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History of Loch Leven Fisheries

From a talk given in Lodge St. Serf No.327 in 2003

by Mr. Willie Wilson, Manager

I will run through the history of the fishing on Loch Leven. We use fishing collectively to start with because Loch Leven was and still is a tremendously productive Loch. It is well documented in the diaries of the late historian, David Marshall that very many fish were taken out and netted and this is how a lot of the names on Loch Leven have arisen-The Old House Sett, The Rough Hole Sett and The Pow Mouth Sett. These Sett’s were Net Stations and fish were sold. Some of the best times and some of the most prolific times for netting from October through the winter, where the nettings were what we would call the close season, and how Loch Leven sustains all that and how it managed to sustain it with what we see nowadays is amazing.

However, I am only touching on that because it’s not relevant to the modern day fishery that Loch Leven tries to be. Loch Leven was lowered by some four and a half feet (1.37mt.) in the 1830’s to accommodate industry in Fife. The old Levenmouth where the Leven used to run out which was by-passed and a new cut made and it had incorporated, at the Loch Leven end, sluices and these were some four and a half feet (1.37mt.) below the water level. Now if you can imagine Loch Leven being four and a half feet on average higher and if you take the middle line then it was massive. Its surface area was some 70% bigger than what it is now so in the days before it was lowered it covered a very large portion of Kinross-shire. When it was lowered and the water was used it then became very, very prolific.

Now Loch Leven was scooped out by a glacier. The glacier formed and you can see, by the surrounding hills, this whole valley from Stirling right through and out to the west and into Fife coast in the east. Had there been an architect who specialised in the making or designing of a fishing Loch he could not have bettered Loch Leven because there are banks and features within the Loch. Anglers can fish the whole surface area of the Loch and these features, underneath the water-banks, form hundreds of yards out into the Loch. There are huge plateaus that may only be three feet deep (.9mt.) in the summer time, and others that drop down to areas which may be between six and eight feet (1.8mt. & 2.4mt.) depending on the level of the Loch. There are very deep holes, by Loch Leven standards. One is in the “South Deeps” which is the deepest part of the Loch and goes down to eighty feet (29mt.) just off the southwest point of St. Serf’s Island. The other deep hole is just in front of Milnathort, the “North Deeps”. It is not great but at 70ft (21.3mt.), it is fairly deep. Now these provide wonderful boltholes as the fish in wintertime can retreat into these deep-water marks. The water becomes a little bit low in oxygen content there but because it is so cold over-winter well. These features therefore, are very helpful for Brown Trout and indeed for the other course fish-Perch, Pike and so on.

Water comes in from the west catchment, and the main carrier streams are the North Queich, the South Queich and the Gairney Water. The Gairney Water is purely man made as it is a drainage channel and it runs out at the east end so the turnover is genuine. It comes in at one end and goes bowling round and goes out at the other.

Angling as we know it today, really started almost at the beginning of the nineteen hundreds, probably a little bit earlier in the late eighteen hundreds when the netting for some reason or other ceased. I’m not quite sure why this happened, I think there may have been a transition to rod fishing, probably the economy of the times, the lack of value of the fish that they were netting or the increase in value of the rod-caught fish. At the start, there were only seven or eight boats on Loch Leven and the boats interestingly enough had names, not numbers. Angling in those days was relatively low key, people would come by horse and trap or indeed if by train they were lifted by horse and trap from the station and taken down to the Pier and on to the Loch by two Boatmen and they would be brought back in again, usually with a handsome number of fish.

After the early part of the nineteenth century the increase in the number of fish caught was steady. The Loch was probably at its most prolific in these days. If you can just imagine all of the water coming in from the west so all the sponges, I mean where water came out of the ground up in the headwaters of the North and South Queich and the Gairney, very, very slow-there was no extensive drainage in these days, it was pretty basic by today’s standards. Now that carried on right through the early years of this century through to the twenties. There was one slight change in the twenties and thirties; there were Fish Ponds built. Now these fishponds were built on the north shore of the Loch and we in fact, use the same ponds and, some of the same drains in these ponds are used to this day. We resurrected them for our own fish farm when we started
a few years later. But these fish ponds were built to rear fry for selling, mainly sending away to local fisheries and in these days there was over production and the Ovawas sold, and indeed Loch Leven Ova trout was exported to many parts of the world. They found their way to New Zealand, Canada and all sorts of places, in fact, we had an enquiry from someone from Chile not so long ago. Apparently down in Tierra del Fuego there is a wonderful Sea Trout Fishery and they reckon that, unfortunately there is nothing in writing about this, it was Loch Leven progeny that started off one of the Sea Trout Fisheries there because a Sea Trout is just exactly the same as a Brown Trout.
The Fishponds were built in the twenties and were operated in the twenties and thirties. Very quickly the Loch Leven Fisheries or the Kinross Estate Company as it was known in those days, for some reason or other, leased out the fishing’s and PD Mallock of Perth, who was a wonderful fisher (I don’t think you could call him a fishery biologist) but he had a wonderful way with fish and he was extremely interested and rented the fishing’s on Loch Leven along with the Fish Farm. But it was taken back sometime in the thirties by the Estate Company and the Loch just trundled on and kept producing huge catches of fish, when I say huge catches of fish you’ve got to remember that angling pressure in the thirties, forties and early fifties was probably quite a lot lighter than it is nowadays. People could come and perhaps fish from ten o’ clock to six o’clock. There wasn’t much evening fishing and the dreaded Sunday fishing hadn’t been introduced and even more dreaded early morning fishing hadn’t been introduced.

