Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2020 i Shooting Gazette

With the season now in full swing, we thought we would give you some inspiration for what to do with the game you take home after a shoot day. This can be anything from birds in the feather to partridge pasties, and an increasing number of shoots are feeding Guns using birds taken from their own ground. It’s great to see this culinary revolution taking place. We’re speaking to a number of shooting foodies about their love of game and giving them a chance to share their go-to recipes this month. Our main shoot feature this month comes from Apley Park in Shropshire. This is an estate with a colourful backstory and its love of game is something many of our larger shoots should aspire to. Shooting’s harvest doesn’t magically…

A campaign aimed at increasing the level of interaction between parliamentarians and the shooting community has been launched by BASC. The BASC Parliamentary Campaign to Support Rural Britain has been billed as a ‘matchmaking service’ that will see BASC facilitating visits by MPs to shooting businesses and individuals connected to them within their constituencies, allowing them to see the economic, conservation and social benefits of sustainable shooting for themselves. The campaign, which has received cross-party support, follows on from last year’s birdbox project, which saw MPs putting up boxes in their constituencies. “BASC is bringing rural Britain to the gates of Westminster. We will be knocking on doors to ensure every MP understands the benefits that sustainable shooting provides economically, environmentally and socially,” said BASC's Jak Abrahams. BASC trade members…

Pheasant carbonara SERVES 4 PEOPLE PREP TIME: 10 minutes COOK TIME: 20 minutes Ingredients • 1 packet spaghetti• ltbsp olive oil• 1 garlic clove, halved• 2 pheasant breasts, cut into strips• lOOg bacon lardons• 2 eggs• lOOg Grana Padano, finely grated, plus extra to serve• 1 tbsp butter Method 1. Cook the spaghetti following packet instructions. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the garlic and bacon lardons until crisp. 2. Add the pheasant strips and fry briefly until they are just cooked through (pheasant is slightly pink compared to chicken). 3. Fish out the garlic clove and discard it. 4. Beat the eggs with the Grana Padano and some black pepper. 5. Add a couple of tablespoons of pasta water to the bacon pan along with…

THE exact location of my dream day - or, should I say, evening - is a secret and will remain so or it will cease to be my dream. Without going into geographical specifics, it would be on an October evening, standing knee deep in flood water on the banks of the River Severn with the sun setting through the willows. As the sky begins to bruise and the wind whistles past my barrels, the distant honking of greylags will grow louder as anticipation rises. Whilst my days as a Gun in the field so far may be limited, my memories of these days are truly cherished and I have had the pleasure to shoot alongside everyone in my dream team at some time or another. First up would be…

The late, great and much-missed Clarissa Dickson Wright cooked many a shooting lunch in her time and declared that such meals were very definitely a product of the Edwardians, crediting them for not only the rise of lavish shoot lunches, but also for general excessive behaviour when it came to enjoying the hospitality of game shooting friends. “The Edwardian house party,” she said, “must have made the best excesses of Sodom and Gomorrah seem tame by comparison – the excitement of corridor creeping; the heady possibility of the heir to the throne cheating at cards; the palpable tension between the sportsmen as the bags were tallied; the 14-course dinners… Clearly they were not going to be content with a stale sandwich – and neither was the greatest gourmet and keenest…

This is a bit like asking who invented the bicycle. The answer to this simple question is that we do not know. The humble percussion cap came into rapid universal use in the early 1820s, with a whole host of well-known gunmakers and sportsmen claiming to have invented it depending upon which book you read. It was always assumed that Joshua Shaw, born in Lincolnshire in 1776 and who emigrated to the US, was the original inventor in 1814. There is no doubt that he invented a copper cap and obtained an American patent for it, but he was one of many inventors and certainly not the first patentee. W W Greener in The Gun and its Development (1881) neatly summed up the situation: “In England, the inventors of the…

Q I am considering buying a labrador and my wife insists that I train it properly. I have not trained a dog before and need some advice on where to start. Can you help? A The first step is the motivation. People embark on training their dog for a great many reasons and I would suggest that you need to want to train it, as opposed to a family condition of getting it. Training a dog for whatever purpose needs quite a lot of time, effort and consistency and many people simply stop at the early stages. Those who truly enjoy it and immerse themselves in it are the ones who usually get the best from their dog and the partnership. It does, of course, depend on what you want…

