Why "Keep It Wild" Is the Whole Point

There is a word for a salmon that has come back. A river with a run is a living river; a river without one is just water going downhill in a hurry. For most of the history of the west of Ireland the distinction did not need explaining, because the fish were simply there, in the Erriff and the Moy and the Bundorragha, in numbers that made a season and a livelihood and a way of marking the year.

They are not simply there any more. Where something like 1.76 million wild salmon returned to Irish rivers in the middle of the last century, the count now runs in the low hundreds of thousands, and only three or four fish in a hundred survive the sea to come home at all. That is not a bad year. That is a different world, arrived inside a single lifetime.

We could farm our way around the shortage. The supermarket chiller is full of salmon, and it is cheap, and it is the reason a great many people have never tasted the other thing at all. But a farmed fish and a wild one are the same animal only in the way a caged bird and a curlew are the same animal. The wild salmon is the whole system: the gravel it was spawned in, the river it learned, the two thousand miles of ocean it crossed and recrossed, the miracle of it finding the exact pool it started from. You cannot buy that. You can only keep it, or fail to.

That is what this place is for. Every day we run, every fish we return, every euro that a supported guest never has to find, it all points at the same small, stubborn idea: that a wild fish in a wild river is worth protecting, and that the protecting is not somebody else’s job. Keep it wild. It turns out to be the whole point.