Without getting too technical, Loch Leven is not only a wonderful fishery it is a wonderful site for homebred and migratory wildfowl. In fact it is one of the most important sites in the world-inland breeding sites and inland over wintering sites for all sorts of migratory wildfowl. Now the two go hand in hand. If a water is producing a lot of homebred duck and is fit to overwinter them, not quite so important for the over wintering because they mainly just need a body of water to roost on, but if it producing a lot of duck it has the potential to produce an awful lot of fish.

In the late fifties there was just an inkling of some of the troubles that were going to beset Loch Leven from a fishery point of view. The water in Loch Leven, even away back, has always been nutritious, very rich in nutrients and it lies, as I said, in a formed basin glacier and it’s a very rich basin. It’s a sump also, obviously most lochs are sumps, and, as sumps, they drain from these nutrient rich fields and collect all sorts of wastewater. The man at the bottom of the ladder has got to collect everyone else’s waste. This waste is turned into nutrients and for years there is a nice fine balance. Now things were very good in Loch Leven for a long time, but it got too good. The word for nutrient over enrichment is nitrification. Now nitrification was beginning to rear its head probably as early as the late fifties but certainly in the early sixties. Now the start of nitrification conditions, fishing can get very good and it was probably at its most prolific in the late fifties and early sixties. In 1960 records show that there were 86,000 fish caught by anglers, now that’s a tremendous number if fish. You can do all sorts of breakdowns but it equated to somewhere over five fish per rod visit. Now if any fishery could produce that over a whole season nowadays it would be a tremendous high rod average and Loch Leven churned that out for several seasons. However, as I said, the water was becoming rich, just too rich and the balance tipped over. The analogy that I use is that you get a strong person who can carry something on his shoulders and he doesn’t worry, but as he gets older or a bit weaker, probably a bit of both, he tries to run faster and it just can’t be done. This is what Loch Leven was doing; it was producing so much food that 1960, which is an easy date to remember, was the peak. After that, the numbers started to fluctuate but, more importantly, the quality and condition of the trout started to fluctuate terribly. The good stock, the fish that ran up the burns, took longer to come back into condition, and sadly, some of them didn’t. There was disease, I don’t know if any of you remember seeing, about 1963/1964, a whole lot of fish with white spots-the name of that was saprolegniaceae That was a secondary thing; it was because fish were probably in such poor condition that the final straw of running the burns and reproducing just put them over the edge.

Then came profuse blooms of algae. Loch Leven was always famous, or infamous, for weed. Saprolegniaceae is the collective name for all different weeds. I am not a weed specialist, apart from my garden, and I don’t know all the names but there were many and quite a variety and they supported all types of flies. When algae becomes prolific the most prolific type we have are called blue/green algae’s. Now there is an algae for almost every day of the year and Loch Leven can produce, or can have its water column at any one time, twenty or thirty different types of algae. One of them, depending on conditions, will become dominant. Now when we get all the trouble the blue/green usually becomes dominant in Loch Leven and it doesn’t but its one called macrophyte.  Now what happens is that the alabina stops the light penetration through the water and the macrophyte if this happens over a few weeks at the right time or the wrong time the macrophytethe plants cannot photosensitize and they die back. Now with the dying back of the macrophyte you lose all the aquatic insects that were supported by the macrophyte and the whole thing collapses relatively quickly. When you are looking up environmental history a few years is but a second in time and this happened very, very quickly. By the end of the sixties and the early seventies in some seasons we would have very big trout, short term, perhaps a couple of years, where fish did very, very well. They grew very fast there were fewer of them; the catches were up and down, the graphs were just like mountain ranges, and it was very worrying. We just got through the seventies, and just about had enough anglers were despairing. Loch Leven used to be called the duffers loch. You could go out there anytime and catch a few fish or a lot of fish. I have been involved in fishing all my working life, I’ve never done anything else, and I can relate to one group and that’s anglers and I know every mood an angler can get into and, believe me, they are the mildest people you will ever meet. They are at one with nature because if you consider that we spend four hours, eight hours, some of them longer, sitting throwing a rod back and forward looking around them, it’s not only fish that they take note of, they take note of everything. They saw what was happening and it was very upsetting, it was upsetting for everyone concerned, not least the people who worked on the Loch and something had to be done.

