his friend Tom Robertson had heard of a Loch at over 2000 ft where marvellous big trout could be caught near Ben Alder, they stayed at now renamed to Ben-Alder cottage for almost a week and fished to their hearts content. On the last night they were disturbed by strange noises at midnight like people walking on the roof which they could find no explanation, similar noises were reported on other visits, later in the year 3 travellers were woken by strange noises scratches and door rattling. It was put down to a tame stag who was trying to get inside (very dubious and most unlikely). In 1973 the strange noises were reported and taped by the Editor of Mountain Life magazine, but northing become of it. Another article when a traveller become ill, one of his daughters went to fetch the Doctor. She went out in a snow blizzard and encountered swollen streams, ice and deep snow on her route, when she got back with the Doctor he collapsed out of fatigue and exhaustion and was put to bed by Mrs McCook she then treated the traveller with the Doctors medicine. The Doctor stayed there till he was ready to travel. When Mrs McCook was in childbirth the Doctor saved the child but Mrs McCook died. Some of the ghostly stories and happenings are related to the late Mrs McCook. I believe they had 2 children and they all lived locally.
In 1963, Sid Scroggie was a mountaineer and he was blinded during the war, but he still manged to tramp across the moors with his friend and on several occasions he stayed at the cottage. In November 1963 he was woken again to strange noises, footsteps and groans, next morning at breakfast he experienced the first of poltergeist phenomenon where while sitting at the table a packet of biscuits in a tin flew from the mantelpiece to the opposite side of the room, a further time was a knife came out of a draw and flew across the room. Ben Alder Cottage stands at the junction of two ancient rights of way, one a low level route along Loch Ericht to Dalwhinnie, and the other high over high ground of Bealach Cumhann and Bealach Dubh and down to Glen Pattack. The present cottage dates back to 1871 when the owner then owned both Ben Alder and Ardverikie Estates.
Bob Grieve claimed that in 1938,he could trace the outline of older buildings at the cottage site, which could be from the Dooms Smokey place which would go back to the Culloden days.
If in fact there were ghosts from days gone by, perhaps they’re from long ago Culloden Battles in and around 1745. These stories or perhaps variations of them, they will I expect stand the test of time for many years to follow, when I drove the Snow-Cat up the lowland slopes of Ben Alder to the stone barn 40 years ago I never expected this history was to be around me. There are many more stories to, of hangings and deaths but over the years family members have come forward with proof to prove that these were only actual made up stories, there is no doubt about what a hard life it must have been working in that environment in those years for the families.
I have never been back there as now the Truim is closed to day tickets fishing, unless you have a local post code and live in the vicinity and the west end of the Loch area in front of the cottage now is only for private fishing. Hope you enjoyed the tales, you now need to read the books.
Andrew Ayres
Worcester FD, Gloucester & Cheltenham FD, Grayling Society and Ludlow FD, & FDG member.
August 2025.
Worcester Fly Dressers 