The most useful source of information about fishing is Fishpal, http://www.fishpal.com/Scotland/. As well as giving details of historical and recent catches (updated daily in high season), fishing can also be booked through the website.

One of the most respected casting teachers around, Eoin Fairgreave (also a terrific guy with a great store of fishing anecdotes) runs a spey casting school in the grounds of the classy Roxburgh Hotel for beginners, or for more experienced fisherfolk looking to tighten up their spey loops http://www.eoinfairgrieve.co.uk/.  Eoin gets very booked up during peak season so if you’re looking for a lesson any time in the Autumn best to book ahead.

The Roxburgh also has a championship standard golf course and clay pigeon shooting – though for clays we tend to go to the excellent Braidwood, about 25 minutes away (beginners welcome, guns and tuition provided if needed, a huge range of traps to choose from, and a great way to entertain teenage lads for a few hours) http://www.braidwoodsc.co.uk/

There are many lochs in the area with brown and/or rainbow trout.  Most of the publicly accessible ones are run by the Hawick Angling Club.  Within 15 minutes of Colislinn are both Acreknowe and Barnes lochs. The latter is in a spectacular location up in the hills near the site of the old Stobs Army Camp – best not to drive too close unless you’re in a 4×4, and best not to bring dogs during lambing season.  Permits can usually be obtained either through the Club, which is located in the Sandbed area of Hawick (this side of town for Colislinn), or in Libby’s Pet Shop in the High Street, which also stocks a small range of fishing tackle.  Other contact details for the Hawick Angling Club: 01450 378907, or 07988 900602, or drewdickson@talktalk.net.  The Club also owns some association water on the Teviot.

Sadly, because of the acidity of the water and the huge spates, both caused by the Wauchope commercial forest that was planted several decades ago, the Slitrig Water (a tributary of the Teviot, itself the major tributary of the Tweed) that runs through Colislinn now holds very few fish.  We do see an occasional brownie and in late autumn some very tired salmon come up to spawn, which tend to shoal near the bridge.  We’d ask you, please, to leave both alone.  However a lot of fun – under adult supervision – can be had by youngsters with nets and jars collecting various forms of fry and bugs. And if they catch something bigger … we’ll have been pleased to have played a part in introducing them to one of the greatest sports in the world!

Finally, if you find yourself short of fishing tackle the best shops in the area to buy kit are in charming Kelso. The brilliant John Norris in Penrith, http://www.johnnorris.co.uk/, are also old hands at mailing stuff out speedily to anxious fishermen short of a rod tip or with a leak in their waders.

Due to a cancellation Colislinn will be available for Easter – 30th March to 7th April 2013

At a third less of the usual cost!

Please get in touch with Charlotte on reservations@colislinn.co.uk or 07799 053 330

For those of you who missed last week’s Scotland game against Italy, here is the undoubted  highlight of the match featuring Stuart Hogg, one of the most talented rugby players of his generation to come from Hawick.  And he is only 20 years old!

We are not alone in thinking that this guy is genius.  Here is heart-warming article about him in the Daily Telegraph.

Timing 

Arrive near the sett about 20 minutes before the badgers come out.  On a summer’s day this would be around 7pm, but generally about 2 hours before dark.  If you are unsuccessful the first time and you either don’t see any or end up frightening them away, try a little later or earlier the next day.

Make sure the badgers don’t see you.

The badger’s eyesight is not very good. It can’t see colour, and can’t see details very well. It
can see shapes and movements though. So don’t wear bright clothing or clothing that is noisy. Don’t stand/sit too close to the sett, stand/sit where the badgers won’t see your shape against the sky, keep still.

Making sure the badgers don’t smell you.

The badger’s sense of smell is very, very good! However, it’s not too difficult to make sure that you are not detected by Brock’s nose: Don’t walk over the badger sett or on a badger path. The badgers will be able to smell where you have been, and this may frighten them off.  Don’t stand or sit in a place where the wind is blowing from you, towards the sett. If you are looking at the sett, and you can feel the wind on your back, then the badgers  will smell you when they come out.
Making sure the badgers don’t hear you.

