Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2017 i The Field

“The point of the elaborate Regency picnic described in Emmawas to enjoy the view” PICNICKING is one of the most British of pastimes. Ratty’s phenomenal repast for his boat trip, described in Kenneth Grahame’s The Window in the Willows (1908), readily evokes the easy leisure associated with the Edwardian devotion to pleasure. Mole asks Ratty about the large wicker basket that he heaves aboard his rowing boat. “There’s cold chicken inside it,” replies Ratty, “coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater–.” In Grahame’s immortal scene, the content of the picnic hamper has become one delicious mouthful in itself. That little scene catches something of the British spirit. The Edwardians seized any excuse to bundle out into the country and frolic in fields and rivers, nude bathing and drinking champagne in meadows at dawn. They revelled in…

1 POLO BELT CHUKKA BELTS Slightly stretchy weave allows for a tight or loose fit. Comes in an array of colours. Choose one of each. Spanish, smart. • Price£18 • Tel07511 221867 • www.chukkabelts.co.uk • Stand Country Living Stand B229a 2 CHILGROVE GUNSLIP FUR FEATHER & FIN Fleece-lined leather with teal piping and stitching. Matching cartridge bag and licence holder. • Price £189 • Tel 01243 811844 • www.furfeatherandfin.com • Stand E679 3 OAKHAM FLEECE GILET SCHOFFEL Three new colours to collect at Hatfield: plum, mink heather and espresso. Excellent shooting layer. • Price £140 • Tel 01432 377089 • www.philipmorrisdirect.co.uk • Stand J1397 4 GLANMIRE BOOT DUBARRY Internal Gore-Tex stretch membrane and external Lycra panel gives room for a variety of calf shapes. Distinctive lacing, available in black/brown or walnut. • Price £379 • Tel 01608 677622 • www.dubarry.com • Stand C378 5 ROBINSON HUNTING…

THE FIELD KITCHEN THEATRE The Field is delighted to be sponsoring The Field Kitchen Theatre at The Game Fair this year. The sporting world is inextricably linked to what we eat and how we eat it. Field readers want to know the provenance of their food and The Field Kitchen Theatre will present a superb opportunity to watch and interact with like-minded chefs, who are just as keen to show how food gets from field to fork and suggest the best and most delicious ways to do so. Game Fair regulars Mike Robinson, Jose Souto and Rachel Green will demonstrate every day, with some new and familiar faces, including Tim Maddams. “There is no other event like it,” says Jose Souto, who will be preparing and cooking a whole boar…

Creating new areas of woodland represents a lasting and significant contribution to the landscape. A new plantation not only enhances already existing habitats, but a good scheme will benefit other wildlife and game birds too. Many game birds need cover at ground level for both nesting and shelter. Redleg partridges particularly rely on shrubby cover because they lay their eggs on the ground. Similarly, fruiting trees such as hawthorn provide food as well as habitat for game birds. Not only this, but by planting trees on your land you can save money on energy bills by harvesting your own wood for fuel and selling the timber locally, as well as creating a beautiful green space for the enjoyment of generations to come. HOW TREES WORK FOR YOUR SHOOT By planting…

Rowing is becoming one of our best-loved amateur sports, with a quarter of a million people rowing at least once a month. This has been buoyed up by the success of the GB Olympic crews in 2012 and 2016, as well as the annual glamour of the heroic Oxford versus Cambridge Boat Race on the Thames. One of the glories of amateur rowing lies in its openness to new recruits, so rowing competes with speed cycling as a sport that people can take up and enjoy in mid-life. More than that, rowing is also, for many, in effect a country sport. Most (although not all) crews row out from clubs in towns and cities and make their way along rivers and canals into open country, often at first light, through…

“I liked the feel of the new William Evans from the start. Heavy, long-barrelled and well ribbed, I anticipated it would break clays well. It did.” THE gun tested this month is a new William Evans over-and-under made in association with Italian firm Perazzi. Such ventures are increasingly common in the British gun trade.EJ Churchill has offered its “Continental” guns in recent years, as has William Powell. William Evans has previously worked with Guerini and Grulla. And Purdey famously makes its sporter in association with Perugini & Visini (although this project is, perhaps, atypical as much of the gun is still made in London). The essential idea is that the English firm specifies the gun towards the needs of our sporting market to the foreign maker. This, typically, is an…

