Torbol Salmon Ladder - 'The Salmon Rivers of Scotland'
Extract from 'The Salmon Rivers of Scotland' providing a good description of the Torbol salmon ladder. "A further feature of the Fleet is the remarkable salmon ladder at Torbol, on the Carnach, a tributary on which there is a series of falls some sixty feet in height, up which the fish have been successfuly taken. The late Mr Bateson of Cambusmore - which is at present rented by Mr Laurence Hardy MP - was I believe the inventor of this, the first fish-pass (about 1864) that took fish up such a very formidable obstruction. The total length of the pass, which cost £600, is three hundred and seventy-eight yards, the first one hundred and forty of which are very steep up which the fish are taken by the ingenious principle of a ladder within a ladder, which provides two sets of pools, a large and a maller, in the breadth of the ladder, a large one on the right hand side with the small one on the left. In the step below the order is reversed, and the fish is thus enabled to pass alternately from shallow to deep and vice versa. At the head of the ladder a sluice regulates the water flow, admitting only what is required for the passage of the fish. Salmon, grilse and sea trout ascended in fair numbers and the waters above the fall soon became stocked and yielded sport to the rod."
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