The Nith was once famed for its giant autumn- and winter-run salmon.
In another life, I knew a former Dumfries man moved to Wales, Joe Bennett, who had left the Nith and his home patch - had been forced to leave - on account of his, er, full-time daytime activities with a rod and night-time activities with net and gaff, moving to an area that not only then had lightly bailiffed rivers teeming with salmon but also a centuries-old tradition of wholesale illegal fish-removal by the locals.
Joe, a real character and simply lethal with a salmon-spinning rod or with worming tackle, told a very young me all those years ago (early to mid 1970s) a lot about the Nith, about the forties that were poached every winter, of the occasional fifty, of one sixty that ripped through a set net and smashed two gaff-handles before it was eventually brought to the bank.
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