“Innovative technology is not mainstream and the human hand prevails for many fiddly crops” THE heat is on. Sun-kissed faces gasp and cheer behind pots of strawberries and cream. A puff of chalk rises from a Murray cross-court forehand: game, set and match. As regular as Wimbledon, the soft-fruit season is upon us – a delight to be savoured. My first summer job was strawberry picking at the local farmshop. It lasted two weeks; hours of bending and kneeling were simply unsustainable for a teenage layabout. Back then, pick-your-own operations and farmshops involved straw bales and honesty boxes. Most villages had one and for those without kitchen gardens or allotments, they were the source of delicious, inexpensive summer fruit for freezer-filling and jamming. Today, there is a different culture around…

“Then the noise of a grouse calling, surely a freak of nature in lowland Cumbria, until I realise it is my ridiculous ringtone” THE May bank holiday weekend found me sat alone among the bluebells on a wooded bank overlooking Cherry Dene pond. There, I contemplated life, conscious of the background splattering of the waterfall and birdsong as the pale sun vainly attempted to evaporate the rivulets of sweat pouring down my neck. Actually, strictly speaking, most of the contemplation was concerning just how I could extract my chainsaw from the heart of a 200-year-old oak tree. It stood proudly upright like a modern-day orange and white Excalibur, stuck in a vice-like grip, pinned by a large, inexpertly cut creaking limb – what the cutters in the trade refer to…

 GROWING up in Canada surrounded by some of the world’s greatest unspoilt natural wilderness is ideal for a sporting artist. Growing up in Canada as the only one of four brothers not to be particularly interested in the country’s national sport, ice-hockey, was less straightforward. Daniel Porter remembers: “I was born in New Brunswick and we were a hockey family, so when I was a little guy I tried hockey – and quit. It made my dad so mad. He said, ‘You’re the best skater in the family.’ We were Canucks fans. Hockey is our national sport and I am going to be a painter. It was a bit of a lonely road at first.” PORTER ON HIS PAINTINGS OF SALMON FLIES:“‘I paint them with a historic English portraiture background;…

 The Royal Berkshire Shooting School played host to the Femmes Fatales Cup recently, for the third year running. It’s an event that brings together some of the best female shots in the UK with ladies who are just getting started in the sport. Schoolgirl Amy Easeman, a previous winner, went on to win the 2017 shoot with an outstanding 72 ex 80. “Was the shoot different from the usual blokey affair? Well, yes. More laughter but just as many clays smoked” Easeman was one of 80 competitors at this year’s event, staged by Femmes Fatales, a shooting club devoted to encouraging shooting among women of all ages. It has been remarkably successful. Fellow guns included Hannah Gibson, the ladies’ British Open Sporting Champion; Rachel Parish, who’s an A&E doctor and…

The first living creature that I ever captured was a prawn. I caught it in a drop net from the end of the Cobb in Lyme Regis. My aunt had a house there and I went to Lyme regularly with my mother in the summer. In those days, she had a lover – the actor Robert Newton. “Uncle Bobbie” loved using the nets and I remember vividly walking slowly down the hill from Theo’s Cottage to the end of The Cobb holding his hand. When we arrived, Bobbie unfolded his deckchair and watched as I lowered the net, with its foul bait of rotting fish, into the sea. He then produced a bottle from his pocket and took an enormous swig. I thought it was Lucozade and one day asked…

It was something of a conundrum. There, basking in the sun, was a wonderful, golden-winged comma, the first I had ever seen, and a specimen I was desperate to catch for my collection. There was only one problem. It was in a nettlebed and if I was to catch it, I would undoubtedly get badly stung. To make matters worse, I was wearing my usual butterfly-hunting outfit of shorts and a T-shirt. I gave the matter all of five seconds consideration before plunging into the nettles, catching my prize with the first sweep of my net. That memorable incident took place more than half a century ago and although I can remember the triumph of capture, I’ve no recollection of the pain I must have endured. Remarkably, I still have…

