Hooked by a great book

Annual preparations are well under way for those anxious to take to the rivers and streams, lakes and pools of Ireland in pursuit of increasingly elusive salmon and trout. Purists, skilled veterans, happy amateurs and willing converts to the river-banks alike will be well-prepared for the season by enjoying probably the finest book on Irish sea-trout fishing, T.C. Kingsmill Moore's A Man May Fish. First published in 1960, revised and re-issued 19 years later, Kingsmill Moore's stylish memoir is as graceful and assured as was his approach to the art of fishing. Having discovered this book in a stone cottage in Connemara not far from the spot where I had memorably hooked my hand and leg as well as one of our dog's ears, I can honestly say that once read, A Man May Fish is never forgotten. It has made anglers of the most unlikely people. Through him, fishing by night acquires mystery and romance. It is a vivid account of a life enjoyed fishing, indeed a life lived through fishing and the special awareness and sensitivity to nature it develops. Theodore Conyngham Kingsmill Moore (1893-1979), a distinguished barrister, judge of the Supreme Court and onetime war correspondent of The Irish Times, fished 32 Irish lakes and 36 Irish rivers. He was meticulous, innovative and patient, without being passive. But alongside the memories and Connemara anecdotes, as well as the extraordinary knowledge and detailed analysis of various flies (including The Kingsmill), is a cautionary regret on the declining quality of Irish waters. As long ago as 1979, when writing, at the age of 85, his preface to the second edition, he acknowledged: "fishing has changed sadly during the 70 years of an angling life". Apart from pointing to the increasing costs and new aura of elitism tracking first-class fishing, he notes "stretches of brown trout rivers have been ruined by pollution" and laments the extent of drift net fishing with nylon nets, threatening the extinction of salmon. He points out that "even white trout are only half as numerous as they were".

His chapter "Why Do Fish Take?" confronts an issue so many non-anglers, and even some anglers, take for granted, the motivation of the fish itself. Kingsmill Moore was a master angler for many reasons, not least because he respected the intelligence and curiosity of his prey. He disputes the notion that a fish only takes something into its mouth to eat it. Its mouth, he argues, "is the only available organ for attack, defence or exploration". Elsewhere, he notes a fish which takes from curiosity usually takes quietly, for "he is exploring rather than killing".

Experts can often overwhelm the amateur with knowledge, but even at its most scientific, A Man May Fish remains a visionary, even poetic tract. Who could resist a fisherman who describes brown trout as the little fish, "these page-boys of the hills".

He sees them as playing an important part in an angler's education. "I never met a really competent fisherman who had not learned his rudiments at the fins of little trout . . . these mountainy urchins teach the things which cannot be learned from books yet are fundamental to all good fishing - observation, alertness, delicacy, and unconscious co-ordination of hand and eye, mind and muscle."

A Man May Fish is not a long parade of great catches. There is so much more to this gentlemanly Edwardian book than fisherman's boasts - many fish got away. [ He celebrates the lakes (many of them in Connemara), particularly the Corrib, presided over by the genius of Jamesie - a boatman without equal who had an understanding of every inch of the lake as it stretches west to the foot of the Maumturks.

The judge recalls Clogher as a lake that "can be as dour as a Calvinist minister" but "it gave me great sport". It comes as no surprise when he declares: "if a friendly millionaire were to offer me any white trout lake in Connemara I would choose Clogher."

His time at Delphi Lodge - when it was under the stewardship of Alec, a man who possessed a "mind like a bran dip, you could not guess what would come out next", and who was also an authority on Elizabethan mathematics - seems close to companionable paradise. There is also mention of the "classic, oft-repeated, never, as far as I have observed, conclusive, combat between a peregrine and a heron".

As a young student, Kingsmill Moore centred his fishing for four years at a big house on the shore of Lough Melvin, Co Leitrim. At the time, a way of life was coming to an end. "I was too young to recognise the significance of these changes . . . then at one stride came disaster. Father and then mother [his friend's parents] were dead; the son [his friend], always delicate, became incurably ill. The Big House had fallen. Another old Irish family had come to an end. Of the Big House itself only a few ruins now remain." Kingsmill Moore praised the great Izaak Walton (15931683), author of The Compleat Angler, the definitive discourse on fishing, for his approach as much as for his skill. The same could be said of this civilised Irish fisherman who deferred to nature and believed that "timelessness is all".

A Man May Fish, by T.C. Kingsmill Moore in the edition published by Colin Smythe, 1979, is available on order from most bookshops. This classic is also due a re-issue.