The Hunter GTX Eva Extreme from Lowa is the boot of choice for Guns and keepers who demand strength and comfort when out in the field. Hand-crafted in Germany using the finest leather, SPS midsole technology and Vibram outsoles, these boots will look stylish and your feet will be well supported, while the Primaloft insulation and Gore-Tex waterproof lining will keep them warm and dry. For more information, visit lowa.co.uk. To win a pa ir, find the 11 words listed and send the completed entry form to: Wordsearch, Shooting Gazette, Future PLC, Pinehurst 2, Pinehurst Road, Farn borough GU14 7BF. Entries to arrive no later than 30 November. The first correct entry to be drawn will win. September's winner was A. Roberts from Wakefield. • Shooting Gazette. published by Future…

The Apley Park Estate, near Bridgnorth in Shropshire, sits in 8,500 acres of prime agricultural land and stunning parkland intersected by the River Severn. Apley Hall is home to Gavin Hamilton, Lord Hamilton of Dalzell, who is the fifth generation to own the estate. Gavin moved here with his family in 2006 when he inherited the title, but his ancestors very nearly didn’t end up at Apley at all. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were rumoured to be interested in buying the estate, but eventually decided against it because of the main road that ran through it and decided to purchase Sandringham in Norfolk instead. William Orme Foster, an ancestor to Gavin and whose family had made their fortune in ironworks and blast furnaces in Stourbridge, bought the estate instead…

Picking his way through the Hampshire countryside en route to the gathering point on the first day of the new season, The Back Gun’s passage was temporarily slowed by an encounter with an eclectic collection of swine, sheep and sundry bovines as they meandered about the place in search of nature’s hedgerow bounty. The home farm has its milking herd of Holsteins and rents land to a man with sheep. While demonstrably admirable in their provenance and conformation, they don’t quite match the value of Sportsmans Double Diamond, a six-month-old Texel ram lamb that sold recently at a world-record price of £367,500. As one of the horny-handed sons of toil leaning on the auction ring rail commented: “The boy has great legs, beautiful hair and cojones to die for”, all…

A bird in the hand may be better than two in the bush, but apparently there are some folk who are a bit flummoxed if the hand bird still has its feathers on. Well, say goodbye to feathered bird misery because I am going to tell you how to deal with the situation. Time was when no country show would have been without its pigeon plucking competition and you needed a time well under the minute mark to be in with a shout, let me tell you. Your pheasant is an altogether bigger undertaking, of course, but if you are something of a novice then a partridge is perhaps the place to begin. And specifically the back of a partridge. If you have never attempted this before, let me suggest…

One indefensible aspect of game shooting is that the end product has gone from a highly sought-after and valuable commodity to a near-valueless carcass. The very first gamekeepers were employed to provide and harvest food in the form of game, wildfowl, waders and coneys. They shot for the ‘big house’ and sold a surplus at the market. It was all about food production not sport. Traipsing around field, moor, stream and woods was most likely deemed too much like hard work for the landed gentry of the time. “The CFT provides meals to those in need, using the game we enjoy shooting. What better use for this healthy end-product?” Then the sport of shooting edible quarry became popular, fashionable even. Fortunes were spent and lost in hosting driven shooting for…

Q I have started to struggle with hitting two birds on the trot with a slight gap between them. I often kill the first bird and miss the second, is there anything I can do that will help? A You are clearly doing something right as you say you are often killing the first bird; we need to make sure you are replicating this performance on the second shot. The first thing I would probably look at is your timing; is the second shot being rushed due to you feeling under pressure? I often see people make a fantastic first shot where everything is cool, calm and collected, then throw all their timing out of the window on the second shot, which is either too early or way too late.…

No airs and graces here By Ben Samuelson When I was racing a TVR, a chap turned up who had won a title. He bought a brand-new racing car, a brand-new truck to transport it in and a brand-new race suit, helmet and even gloves. He made little secret of the fact that he expected to show us sleepy old Brits how to drive. Proving the existence of a benevolent deity, he crashed before even leaving the pit lane for the first time. I really, really don’t want to join the shooting equivalent of the “lots of money but aren’t really drivers” fraternity. You do sometimes see them. They only ever use Acme Stratospheric Pheasant cartridges, wrapped in goat skin and with each pellet laser-cut with their initials into its…

The Country Food Trust (CFT) has been appointed as the official Charity of the Game Fair for 2021. “The Game Fair team are delighted to focus our efforts and give The Country Food Trust an elevated fundraising platform both at the event and through our partnership activity over the coming year,” said The Game Fair managing director James Gower. “With ethical and sustainable food sourcing at the heart of The Game Fair, the synergies are numerous and The Game Fair’s audience and vast reach will undoubtedly be able to further the causes of the trust and help to raise funds.” Planning for the 2021 Game Fair has already started, with the partnership taking immediate effect. Later in the process fundraising streams will be put in place for The Game Fair,…

