FIELD SPORTS
H
ow many anglers, I wonder, can tell you exactly how many fi sh they’ve caught? Not many I suspect. Even
though my own total is embarrassingly low, I’m still more than a bit hazy on the precise numbers, so God help anyone who’s fi shed enthusiastically and with more than a modicum of skill for over half a century. Yet as soon as I ask the Duke of Roxburghe
the question, he consults a large bound book in the tackle room at Floors Castle and is quickly able to give me an answer that is as breathtaking in its scale as it is in its preci- sion. ‘I’ve caught exactly 1,550 salmon and 299 grilse,’ he says, ‘which sounds pretty damned impressive until you realise that my father’s total for his life was 4,777 salmon and grilse. As he died at 61, that leaves me two years to catch up, so I’d better get my skates on!’ Although those fi gures also include fi sh
caught in Norway on the Alta, the world’s premier salmon river where the Roxburghe family have fi shed for up to fi ve weeks a year since the 1860s (‘the Alta is a family failing; much of our family fortune has been dissi- pated on that river,’ quips the Duke of a river where the average salmon weighs 25lbs), the lion’s share of both father and son’s fi sh have been caught on the family’s Tweed beats. These days, that consists of just the Upper and Lower Floors beats, but used to extend to the Junction Pool and Sprouston until the late 1970s, when punishing death duties following the ninth duke’s death in 1974 forced the sale of the most famous pool in the fi shing world.
‘My fi rst fi shing experience was worming for a trout aged three’
Above: American actor Larry ‘JR Ewing’ Hagman fi shes one of the 18 named pools on the 1.5 mile Upper Floors beat. Right: The Duke in action. Below: In the riverside bothy.
‘With hindsight it wasn’t perhaps the clev-
erest thing to do fi nancially, but it was that or selling land,’ grimaces the Duke. ‘It was on the back of UDN so catches were low, and what we received now sounds like an embarrassingly low fi gure. By 1990 those two beats were worth 20 times what we sold them for while land had only doubled in value, so it sounds like a poor decision but we retained the integrity of the estate, which was enormously important.’ Besides, he says, in the Seventies, no-one
had appreciated how popular salmon fi shing would become or how high river values would go. It was, in so many ways, a different world, particularly when the young Guy Roxburghe learned to fi sh and had the Upper Floors beat, the closest to the castle, all to himself. ‘My fi rst fi shing experience was worming for
a trout in the river, straight in front of the fi shing hut, aged three or four,’ he remembers. ‘I fi shed a lot for trout as a child. In those days there seemed to be a lot more trout about, especially in the spring and at night. I actually caught my fi rst salmon fi shing for trout in July on a trout rod, which came as a complete surprise to me. It was on Upper Floors in a pool called The Slap and weighed seven or eight pounds. ‘I was very keen to fi sh so as soon as I was
allowed out I’d be down at the river practising and throwing out a line. Even then I knew how lucky I was to have the Tweed on my doorstep and running through, if not our garden, then the parkland surrounding our home.’ These days, the beat is largely let, often to
celebrities such as Larry Hagman, Ian Botham, Chris Tarrant and Gareth Edwards, but in those days the beat was completely private and
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