It is used when someone manages in one day to kill a red deer stag, catch a salmon and shoot a brace of grouse – although wild goats and trout and other ‘achievements’ of a less notable nature are often substituted.

However exciting these may be for today’s participants they are a pale imitation of the original plot first enacted in Inverness-shire more than a century ago which became the source of the best known of all Highland deer stalking and salmon fishing novels.

It all began at a dinner held in Inverness in the summer of 1897 by the officers of the Militia Battalion of The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders when one of the company, Lt James Brander-Dunbar of Pitgaveny, near Elgin, announced, somewhat provocatively, that as he had not been invited to stalk anywhere that year he would be reduced to poaching and laid a £20 bet that he could kill a stag undetected on any forest in Scotland. A fellow officer, Captain James, 4th Lord Abinger, owner of the 80,000 acre Inverlochy Castle Estate near Fort William, immediately took up the challenge.

James Brander-Dunbar was no ordinary mortal. Born in 1875 he became a legend in his own long lifetime (he died in 1969 aged 94) as a traveller, soldier, forester, sportsman and laird and, of particular relevance to the tale of ‘John Macnab’, an inveterate deer poacher. For his foray into Lochaber he enlisted the help of Col William MacDonald, another brother officer whose family owned the famous ‘Dew of Ben Nevis’ whisky distillery but, more important, lived at Keppoch House near Spean Bridge on the very boundary of Lord Abinger’s estate.

Brander-Dunbar’s escapade almost failed before it began when Lady Middleton, wife

SEE OCTOBER EDITION OF SCOTTISH FIELD TO READ FULL STORY

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