Ian Niall

FEW BOOKS remain in print for 50 years, but one which has is Ian Niall's The Poacher's Handbook, a classic of the countryside whose spare prose evokes the feeling of the land, especially at night, with magically slight, sure touches. The urge to poach, the author declares,

John Kincaid McNeillie (Ian Niall), writer: born Old Kilpatrick, Dunbartonshire 7 November 1916; married 1940 Sheila Hoyles (two sons, one daughter); died London 24 June 2002.

Few books remain in print for 50 years, but one which has is Ian Niall's The Poacher's Handbook, a classic of the countryside whose spare prose evokes the feeling of the land, especially at night, with magically slight, sure touches. The urge to poach, the author declares,

is old, old like the scent of peat smoke from the lonely cottage; the cairn on the hill; the flight of geese in late October. In the flat country of East Anglia a man rose at five today to take a pheasant, and last night, in Wiltshire, kindred spirits were running out the long net, stopping to recognise the yelp of the fox and the cry of the owl.

That book – part memoir, part instruction, part natural history, embellished with dark wood engravings by Barbara Greg – gripped my imagination as a boy, and has haunted me ever since; but it was many years before I discovered that Ian Niall was a pseudonym, and that the author's real name was John McNeillie.

He was born on Clydeside, the son of a shipyard worker, but during an outbreak of meningitis, which killed his younger sister, he was sent to live with his paternal grandparents on a farm in Galloway. It was there, working in an era before machinery replaced horses, that he learned old country ways, and he retained a soft Galloway accent for the rest of his life.

His first book, the novel Wigtown Ploughman: part of his life (1939), came out when he was only 22, and caused some scandal with its account of social injustices in south-west Scotland. His fourth novel, No Resting Place (1948), about a family of tinkers, was filmed in Co Wicklow with a cast of players from the Abbey Theatre and became a classic in Ireland, but never went on general release.

During the Second World War McNeillie moved to North Wales, where he lived first in Old Colwyn, then in a house perched on a shelf above Llandudno. His strip of land, at the foot of a sandstone cliff, boasted a long, Victorian conservatory, separate from the house, and in the garden he kept old English gamecocks. His wife Sheila, with whom he had a daughter and two sons, would have preferred to be closer to civilisation, but she always kept the house immaculate, with brass coal-scuttle and fender gleaming on the hearth.

When The Poacher's Handbook came out in 1950, it was recognised as a masterpiece of rural writing, and for the next 20 years Niall/McNeillie contributed regular country columns to the Spectator and Country Life. He also edited the monthly magazine Angling. Yet he remained reclusive and, even when his work was widely recognised, preferred to shelter behind his pseudonym and keep to the high ground.

Wiry, tough and bearded, a hard worker with a fierce temper, he looked like a shepherd or a hill farmer, and was described by one friend as "a delightful companion with a big depressive demon on his back". He liked people who got on and did things, and numbered several Welsh Nationalists among his friends.

His greatest love was trout-fishing: he tied his own flies, and insisted on using a model like a tiny black bottle-brush, which was effective against the brownies in the Welsh lakes, but not much use anywhere else. Fellow anglers regard his Trout from the Hills (1961) as one of the most beautiful fishing books ever written. This purported to be a memoir, but when, years later, a new publisher took him back to some of the tarns he had described, it became clear that he had created an idealised, semi-mythical landscape.

In all he wrote more than 40 books, including the memoir A Galloway Childhood (1967), and a biography of the outstanding bird artist Charles Tunnicliffe, Portrait of a Country Artist (1980).

For the last years of his life he and his wife moved to a house in the Chilterns. She was happy there, but he regarded the environment as suburban and, while he gloomily shot the grey squirrels which were damaging his trees, he hankered for the high hills of Wales.

Duff Hart-Davis