look Leven-type to me, but they're just as likely to be grown-on descendants of the wildies which lived in the burn when the Victorians dammed it to make a scenic vista for the big old house on the hill.
Like most early-season Scottish brownies, these will slash at anything small, black and midgy - or maybe they won't. Maybe they'll only hit a moving midge - or maybe they'll hit you static and run so fast you'll never know where they came from.
But when they do connect, you've got a fight on your hands, and even eight inches of angry little lochan trout can make you wish you'd taken that casting knot out of your tippet, despite the sleet in the wind and the way that you can't feel your fingers any more.
Later on, they'll turn selective, too. The lochan is full of life, and the trout seem to know it: the weedy depths are crawling with caddis, and the surface can sometimes boil with risers that won't look at an artificial fly. One summer holiday, determined to outwit them, I spent half a night drifting across the lochan like Thoreau across Walden Pond, casting into warm foggy blackness that could have been air or water, and was truly a mixture of both,
"...communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below... now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind".
Because this lochan also hides bigger fish.
You don't connect with them often, but they're in there: the 13-incher that bashed a buzzer flung deep under the eaves of the sagging Victorian boathouse, Patrick finessing the oars as I leaned far out for the side-cast; the big slab we all saw roll on a sedge by the summer-house island; and just last spring the unseen monster that rose so sweetly to a little black Bibio, cruised in a single contemplative six-foot circle, then put pedal to the metal and burned for the horizon and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable smash.
This year, the ice will come later, and the lochan is still a dull grey plate of pewter under a low sky, cracked with a trio of slowly-swimming swans. This year, too, Patrick and Alexandra will move south, swapping Scottish stanks for Wiltshire chalkstreams before the season opens, and someone else will come to discover the lochan's secrets.
Stillwater fishing's not usually my style, but over the seasons this little disc of water, its trout, and its moods have slid a hook under my skin.
Like Thoreau again, "these experiences are very valuable and memorable to me". Maybe I'll have to send someone a bottle of something strong...
