page_title: Megan Boyd
section_title: Fly tyer
hierarchical_section_title: Megan Boyd / Fly tyer
caption_attribution_description: English: The former cottage of Megan Boyd (1915-2001), an award-winning Scottish fly tyer. The cottage is in Kintradwell, near Brora, Scotland.
context_page_description: Rosina Megan Boyd was a British fly tyer most noted for her Atlantic salmon flies. She lived most of her adult life in a small cottage in Kintradwell, near Brora, Scotland. She was awarded the British Empire Medal in 1971.
context_section_description: At the age of 12, Megan began taking fly tying lessons from Bob Trussler, another river keeper on the estate. Trussler's tutelage went on for many years with emphasis on precision and quality. Boyd also relied on two classic salmon fly publications for tying instructions and pattern recipes.  She considered How To Dress Salmon Flies-A Handbook for Amateurs (1914) by T. E. Pryce-Tannatt as her "bible". She also relied on Kelson's The Salmon Fly (1895) for pattern advice. Her first paying fly tying work came when a Sir Charles Clauson requested she convert more than a dozen gut-eyed salmon flies onto the more modern eyed hooks or "irons". After seeing her work, local salmon anglers began asking Megan to tie flies for them and her reputation began to grow. Megan made her reputation by tying classic and traditional flies such as the Jock Scott, Silver Doctor, Durham Ranger and Wilkinson. She always claimed she tied flies for anglers and resisted tying for commercial fly houses. Her flies were extraordinarily durable and lasted many seasons.  Over the course of her 65-year tying career, some estimate she tied tens of thousands of salmon flies.  Yet despite the huge numbers of salmon that could not resist her flies, she never fished herself.
  Now to disappoint all my customers, I do not fish, have no interest in fishing, and cannot even tie a fly to a cast.
  — Attributed to Megan Boyd in The Women of a Graceful Rise
  In 1935, at the age of twenty, Boyd left her family home and moved into a small cottage at Kintradwell overlooking the North Sea just north of Brora. The cottage was built from second hand materials in 1906 and did not have electricity or running water until the 1980s. She set up a small, kidney-shaped fly tying desk in a potting shed next to the cottage where she routinely worked 14-hour days tying flies to fill orders. Visiting anglers from around the world who came to fish the Rivers Brora and Helmsdale for salmon would stop by her cottage to watch her tie flies and place orders. If she was not at home, she left a small notepad and pencil under her doormat for visitors to write down their orders.
  Boyd for the most part tied traditional patterns, but is credited with one of her own invention – The Megan Boyd – which proved to be a very effective low water pattern in the Scottish Highlands.
caption: Boyd's cottage as it looked in 2012, in disrepair.
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