By David Hudson
The Real Macnab Loch Choire Lodge on a wintry day.
I
n common with much of the country I find myself with a certain amount of time on my hands at the moment. I have kept a gamebook for many years now and the prospect of being isolated for the next twelve weeks gave me the perfect excuse to start thumbing through some of the old notes – where I came across several references to someone or other ‘Doing a Macnab.’ They all go back to the 1980s when Georgina and I were working on a sporting estate in Sutherland. Loch Choire covered 35,000 acres of mountain and moorland with five miles of salmon river, half a dozen trout lochs, a few acres of forestry and a lodge which has since burnt down. Guests came to Loch Choire for just three reasons: to fish for trout and salmon, to stalk red deer and to shoot grouse. Occasionally – very occasionally – one of them would manage to catch a salmon, stalk a stag and shoot a grouse on the same day, and that is what we call ‘a Macnab.’ The expression comes from a John Buchan novel: John Macnab: in which three gentleman who are bored with life create a fictional persona they call ‘John Macnab’ and issue a challenge to three Highland estates that they will poach a 62
stag or a salmon from each estate within a certain time frame. The book tells how they set about their enterprise and how each estate tries to foil them. If you are not already familiar with the work I can recommend it as a cracking good read. The modern version of the Macnab isn’t really true to the original concept. Firstly, there is no poaching involved – at least, I sincerely hope there isn’t – and secondly, grouse didn’t feature at all in the original story. The challenge originally was for ‘John Macnab’ to shoot a stag or catch a salmon without being caught himself. In the modern version the challenge is to do all three things between dawn and dusk on a single day. These days some estates offer the chance of ‘doing a Macnab’ and will plan the day in advance to give the sportsman the best possible opportunity of achieving the treble. At Loch Choire the guests didn’t generally pick a day with the intention of setting out to do a Macnab: they were more likely to sort of stumble into it.
It didn’t help if the river was fly only The hardest part of a Macnab is likely to be catching your salmon. The stags and the grouse would always be
Autumn 2020 Irish Country Sports and Country Life
there to be stalked or shot but the salmon was a different matter. Some days you could go to the river and hook a salmon with no trouble at all: other days you could flog the water from dawn to dusk and never get the slightest semblance of interest even when the fish were there in decent numbers. It didn’t help that the river was fly only: no spoons, plugs or spinners were allowed though sometimes the ‘fly’ was a three inch brass tube with a bit of deer hair dressing rather than a traditional Jock Scott, Silver Doctor or Garry Dog. The stalking day started at 10 a.m. when the stalkers and the guests would meet in the gun room so there was time for the keen fisherman to wander down to the river, either before or after breakfast, and try for a salmon. If he or she succeeded then a Macnab was on – provided they were equally fortunate when it came to stalking their stag. Alternatively, sometimes the stalkers would be back at the lodge by early afternoon with a victim in the Argocat and a stroll down to the river might end up with a salmon on the bank. In either case, with two out of three already in the larder it was only natural for the successful stalker/fisherman to turn their thoughts to the possibility of a grouse and the elusive Macnab. And
