“This is the one place I can absolutely lose myself, out here on the river, with my fishing rod. It’s a little piece of heaven,” says Tim Radford, 63, whose memories of idyllic childhood holidays spent fishing on the Benmore Estate on the west coast of Mull led him to buy the 32,000-acre estate in 2003 and run it as a commercial enterprise.
Guests who rent out the estate’s main property, Knock House, for up to £25,000 a week, invariably share Radford’s piscatorial passion. The estate offers the chance to fish for salmon on the rivers Ba and Forsa, trout on the estate’s lochs and mackerel and lobster in the sea.
Right now, though, Radford — who was able to buy Benmore after selling his telecommunications business to Vodafone in 2003 for £162mn, and now splits his time between Mull and his farm in Lincolnshire — has his focus on his rivers to monitor the start of the salmon run in late June. “I’ve installed tech on my computer so I can see if we’ve had salmon in that morning or the previous night. I can count them and view every fish,” he says.
“It still makes my skin tingle every time when I see the new brood coming in,” he says of the moment, around the time of the full moon, when the salmon swim en masse upstream from the sea to the rivers to spawn. “My father was a fishing nut and I inherited my passion from him.”
Passion is a word that crops up frequently in this niche market in which only a few fishing estates sell each year, often off-market, and pure salmon estates almost never come to market.
The simplest option for fishing-driven property buyers is to opt for a beat — a stretch of river where you own fishing rights, which can range from a few hundred metres to several miles long and cost from around £30,000 to millions of pounds.
“We value beats on the capital value per salmon, which is all linked to the five and 10-year catch record. That value might be £5,000-£8,000 per fish, so if the beat’s average catch is 200 fish, it will cost £1mn-£1.6mn,” says Tom Stewart-Moore, Knight Frank’s head of rural agency for Scotland.
Most buyers begin their search on the Big Four rivers — the Tay, Spey, Dee and Tweed. As Scotland’s largest salmon fishing rivers, they are also among the most prolific when it comes to numbers of sea trout — and “wild brown trout fishing isn’t to be sniffed at: it’s very popular, less expensive, and there are plenty of often more remote trout lochs and small rivers where you can fish,” says Stewart-Moore, “but when it comes to the most prestigious and valuable beats, it’s all about salmon.”
The most sought-after beats — based on proximity to the sea and, hence, number of salmon — include the Junction Pool on the river Tweed, where anglers will pay up to £1,400 a day to fish — “even though it’s pretty much all about catch and release now. You no longer keep the fish,” says Stewart-Moore. The Park beat on the river Dee is desirable as, unusually, it fishes well in both high and low water due to its range of pools. On the mighty 117-mile-long Tay, the stretch closest to Perth is home to the best beats, including Islamouth, at the junction of the river Isla, where British banker David Mayhew, who was chair of JPMorgan Cazenove until 2012, co-owns Islamouth Fishings with Sir Alan Parker, chair of Brunswick, a public relations group.
“My love of fishing was born of early experience when I was introduced to it by my grandfather in 1953 and caught a spring salmon, much to his surprise. I was fortunate to be invited to fish on Islamouth in the 1980s and as I favour summer fishing, wading the streamy water was pretty magical,” recalls Mayhew, 84, who bought the first bank of his beat in 2000 and the opposite bank 10 years later. “Fishing for trout and salmon is a wonderfully absorbing sport done in beautiful places. While the fishing demands concentration, the wildlife on rivers is always fascinating and fun.”
Some prefer “more intimate” salmon rivers such as the fast-flowing Halladale in the Highlands, whose smaller volumes of water are easier for less experienced anglers to handle, says George Goldsmith, whose Edinburgh-based agency rents out the Benmore Estate and other fishing properties, mainly to holidaymakers from the UK, Scandinavia and the US. Helmsdale, another salmon-rich smaller river, whose beats are owned by six estates, comes with the added prestige of royal connections; both King Charles and the late Queen Mother have fished there.
“There are opportunities to buy beats all over and most have a fishing hut,” says Murdo Nicoll from Strutt & Parker’s estates and farms agency team. Most buyers still want a beat purely for traditional fishing, he says, “to entertain friends, family and clients in the same way that somebody would use a substantial country house or a boat. They will use their beat as a commercial enterprise but still enjoy it for themselves when they are able to.”
He is also seeing increasing numbers of high-net-worth buyers wanting beats “with eco or tourism aspects, be that woodland or the opportunity to develop the property into yurts”.
The difficult part is finding a beat that comes with a residential property or development opportunity on the same spot, adds Nicoll, who is marketing the four-bedroom Boatlands House with a beat on the Tay — one of Europe’s most prolific rivers for salmon — for offers over £1.25mn.
