Changing beats on Lower Spey

A once-in-a-generation change is happening to seven beats in time for the 2022 season. Is now the time to net a spot on the bank?

- MUNGO INGLEBY

Every year, there is the potential for the character of any Lower Spey pool to change as the winter floods either deepen a tail or deposit gravel where it is least wanted. The Spey can take with one flood and give with another. One year’s prime salmon real estate can become the following season’s shallow glide. It is a natural process, one as old as the river itself.

These natural movements are expected but what is unusual this year is that there are great changes afoot to the boundaries and mechanics of a number of Lower Spey beats. For all those involved – and, indeed, the wider fishing community – it is a noteworthy moment in time as there have been few significant changes to the prime beats of Scotland, give or take a pool here and there, for many years.

At the heart of the changes is the expiry of a long lease of the Crown’s Spey fishings. This lease covered notable sections of the river, from the top of the tide to the bottom march of Orton, roughly eight miles, about which Augustus Grimble, in The Salmon Rivers of Scotland (1902), noted: “There is no question that this is the finest and most productive stretch of water in Scotland.” Little has changed in the intervening 120 years.