Loch Leven is three thousand five hundred acres, it’s a massive water body and if you are standing on the side and look out and say, “Well, we’ve to sort you out” you’ve got a big job on your hands. It was in the eighties, and I am categorising this, but it’s very convenient because it was in 1980 that we decided we would go forward and see if we could help nature along. In our naivety we say “yeh” just do this, we’ll start up the fish ponds again, we’ll chick in a few Brownies and away we go. Well, that was in 1980 and it’s now 2003 and dare I say we are struggling a little bit. But let’s go back to 1980. We were very careful, and still are, that we wouldn’t change the integrity of the Brown Trout. I didn’t know just how important this was, but I thought it was fairly important and we stripped fish from the streams and laid down the eggs. We do everything ourselves at the Fish Farm. Now the fish farm is very unique, it’s a great piece of kit if you like, it’s taken us a long time, we are at one with Brown Trout but where we fall woefully short, in my opinion, I think, is in pure numbers. There was a survey done in the mid sixties and the survey was not done with an knee-jerk reaction; there were no panic buttons getting pushed at this time, it was what is now the Fresh Water Fisheries Laboratory, conducted a survey on juvenile production and juvenile numbers from the streams run by John Thorpe, who was ahead of it at that time, he is now retired, reckons it could have been as many as a million, perhaps as many as two million, Brown Trout recruited back into Loch Leven in one season. Now these were fish from either one plus or two plus years old. These fish have been looked after in the streams for one or two years and were then released back to nature’s way of stocking the Loch itself. Remember, Loch Leven was stocked like that year in, and year out, until we tried to help it in 1980. Now we started off by putting in about one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand and thought we were doing wonders. It made a difference, and it is making a difference, so hopefully we haven’t done any damage because we have got to be so careful when we are working with nature. Personally, on the Brown Trout front I don’t think there has been any damage done at all, the genetic integrity of the Brown Trout I think is quite strong. The fact that they still run the main burns, not in anything like the numbers that they used to, is a very good sign.

Through the eighties the fishery went through one or two changes. I have forgotten to add that in the old days the boats were all rowed by two fourteen feet oars. One man to each oar, you needed to have long arms to reach a fourteen feet oar. There was a transition to outboards and, I think, the first outboards came on the Loch in 1963. It wasn’t the first outboard on the Loch but it was the first commercial outboard for fishing. Sir David Montgomery, my boss, he tells the story that his father took an outboard motor out one day in 1939 or something like that, and 1940 was a terribly bad season so they never allowed another outboard motor on the Loch! The outboard motor certainly opened up the fishing from an anglers point of view because Loch Leven, as I have said is a big Loch, it is four miles from the Pier to the Sluices all but a little bit and its just about as wide, so historically the outboard motor probably was one of the biggest changes we have seen.

Another change and it’s certainly something I’m not proud of. It may or may not have been very necessary, and it has not been very successful, and that’s the introduction of the Rainbow Trout. If you want to start an argument in a pub, and nobody’s interested in football or religion, and they are all fishermen, just mention Rainbow Trout to a Brown Trout fisherman. You will get so many exchanges going, it’s wonderful. In 1992 there was an Open-Day planned for June 14th by the Nature Conservancy Council, the NCC, and on the 13th June there was a massive bloom of alabina. It is the one that is dominant, and by Jove it was dominant. There is one very impressive aerial photograph taken of this and its just like, well, I don’t know what its like, it’s just not like water at all. All this stuff just forms and twists round with the wind. When algae’s growing, it grows in the main in a column but the blue greens and especially alabina depicts nitrogen, it becomes buoyant, it comes up to the top and gets its fix, but it’s vulnerable and starts to stick together and forms a mass. This is when it can become toxic

In June 1992 we had this massive algae bloom and it was brought to a head. It was a bad day, it was our Black Sunday if you like. It started everybody thinking, and if you will pardon my French, all hell was let loose. SEPA,  Forth River Purification Board, Scottish National Heritage, all environmental agencies put their hands up and said “We didn’t know is was coming” but we had seen it happening for years and years, algae was not a new phenomenon in Loch Leven. But as I say, it did bring to a head all that was gong on. A lot of good work came from that, the local authorities have been wonderful. In Milnathort there is now a massive and wonderful waste water treatment plant and in Kinross north the water is treated there.