Last year, he sold a Scandinavian-style six-bedroom fishing lodge overlooking a beat on the Dee for “well in excess” of the £800,000 guide price, due to competing bids from several buyers. Although the rural Scottish market has long been popular with US buyers, particularly when there is a house of historical or architectural importance on the land, Scottish fishing beats appeal far more to European buyers. In the case of the sale in 2023, however, “all were domestic buyers — wealthy, successful businessmen who enjoy the escape of standing in the river for a bit of peace and quiet,” says Nicoll. “The position, views and property with the beat made it unique, and this stretch is severely underfished, so that was a big draw.”
Given the scarcity of fishing estates and beats for sale, an alternative and more affordable form of ownership is to buy a “rod” in a syndicate, which is like owning a timeshare. “It gives you the right to fish on a certain stretch for certain weeks of the year, and you can let those weeks to support upkeep costs,” says Luke French, director of Savills rural agency in Edinburgh. The portal FishPal lists various rods for sale, including prime salmon fishing rights on the Tweed in perpetuity from £10,000 for a week in spring, summer and autumn.
Among fishing estates, last year Knight Frank sold the Glassburn Estate, 26 miles south-west of Inverness, which came with a six-bedroom house on nearly 400 acres with salmon and trout fishing on the river Glass, for offers over £1.75mn.
“Owning a Scottish estate isn’t about making a big profit. People buy them because they absolutely love Scotland and they love fishing. Weekly rentals help with running costs and some owners are installing wind farms or hydro schemes on their land,” says Goldsmith.
Passion alone can’t run a huge Scottish fishing estate. Tim Radford employs 31 people, including guides, gillies, skippers and housekeepers, and has spent the past 20 years, he says, “investing significantly in it, trying to make it into a commercial project that I can leave for the next generation to run sustainably”.
Besides the rental income from Knock House — which was extended by Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, in the 1870s — Benmore has red deer stalking, a farm shop, café and a salmon hatchery, “to breed the next generation”, Radford explains. “The only way my kids can look at this as a long-term asset is if it’s profitable — and it is.”
Similarly profit-minded buyers will look at the fishing estate’s “catch records”, says French, “so you know you will have enough fish to catch — though this has been quite challenging recently across the country”.
The second priority for buyers is “a spectacular backdrop — whether it’s the lowland plains around rivers such as the Tweed in south-east Scotland or the rugged Highland glens around rivers such as the Helmsdale,” says French. And third, buyers want to know how well the fishing beat is maintained, “with well-tended banks, not too many low-hanging branches, a well-equipped fishing hut and a specific right to vehicular access”.
Scotland’s salmon and sea trout numbers are the lowest they have been in decades, due to industrial fishing and climate change. “This year, Atlantic salmon have been added to the list of endangered species, which reflects the grave conditions for wild fish,” says Mayhew, who since retiring from banking has created the Missing Salmon Alliance, to track and help save wild Atlantic salmon.
Given the vicissitudes of nature, it means that investing in a fishing estate is, for most, a heart over head acquisition. “It’s a discretionary purchase — it’s not like buying a house to be near a good prep school. You just can’t get a guaranteed result with fishing properties,” says buying agent Tom Hudson at Middleton Advisors.
“Go to Iceland or Russia if you simply want to catch lots of salmon. A Scottish estate is a way-of-life hobby, spending time in nature, and most buyers are happy to do their bit to work with nature to make it better, by improving the river banks and working with better keepers. Buying a fishing property is like buying a doer-upper,” Hudson adds.
Nicoll says that buyers’ choice of location is rarely based on fish numbers and rather “far more to do with scenery. If you’re going to be standing in the same spot for hours, make it somewhere beautiful”.
Those looking to make some money by renting out their beats or fishing properties can bank on a long season — “from mid-January for the hardcore, until mid-October”, says Goldsmith. And it’s getting longer, says Radford. The salmon run relies on abundant rain and the Benmore Estate sees an average of 11ft of rain a year. “There’s nothing between us and America and we sit beneath a mountain,” Radford says.
Climate change is taking its toll, though, with more intense periods of rain followed by prolonged drought in summer. “We never had that in the past and it’s very challenging as it stops the salmon from running to the smaller rivers. Instead, they congregate in the sea lochs waiting for the rain and are exposed to predators such as dolphins and seals,” says Radford.
Scotland’s weather may be changing and its fish numbers dwindling, but it takes more than that to deter ardent anglers. “People come to Scotland for the whole package. It’s not just about the fishing,” says Goldsmith. “It starts with a sizzling breakfast, then out with the gillie, dressed in tweeds, for a full day outdoors, and home for a hot bath and a glass of whisky.” There is the romance of the Scottish wilderness in a nutshell.
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