A fishing trip to the west of Ireland in 1936
By Tom Gillespie
IN October 1936, writing from Ballinrobe, E. H. Tattersall (‘Onlooker’ in The Daily Mail) wrote of his experience of a fishing trip to the west of Ireland 90 years ago.
He wrote: No fisherman leaves Lough Mask without regrets, usually for the monster which he has lost.
My regrets are not for the fish I have lost, for I did not hook a giant pike, but that I had just not three more days’ fishing in this sea-like lake.
When you visit a place for the first time - and the west of Ireland was quite foreign to me - it is never until you are just about to leave that you discover all the wonderful things that you should have done.
This is precisely what happened on this visit, but as regrets, the exact locality in Lough Mask where my boatman acts as ‘harbourer’ to 30lb. and 40lb. pike until the demise of one of these fish I am remaining silent.
All the great Irish lakes are stacked with big trout and pike, and in the ‘local’ in the evenings they barely bother to mention any pike under 30lb. and any trout under 5lb.
Leaving Lough Mask makes me feel about as anaemic as on a goat’s milk diet, but the stern call of duty triumphs over the stern voices of colleens who, I understand, are indigenous to the neighbourhood: I have yet to see the genuine article.
Girls have to behave in Ireland, otherwise the parish priest gets in their track and reads their names from the pulpit on Sundays: a Mayfair vicar would never get through his service should he undertake the same task.
The three main points which I noted while motoring from Dublin to the west were:
The number of donkeys.
The hillocks in the roads (of which the surfaces are excellent) due to their being built on bogs.
The number of girls with red hair.
My first port of call was Sligo, whence a kind friend was to despatch me around the great lakes armed with local knowledge.
One of the smaller lakes in the vicinity had recently disappeared. Local wits playfully attribute this to the search by members of the Sligo Golf Club for water one morning after the dinner for the captain’s prize.
Rosses Point, where the club has links, is described as being ‘really tone-y’ and certainly all the local luminaries congregate there in the evenings, and they are the soul of hospitality.
“Faith and you’ll see some weird and wonderful creatures before you leave this country.” And I did. At one hotel the call-board told me that No. 33 was being called at 7.15 a.m. with hot whiskey, nor was there any mention of water or milk to be added.
And at 9.15 No. 33 (so I believed him to be) waddled down to breakfast; he had a very red face, and his face was even redder than usual after a shocking battle with his razor.
I was lucky to be put in the hands of Mr. Wilbert Middleton, a big four magnate in the Sligo district, for my first venture on a Irish lough.
Mr. Middleton had fished himself as an automatic selection for next year’s (1937) Irish fishing team, for which competition is enormous: he also has a fine pheasant shoot, a speedboat, and looks 26 and not 46.
He looked gloomily at Lough Arrow, though, on which was a gentle ripple, and said that you need waves with tips of foam on all these big lakes to make the trout rise well.
However, at the first cast I had a 1½lb. trout, which was almost put back except that Arrow trout was said to be so good to eat.
The next move was to Lough Conn, past Ballina, to Pontoon Bridge, to a scene of ‘wild beauty’, as an Irishman described it, where Lough Cullen and Conn join.
My boatman was the type of Cameron in ‘Mary Rose’ - he was helping his aunt (who owns the little hotel on the bridge) while on holiday from his medical studies in Dublin.
It made me nervous of setting foot on one of these queer little islands which abound in these lakes; a 20-year interlude from this life would bring awful shocks on return.
Previous surroundings affect one’s outlook to a strange place - and after Aix-les-Bains, Milan, Venice, the Lido, and Villa d’Este it certainly seemed odd here at first.
But it is as when you study a new and rather unusual lesson at school: the first time it seems so strange, and the next time all the strangeness seems to have melted away.
At Pontoon the peat fires were alight all day long although the sun was hot outside: there was no telephone, and altogether the atmosphere was one in which you could dilate for hours upon the deeds of the blackbird, the habits of cormorant, and why owls make peculiar noises at night.