FIELD SPORTS
tion of the glories of the wild places of the Highlands. For anyone not familiar with the story, it’s one which sees three successful but bored fortysomething pals decide not only to become poachers, but to give the owners of the land on which they are about to poach advance warning of their impending misdeeds. If you can put up with some of the class-
I
ridden clichés inherent in a 1920s book about three patrician Tory squires sating their blood- lust and baiting ‘unsuitable’ landowners,
it’s
a truly wonderful read. Buchan’s writing is memorably polished, and his inspiring descrip- tions of the process of fishing and stalking are enough to make even the most ardent of city slickers understand the thrill of country sport. But it is the way in which Buchan talks about
the Scottish countryside which is so utterly compelling and memorable. If the people have altered since the Roaring Twenties, the heather-clad hills and the salmon rivers of the Highlands remain as unchanged and unchang-
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recently re-read the John Buchan novel John Macnab. Even at this remove it’s a fantastic tale of derring-do and a wonderful evoca-
ing as ever. Buchan neatly teases out the essence of our wilderness, and gives field sports their proper place in the scheme of things without recourse to bombast or hyperbole. It is a bril- liant piece of writing about the nature of man and our deep connection to the land. All of which was going through my mind as
Above: The writer with Mar Lodge head stalker Chris Murphy and the elusive stag. Top right: The Deeside estate still uses stag ponies. Bottom right: The changing of the fly.
I headed to try and ‘do’ a Macnab at Mar Lodge, the 72,000-acre Deeside estate near Braemar once owned by the Earl of Fife but now under the stewardship of the National Trust for Scotland, and which was traditionally one of the country’s great stalking estates (its famous Stag Ballroom has 2500 heads on its walls and ceiling). The concept of a Macnab grew out of
Buchan’s book, in which the trio inform their neighbours that ‘John Macnab’ will poach a salmon or stag from their land and return it undetected. The book has been the basis on which countless exhausting days have been spent in the field by men and women for whom bagging a stag, grouse and salmon in the same day has become something of an obsession. Plenty of estates are now willing to cater for this growing quest, although not all have the
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