The Woollen Mill did put a lot of phosphate, phosphate is the one thing that the algae’s cannot glean from nature, they can get everything else but not phosphate and phosphate comes into Loch Leven from three main sources, one is waste water treatment sewage, one is from the Mill by their own admission and the other is from the farmer. Now the one that is hardest to control by the fragmented nature of the whole thing is the farm one and it’s very difficult for farmers. Phosphate doesn’t bleach but it can be washed off, it can be washed into streams and if you are unlucky after phosphate has been applied, you can get it coming down the burns in particular. But the worst, without a doubt, in my opinion, is the wastewater treatment because it comes in and goes to the water column and is readily available. We call that saturated reactive phosphate, it doesn’t really mean too much but it is pretty technical and I don’t know very much about it but the total phosphate coming in has been cut by over 50% since 1992.

The other big thing that happened was that the Brown Trout fishing was really very poor at that time and we took the major decision for us to use Rainbow Trout. Again we tried to introduce them by what we thought was the best way, we got eggs, all female eggs, from Ireland and they were very good and the Rainbows from these eggs were pretty good, but because they were all female they became gravid the following year. It wasn’t very nice catching fish in April and May full of eggs so we decided to have a go with trout eggs. Now an all female is a diploid which is double sexual reversal. It means that they are neither male nor female. They have a slightly lower growth profile in the early part of the year and just carry on growing after that. They are not very robust. This is why I have all sorts if ideas about Rainbow Trout, I really shouldn’t be saying this, but it gets a bit frustrating. They are not nearly as robust as Brown Trout, nothing like it at all, the wonderful Brown Trout and especially the wonderful Loch Leven Brown Trout. Loch Leven would not have been viable from the numbers of Brown Trout that we are catching. But the Brown Trout as we thought would have pulled up, the numbers would have increased, have not, and it worries us slightly that perhaps the Rainbows are suppressing the numbers, but I doubt it very much. The water clarity, the water quality, has not improved all that much either. The water clarity this year was, at its best, about 2 metres on secchi, a secchi disc is a black and white disc that measures water clarity, you just put it down, it’s not very scientific, but is the one that the scientists use to measure the water clarity and it sits about 1.5 to 2. meters. Now that’s OK for a lot of the Loch but an awful lot of the Loch requires 2.5 to 3 metres clarity to allow the macrophites and all the growth of these macrophites to start up and keep growing. The position we are in at the moment is that we are going to stick with Rainbow Trout, certainly for a few years we will have to, for the short term viability of the Fishery. Longer term we have doubled up our capacity in the fish farm and we are putting out at least 2.5 times the number to try and boost the Brown Trout and we are looking to see if anything can be done in the headwater and streams feeding Loch Leven. It is very doubtful because the drainage system has been changed totally since the 1950’s and 1960’s when there were huge subsides available for draining and also gravel extraction in the lower parts of the Gairney and the South Queich.

So in a nutshell that’s the history all the way up to present day. I am not going to say anything of the future because everything I say about Loch Leven-it is bigger than me and it has an uncanny knack that if I say one thing it does the other and I will never be right. My feeling is it’s a wonderful sheet of water; it is without a doubt the most important trout fishery probably in the world. I am not saying it’s the best, I personally think it’s probably the best, but then I have reason to say it. I am just back from fishing somewhere else, I won’t mention where, and it was a wonderful Fishery but there were several things when you just cross check, Loch Leven has everything. Historically, as a Fishery, it’s been the talking point for anglers for more than a century. There have been flies, generations of flies, come and gone that have been on Loch Leven. The Kingfisher Butcher which is a fly that nobody would have been without in the 70’s their cast. The Burleigh, now the Burleigh, was the fly called after Burleigh or was Burleigh called after the fly, we don’t quite know. But it’s the whole, the whole concept of angling on Loch Leven, it is pure pedigree, it is without a doubt something that I am privileged to have been part of and still a part of. It knocks you about a little bit, but it’s a privilege that I know a lot of anglers, they curse it, thy bless it, they come back for more but when they catch one of these wonderful fish, or even a bag of these wonderful fish, they know they have got it there and then go back out and it stings them quite a few times, but that’s what Loch Leven’s all about and that just about says it all for me.

Curling On a frozen Loch Leven

© 2007 - Lodge St. Serf 327