The badger’s hearing is also very good. If the badgers are going to detect you, it will most
likely be because they hear you. So it is very important that you keep as quiet as possible
when you are watching badgers. Do try to sit or stand in a place where you will have a good view of the sett, and where you will be comfortable and get there ideally before the badgers come out of their sett

Don’t all go at once! Badgers are very shy! 

Make this an exclusive outing.  No more than 2 or 3 people to avoid scaring them away.

NB.  Bring binoculars and midge net

More about badgers here provided by http://www.scottishbadgers.org.uk/index.html:

The European badger (Meles meles) holds a special place in our natural history. Since the bear, wolf and lynx were purged from our islands in a bid to make our land and livestock safe, the badger is now our largest carnivore and top of it’s food chain.

It’s average weight varies from 7.25 kgs in spring to 14.4 kgs in autumn, and measures just under a meter in length, nose to tail. They can live quite a long life, over 15 years much like a domestic dog, in favourable circumstances. In Britain they have no natural predators and their only threat is man and his activities. In the south of England populations are at their greatest while in Scotland their frequency varies from common to scarce the further north you go, and as the altitude increases and the availability of food decreases.

Nocturnal
An extraordinary sense of smell, excellent hearing, poor eyesight, just the job for an animal that spends the daytime below ground sleeping, and coming out only at night to feed. A creature better designed for making its home underground cannot be found! It’s body is low slung with short legs, and has spade like feet with very long claws, perfect for digging hundreds of meters of underground tunnels. It’s elongated body is flexible and yet muscular, especially around the neck and shoulders.

Underground
Their underground homes are constructed of tunnels and chambers, generally excavated in soft sandy type soil. Their tunnels are normally around a meter below ground but can be much deeper and can stretch to distances of over 10 meters from the entrance. The entrances are quite distinct, a hole which is approximately 300mm diameter and which is slightly wider than tall, and with a platform of soil mixed with old bedding immediately outside. Fox holes are noticeably smaller and slightly taller than wide, and will often stink! There will be well worn connecting tracks in evidence at an active sett. The badger will spend hours digging out fresh earth spoil from its sett, a sort of continual home improvements plan. It would seem as if they were never satisfied with the finished article, but it is more likely that they are simply de-lousing their many sleeping and living quarters – a regular and necessary activity to control unwanted house guests such as ticks and lice! Digging activity can cause problems to ground stability. Chambers are often excavated under some sort of solid structure, such as a large rock or the roots of trees, causing them to be easily blown over, and the founds of buildings are also at risk for the same reasons.

Whenever we drive past Stobs, it is to go and see an amazingly well-preserved bronze age fort at Newton Hill Wood or climb a hill that has particularly lovely views over the Slitrig valley, so we do not pay much attention to the dusty remains of the camp site on the right that is now only used by the occasional boy racer.

Something almost unimaginable nowadays in this quiet corner of the Scottish Borders is that for over fifty years there used to be an enormous army camp about a mile south of Colislinn at Stobs that housed up to ten thousand men at a time.  They trained here in the bleak hills in preparation for most of the armed conflicts that Britain got involved in during the first half of the 20th century.

For anyone with an interest in military history please have a look at this fascinating website on Stobs Army Camp: http://stobs-camp.bizhat.com/index.htm.  These guys are much better at telling its story than I am; there are lots of photos, letters and other documents of great interest, not least a section on German prisoners of war who were interred here during WW1 and who ended up baking the daily bread for the camp as recorded by a Scottish soldier:

“We have five thousand German prisoners here and they have a better time of it than us. They bake all our bread, carving an Iron Cross on it. Some of our boys don’t like it but to my taste it seems all right. We have about 15 thousand of our boys here”

It is the painstaking work of the Scottish Military Research Group who have done a wonderful job in recording the lives of those who passed through it.

