Jonathan Young - Bagging a Macnab: the ultimate and very affordable challenge [6 min listen]

Voices of the Countryside

The classic Macnab - salmon, stag and grouse - may be costly but try one of the variants and the experience will never be forgotten

What would be your choice for Desert Island Discs? I pondered on this while the Sealyhams worked a brash pile for a rat. Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plane Pour Moi definitely, along with Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen if the BBC allowed it (unlikely). Then the sound of curlew in winter. And next, the scream of my old Sharpe's of Aberdeen trout reel.

The old girl was built almost 30 years ago and she was giving her banshee wail yesterday as the line ripped out attached to a very cross rainbow fooled by a home-tied Shuttlecock Emerger. In he came, the priest delivered the last rites and it was time for a cuppa, at which point one of my fellow Rods noticed the engraving on the reel’s side: Macnab Challenge 1998.

“So, what did you start with?”, he asked. “The salmon, the stag or the grouse?”

“Actually, it was none of those,” I replied. “It was a goose.”