Ask someone in a flat cap and waders how to enjoy the River Spey and they’ll tell you it’s one of Scotland’s finest salmon fishing rivers. Ask a shaggy-haired West Country boy with bulging biceps and a love of the outdoors, and he’ll tell you to pack a canoe with the bare essentials and go wild camping.

To say the two endeavours have co-existed blissfully on Scotland’s icy, peat-stained waterway, is to gloss over the occasional tiff. Salmon aren’t an easy catch – six empty nets in as many miles told me that – and it isn’t helped by the presence of canoes, especially those manned by a couple of amateurs.

My dad and I had tried to quietly slip past one chap, with a ‘don’t mind us’ kind of wave, but it was hard for him to ignore the 12-foot canoe run aground at his feet with two helpless, or should that be hapless, canoeists trying in vain to get into deeper water.

Without so much of a hint of exasperation, the fisherman dumped his rod on the bank and came to our aid.

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Shaggy-haired Dan, our guide, was more than a little mortified to find his morning of good PR - cheery hellos and a wide berth for every angler we’d passed - had been dashed by our inept paddling.

But he was soon laughing about it and we were on our way down the Spey. The river cuts through the Cairngorms National Park from the Highlands to the Moray of Firth.

We started where the ScotRail sleeper train left us in Aviemore. We’d woken at 7am to hulking mountain scenery flying past the window eight hours after falling asleep a few miles out of Euston.

Before hitting the river, there was time for an exceptional hearty breakfast at Aviemore’s Mountain Café, which deserves a medal for its foamy cappuccinos, let alone the divine homemade scones and huge bowl of porridge with berries, honey and nuts.

After the divine breakfast, Scotland was about to bust another stereotype – the sun was out.

So it was in the dappled autumn sunshine under the shade of birch trees that we set off down the Spey, a river as famous for its birdlife as its fish.

As Dan will tell you, buzzards are like pigeons in the Cairngorms, and then there are the herons that lurch into flight as you approach them, and the white-breasted Dippers that nod at you from rocks on the river’s edge.

It’s a twitcher’s dream, but spend too long looking skyward and you’ll come unstuck.

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