Watching our Prime Minister addressing the nation from his Downing Street bunker on the last day of September, flanked by men who have shaped Government's thinking on howto counter and suppress the coronavirus pandemic, two things were apparent. Boris may have been battered physically and mentally by the past six months and while there is no shortage of criticism from everyone with 20/20 hindsight, no one, but no one, including the pompous little man who leads the SNP in the Commons, has any more idea of what's going on and how to stop it than he does. Hence Sir Keir Starmer’s obsequious servility, whilst he and his fellow travellers of the centre-left breathe a collective sigh of relief that it’s not their responsibility. And if we thought that the Brexit…

Where did the idea for the journal come from? Four years ago I was publishing a foodie magazine, Talking Food, focusing on high-end hotel chefs. I was becoming increasingly frustrated and annoyed with Guns not taking game home with them at the end of the day and wanted to help put this right. I approached some of the larger UK shoots and explained that I was going to publish an annual journal for the season, featuring game recipes and related features. Many agreed to bulk buy copies for onward distribution to Guns. The response exceeded all expectations and we have now published our third edition. Hopefully it will inspire readers to cook and eat more game. How do you put a journal like this together? In our first edition we…

I have mentioned before in these pages that virtually all the meat my family and I eat is wild meat that has been shot by either me or friends and colleagues. I won’t bother you with rehashing the whys and wherefores that led to this, but suffice it to say game meat, and I am including that epicurean delight woodpigeon in that list, is important to me. But, of course, it should be to everyone who shoots. I am not insisting you do what I do or even that you eat game at all, though I think you should. I had a fishing friend who loved to fish but loathed them on a plate, which was lucky for his friends, I suppose. But all who shoot must realise the importance…

To be honest, I have never counted them, but I think that if we were to round up all of the books in our house and stack them according to subject, towering above the others, and considerably heavier, would be books on shooting and cooking. Some would be nestling between the two towers, as they could be in both. If I had to put money on it, I suspect that the shooting books would win, just. Eating is the completion of the cycle. It is entirely fitting that after a day out with dog and gun, we should sit and, aided by a supportive glass, celebrate the whole symphony that is the shooting day, from the first eager baton tap as actions close on cartridges to the reluctant finale of…

On 10 November 1821, William Westley Richards took out patent no 4611 for a self-priming percussion lock. When Alexander Forsyth introduced the percussion system in 1807, there were several attempts at inventing better ways of detonating percussion compound to ignite the main charge. Many were downright dangerous as the percussion compound was volatile and highly explosive. The answer eventually proved to be the ubiquitous copper cap developed in the early 1820s. Before the copper cap became universal, William Westley Richards patented a self-priming percussion lock in 1821. This had a magazine for either loose powder fulminate or pellets of the compound. When the magazine was placed on the pan, a little handle was turned to release a pellet. When the gun was fired and the hammer fell, a rocking lever…

Back in the good old days growing up in the 1970s in rural Devon, I could often be found walking-up the hedgerows looking for rabbits, pigeons or pheasants with my old English side-by-side. Fast forward to the second half of the 1980s and I had developed a competitive streak and got into clay shooting, starting with the English clay disciplines. The first gun I obtained was a Beretta 686 sporter followed closely by a 686 trap gun. An interest in shooting woodcock and snipe from Cornwall to Scotland resulted in the purchase of a 687 20-bore, which enabled a pocket full of cartridges to go further. These three guns served me without fault for many years, and even after two and a half decades the 20-bore is in perfect condition.…

When Porsche decided to make an electric car, you would imagine that it would be quite serious about it. And you’d be right. While others have settled for simply taking out the internal combustion engine and shoving a few batteries and cables in the hole left behind, Porsche started with a clean sheet of paper. The Taycan is a completely new car from the ground up, and it is unlike anything else that I have ever driven. First, even though this is the entry-level Taycan, and as such is some £50,000 less than the range-topping Turbo S model, it hits 100mph in 8.5 seconds, which not so long ago was a pretty respectable time for a car to hit 60mph. Like all electric cars, there is no delay between flexing…

1. HURRICANE COTTON FIELD COAT BY CORDINGS £750 cordings.co.uk A British-made coat with an impressive list of features, from a self-lined, shaped hood with “cap brim”, throat tab fastening and studded poacher’s pocket to internal hand warmers and internal recoil pads, you’ll be protected whether your gun is in the air or you’re taking in the scenery between drives. Yes it’s this month’s most expensive item, but you know what they say about investing in quality. 2. LINED TWEED BREEKS IN GREEN COVERT BY FARLOWS £195.99 farlows.co.uk The iconic London brand’s latest breeks feature its new, hard-wearing covert cloth. Apparently, the breeks — made in the UK using Scottish wool — are one of the most robust Farlows has ever created. The cloth is cut longer to allow for greater…