The first time I wet waded I swore it would be my last. But today, two decades later, I am a total convert. I suppose my introduction was just a bit too hardcore. Somewhere in the remotest of remote New Zealand, fording chilled rivers, sodden head to toe, fired entirely by excitement and adrenaline, I was the master of that particular universe. No fish was out of reach; none eluded me. It still rates as one of my most amazing fishing days ever. But… As I lay in our corrugated bivvy that night, shivering uncontrollably with early stage hypothermia, I did wonder (briefly, it must be said), whether it was worth it. It took a while, metaphorically and literally, to dip my toe back in the wet wading water and,…

I find many of the food trends that take the world by storm puzzling. For instance, I never understood the popularity of kale chips, although from the lack of requests to include them as part of anyone’s shoot lunch, fishing picnic or piece on the hill, I assume neither did you. There have been obsessions with goji berries, quinoa and kimchi, too, but I’ll spare you my thoughts on those. One trend I am delighted with is the rise to fame of the barbecue and smoking. No longer is a sad scorched sausage acceptable. Instead, we now put as much thought, care and attention into what and how we cook on the coals and wood chips as we would for preparing a lavish, fine-dining feast. These recipes are perfect for…

“Most rescue charities go to great lengths to match a dog correctly to its new home” SOME years ago I was beating with my spaniel on a local farmer’s shoot – an informal, twice-a-season affair – when my eye was caught by an exceptionally well-behaved English springer, working for one of the guns. The spaniel was rock steady during the drive, ignoring galloping hares and falling pheasants, but went off like a rocket when asked to retrieve, collecting and delivering birds with style. I was sufficiently impressed to ask the dog’s owner, a man in his early thirties, about his spaniel and how he had managed to train it to such a high standard. “Oh, I didn’t train him,” admitted the owner. “Bertie came ready trained. He’s a six-year-old gamekeeper’s…

“After a couple more days, the MINI grew on me – the only explanation is nostalgia” IT’S hard work keeping up with MINI’s output. New models and variants appear almost weekly and revisiting its range after a break of a few months can be bewildering. What will the latest off-the-wall offering be? Hatch, coupe, cabrio, estate? Three-door, five-door (two of them stable), five-and-a-half door? The new (take a deep breath at this point) MINI Cooper D All4 Countryman (and if that doesn’t win a line in MINI Nomenclature Bingo, nothing will) is actually rather conventional: it’s a five-door estate, four-wheel drive and slightly souped up. It’s MINI’s biggest offering yet but is still recognisable instantly as a MINI, even to youngsters whose only memory of the original Mini (sic) is…

The future for rare breed pigs is “extremely worrying”, with seven of the 11 native breeds showing declining numbers on the latest Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) Watchlist. The Gloucestershire Old Spots breed, despite its illustrious reputation, is showing the most dramatic decline. Numbers of sows producing birth-notified litters were down from 837 in 2014 to 416 in 2016. The breed is now on Watchlist Category 4 – At Risk. There were more hopeful signs for native sheep breeds with renewed interest resulting in increases across the primitive and hill and heath breeds. Numbers of Borerays and Whiteface Dartmoors were going up but the situation was more mixed for the shortwool and down and longwool breeds, apart from the Dorset Down, Portland and Greyface Dartmoor. One of Britain’s oldest native…

A TENET of game-shooting is that everything killed gets eaten. The Code of Good Shooting Practice tells us, “All shot game is food and must be treated as such.” The mantra runs that if we trash the bag we trash shooting’s future, so it was worrying, to say the least, that ugly rumours were circulating last winter about shoots struggling to get their birds away to the food chain. The Field decided to investigate and contacted the National Game Dealers’ Association, several game suppliers and retailers, the organisations that campaign to promote game sales, Mintel (which maintains statistics on the food trade) and also Companies House. It didn’t take long to find that one large UK game dealer went bust earlier this year and two others are in deep, perhaps…

