Colin McPherson's Three-Decade Portrait of Scotland's Vanishing Salmon Netters

In 2016, following scientific advice, the Scottish government placed a moratorium on the catching of wild Atlantic salmon by interceptory nets — a ban that looks set to continue indefinitely. Photographer Colin McPherson has spent roughly 30 years documenting the men whose livelihoods that decision ended. His work now appears in the book Catching the Tide: Salmon Net Fishing in Scotland, published by Dewi Lewis.

The project began modestly. McPherson started with a few photographs of a stake net being fished on the beach at St Cyrus in Aberdeenshire. It has since grown into an archive of around 1,000 edited images, plus film footage and interviews with fishers.

What did the industry look like at its height?

"It was once a thriving industry which employed thousands seasonally around the country's long and varied coastline, supplying wild Atlantic salmon to customers and clients at home and abroad," McPherson writes. For centuries, fishers used traditional methods to intercept the "king of fish" in estuaries, on beaches and in rivers as the fish returned each year to their native breeding grounds.

The practice of net and trap fishing dates back centuries. The laws dictating where, when and how the fish could be caught and sold were put in place in the 19th century. Over the following 100 years, tens of thousands of men — it has always been an almost exclusively male occupation — made a seasonal living at fishing stations in every coastal community.

"Netting stations were to be found in villages, towns and even cities on the coast, satisfying a demand for a premium product," McPherson said. "It was a way of fishing which was regulated in the early-1900s and remained unchanged for almost 150 years."

Why did the decline come?

By the mid-1990s, a complex mix of economic and environmental factors had put the industry in sharp decline. Salmon businesses and fishing stations were bought out and closed down to preserve stocks and protect lucrative angling interests. Cheap farmed fish, river pollution and climate change have all taken a toll.

The netsmen who kept working faced restrictions on the times they could fish. The 2016 moratorium then closed the trade outright for wild salmon, though it does not cover sea trout.

The images in the book carry the timeline. They show Simon Paterson and his son James fishing bag nets at the Strathy fishing station in Sutherland in 2007, and salmon netters harvesting sea trout from a bag net at Boddin Point, Angus, in 2025. Earlier frames include Jim Mitchell and Bob Ritchie fishing a "jumper" net in a hailstorm at Kinnaber, Angus, in 2000, and Ian Falconer steering a coble boat to empty bag nets off Boddin the same year.

One photograph from 2022 shows former fisher Sandy MacLachlan standing outside the bothy at the former netting station at Cuil Bay, Lochaber. MacLachlan owned and operated the station until it closed in 2018.

Who still fishes today?

Only a handful of people still exercise their historic right to fish. They include a group of haaf netters on the Solway Firth by the town of Annan in Dumfries and Galloway, where Tony Turner was photographed working his haaf net in 2000. For them, the fishing is a way of preserving a custom that dates back generations; one image from the book shows two fishers entering the Solway with haaf nets at Annan on the first day of the 2026 season.

Other stations survive only as pictures: fishers worked the Paxton House station on the river Tweed at Paxton, Berwickshire, in 2002; James Mackay set off in his coble at Armadale, Sutherland, in 2003; crews crossed Lunan Bay toward bag nets at Auchmithie in 2002; teams guided stakes into the foreshore at low tide to build fly nets at Boddin in 1998 and 2000.

What does this change for the record?

For McPherson, the project has been a race against time to document ways of fishing once woven into the fabric of coastal life in Scotland and now barely existing. Around 1,000 edited photographs, film and interviews now stand as the most complete visual account of a trade the 2016 moratorium effectively closed.