Confessions of a grouse addict

I remember my first day’s grouse shooting as clearly as if it had occurred last week, even though it was more than three decades ago.

As regular readers will know, I have shot since I was a boy, but I was born and brought up in East Anglia, so my shooting experiences were founded on the way things were done there. So while my own shooting was confined to pigeons and rabbits for the most part, when I went beating, the bag was mostly made up of partridges through the autumn, and pheasants and hares in the winter months either side of Christmas.

Grouse mystique

As I grew in age and experience and began to read magazines like Shooting Gazette it dawned on me there was a whole world of sport being undertaken in the north of the country I had never explored.

And it wasn’t the case in those days that you could just call up a sporting agency or go online and with a bucket