This is a Dorset estate of 538 acres – a mix of arable, grazing and pasture land and woodland, with all sporting rights in hand. The main property is a Grade I-listed Elizabethan Manor with eight bedrooms, a reception hall, drawing room, library, chapel and wine cellar. There is also a detached farmhouse and four cottages in the sale, as well as a range of listed traditional Dorset stone barns and livestock buildings. The estate forms a bowl, with the manor and buildings centrally located. Higher Melcombe is home to a well-known beauty spot, the Dorset Gap – an historic crossroads with views towards the Downs and the Wessex Ridgeway. The parcels of woodland and the topography make for good sporting potential and amenity, and with a local pub called…

The game fair is biggest weekend of the summer for fieldsports and this year it has a new location and partner. For the first time, it will occupy the grounds of Hatfield House, the stunning home of the seventh Marquess of Salisbury. Just 22 minutes from London by train, the 10,000-acre estate will host the largest outdoor, countryside-themed event in the world from 28-30 July. Also new this year, The Game Fair and Time Inc. (UK) Ltd – the publisher of this title as well as many other popular sporting periodicals – are joining forces, uniting the fieldsports fraternity’s favourite titles with its most famous summer event. The Field will be the official media partner of The Field Kitchen Theatre, where you can learn how to cook your game like…

“‘Peterborough’s always special and every year it seems to have grown’” Those who pine for hounds in the summer months, or are preoccupied with the business of breeding them, may be found taking tea at puppy shows but the really serious business happens at Peterborough. The first time I attended Peterborough Royal Foxhound Show I found the sunny sight and sounds of hounds electrifing, a pleasure previously restricted to joyful winter days spent hunting. Eminent Masters were grouped together in serious conversation or throwing back bowler-hatted heads to laugh with friends; ladies in garden-party garb with straw hats and pearl chokers chatted discretely while casting discerning eyes over the whole scene; the hounds lounged or paced in their kennels and, like their huntsmen, looked a little warm. The Peterborough Royal…

“‘You can smoke in your kitchen without massive DIY projects taking over the garden’” There’s a big puff of interest in smoke at the moment. Originally a preservation technique designed to save the summer glut for winter scarcity, smoking has embedded certain tastes in the British palate, especially smoked bacon, smoked salmon and kippers. But why stop with what we know? Nowadays, restaurant menus, delis and food producers are broadening their range to offer smoked ice-cream, salt, flour and even water. To start, there’s no smoke without fire. One way to add smoke to food, outside the traditional smokehouse, is through the use of wood-fired ovens or grills. These are growing in popularity, both in restaurants and in the gardens and homes of adventurous cooks around the country. SPITS AND…

Thomas Bell devoted his life to nature’s less glamorous creatures, including the Crustacea. When Darwin returned to London from the Beagle expedition in 1836, Bell was entrusted with the collected specimens. He lamented that most works of natural history lacked all but the most superficial coverage of the class. This illustration helps to remedy that situation.…

“The Bloody Mary isn’t the only mid-morning drink. The Black Velvet has to be up there, too” SIX OF THE BEST MID-MORNING DRINKS 2016 INNOCENT BYSTANDER MOSCATO (£10, The Wine Reserve) A low alcohol (5.5% vol), ridiculously drinkable sweet pink fizz from Oz. HIDALGO PASTRANA MANZANILLA PASADA (£12, Wine Society) Keep a bottle in the fridge for instant revivification. HENRIQUES & HENRIQUES 10 YEAR OLD MALMSEY MADEIRA (£22, Majestic) Gloriously tasty, full of toffee and nuts and spot on with a mid-morning bicky. NICOLAS FEUILLATTE BRUT NV (£19 if you buy six, Majestic) The best-selling champagne in France – and darn good it is, too. TAYLOR’S 10 YEAR OLD TAWNY PORT (£23, Waitrose) Textbook tawny, best served very lightly chilled. FOXDENTON GOLDEN APRICOT GIN LIQUEUR (£24.50, www.foxdentonestate.co.uk). Utterly scrumptious and…