“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.