Description

Henry Newland (1804-1860), Rector and Vicar of Westbourne, spent his summers on the Erne and wrote this book in the manner of its best Victorian kind: half angling manual, half travel narrative, and throughout a collection of the stories told on the river.He follows the Erne from Belleek down to the sea — the Falls of Ballyshannon, Lough Derg, the upper rapids — and treats in turn the water, the fish, the flies that take them and the people who live by them. The ichthyography of the Erne sits beside the legend of the Fairy Fly; a chapter on a well-spent Sunday beside one on the breaking up of the party. It is one of the earliest books to describe Irish salmon fishing from the inside, and it remains a source for the folklore of Donegal and Fermanagh.This reprint is a complete facsimile of the first edition (London, Chapman and Hall, 193 Piccadilly, 1851), reproduced from the copy digitised at 600 ppi: the engraved frontispiece of artificial flies, the engraved title, the woodcuts in the text and the printer’s imprint of G. Barclay. The page is reproduced by image, without resetting the type, at the size of the original leaf (104 x 161 mm).