I was fortunate to grow up shooting driven pheasants and partridges in the UK from a young age and it still forms an important part of my season. Over the years, I’ve been lucky to add an annual trip to the moors for grouse to the calendar and, more recently, started sharing a day of snipe and woodcock shooting in Cornwall with friends.
For me, driven shooting is a more of a social activity rather than “hunting”. When I want solitude and the challenge of pitting my wits & skill against a wild animal, I pick up a rifle and go stalking for deer.
Driven shooting is about being part of a team of guns, beaters, flankers, stops, pickers-up, loaders, the old boy driving the guns bus, the dogs, and the host of others from all backgrounds and walks of life that make the day what it is. It’s wiping your neighbour’s eye (killing a bird that he’s missed; even better if you can land it at his feet) and never letting him forget it, it’s sloe gin and sausages and scotch eggs and cigars at elevenses, it’s the smell of damp tweed and damp spaniels in the gun bus, it’s hearing the ‘keeper “encouraging” the beaters to keep in a straight line with language you haven’t heard since you left the military, it’s tipping your hat to a bird that comes through the line low and leaving one who will make a more sporting shot for your neighbour, it’s scrambling to find an ATM (a rare and vanishing thing in the UK these days) on the drive to the estate in the morning to get some cash so that you can do the weird handshake thing with the ‘keeper at the end of the day to show your appreciation. In short, it’s special and it’s weird but I wouldn’t change it for the world. And, if you ever get a chance to experience it, I’d encourage you to jump at it.
If you are looking for wild birds and more of a hunting experience but still with the social aspect and without selling a kidney to get on a commercial grouse moor, I can highly recommend driven woodcock and snipe shooting. It’s concentrated in the west of the UK from Scotland down to the tip of Cornwall. In January, I’ll be returning to the Arundell Arms on the Devon / Cornwall border with 8 friends for a weekend where we’ll be out from dawn until dusk and be lucky if we shoot one or two birds each. We’ll deliver the bag to the kitchen when we get back to the pub and they’ll turn them in to canapés that we’ll eat in an 18th century cock fighting pit while we clean our guns and drink room temperature beer. Special and weird in equal measure!
Happy to put anyone who’s keen in touch or else chat through what to expect / common pitfalls to avoid and so on.
