"Have you had any pollan in the last few years?" asked a Belfast friend. Pollan is a fish that comes from Lough Neagh and is often described, for example by Estyn Evans in Irish Folk Ways, as "a freshwater herring peculiar to some Irish and Scottish lakes". Our friend from Belfast remembers the days when, in season, the fish would be brought around from door to door in carts, and fishmongers stocked it.
Over the years, he remembers, they diminished in size. Now they are, it seems, not to be had through normal commercial channels. A phone call to a Belfast fish shop the other day brought the answer that they had not seen pollan for years. Had it disappeared entirely or been fished out? He thought that perhaps no one found it worthwhile to bother going after it. An illustrated book on fresh- and sea-water fish tells us that the pollan, coregonus albula, "7 to 12 inches", is found in deep lakes in northern Europe and on the coasts of the Eastern Baltic, and is also artificially introduced into large reservoirs. Its correct name is vendace and it occurs in the Lake District of England and in Scotland and Ireland, where, the book goes on, "it is known as pollan".
The illustration shows a fine silvery fish, slightly pinkish on its underparts. A friend says he thinks he has eaten this fish in a hotel on Lake Annecy in France in the Haute Savoie but does not remember if it was claimed to be from the lake itself or was imported. Not a fish to make a great fuss about, you may say. You might find that it was once much eaten in the North not only for reasons of local pride, but because it was also not too dear.
Just to indicate past glories: there was a public enquiry into algal discolouration of the waters of Lough Neagh in 1924, a year in which only 14 tons of pollan were caught "compared to 447 tons in 1900". (This from a book On Lough Neagh's Shores by Daniel J. Donnelly.) Seamus Heaney would know about the pollan. Maybe he has it in a poem. Anyone remember?