Colislinn and Stobs

I have been told that officers were billeted at Colislinn during WW2.  From the Stobs website it is clear that the conditions in the camp were pretty basic, with soldiers sleeping in tents and officers in wooden, later Nissen huts, so Colislinn must have been an appealing alternative. The dining and drawing room floors in Colislinn are riddled with ancient telephone and electricity cables with sockets  screwed into the floor at regular intervals.  Presumably they were made into offices.

Another mark the officers left on the house are the bullet holes in the weathervane on top of one of the turrets and who knows, it could have been the German POWs who used the old bread oven still visible in a field immediately west of Colislinn.

Regiments known to have trained at Stobs (more details here):

Black Watch, Lanarkshire Yeomanry, Glasgow Yeomanry, H.L.I , Kings Own Scottish Borderers, Royal Scots Fusiliers, Scottish Rifles 

For the uninitiated, the Cornet is the eligable young man who heads the Common Ridings, as explained on the Colislinn page about the Common Ridings.  If you are interested in and want to know more about the fascinating traditions around common ridings in the Scottish Borders, read more here: http://www.hawickcommonriding.com/cornets.html

Best of luck everyone, hope you have good weather tomorrow!

BTW, I am pretty sure that Cornet Andrew Douglas Haddon (1910) lived at Colislinn!

The place I am keen to explore further is Acrenow Reservoir, which was originally built to supply water to Stobs Army Camp (promise to do a blog post on that as well).  When we first moved to the Borders we used to go swimming in it, but someone complained and we sort of forgot about it.  Recently though we have started walking around it because the scenery is so beautiful, and often wondered whether there was any fishing to be had.  On one of these walks we discovered a sign saying ‘Fishing Available’.

This is very exciting and as soon as I have an opportunity I will go down with my rod in search of a few brownies, (or, as I have just read on the Acrenowe Reservoir web page a large brown monster trout weighing 3.5LB!!)  Fisherman’s tales?  No doubt you will demand photographic evidence…

There is one exception:  there half a dozen of very old ordinary beeches – I would say each about 250 years old – with a circumference of at least 2 meters that are probably demarcating an old boundary line towards a now long-lost fording place in the Slitrig.  They stand there like tall elderly gentlemen who have seen it all before.

Apart from these deliberately planted trees the  willows, the alders, holly, the rowans, ash, lime and the odd oak grow rampantly around ‘the policies’.  I have been told that they are the remains of the forests that once covered most of the UK.  Now they it only really grows on the steep areas as on the flat ones the grazing animals take care of the saplings pretty quickly.

Inside the woodland regeneration is a continuous process, particularly the holly, the alder and the ash.  This is good news as we only burn our own wood and we need a steady supply.  We have just finished the last of some wonderfully scented cedar wood, another huge tree of which there are another 4 still standing, taking the light away from the house.  They will however be there for another season as felling season is now closed while the birdies breed, but come the Autumn, we will be taking more trees down.  When I say we, we usually do ‘blomming’ with the whole family and Scottie, our expert woodsman and friend.  We make a bit of a day of it, heartily driving around in the landie and making bonfires and,  at the end of a cold day’s hard work,  there is nothing like looking at a woodshed full of split wood in the knowledge that that job is done for another year.  Time for a cuppa.

So why not come to Colislinn instead?

Imagine being in the garden at Colislinn on a sunny day.  This may not be easy as you are trying to forget London struggling to absorb the thousands of visitors to the Olympic Games, the underground, finding a seat on the busses…

In the garden at Colislinn all you can see is trees, hills and perhaps a little cloud.  All you can hear is the running water of the nearby river, the birdies singing and the woodpecker tapping away; the odd sheep bleating on the hills.  KWAM as they say.. (Ken wat A mean?)

Just choose for peace and quiet and go to: Reserve Online