Anybody who wants to get on in America must give handsomely to good causes. In our own essentially philistine society, the newly rich get further faster by buying grouse moors. I recently heard a tycoon observe sardonically, in an inimitable gravelly Norwegian accent: ‘Grouse-shooting makes all the English prostitutes.’
He meant that lots of people who otherwise think themselves principled, honourable, choosy about the company they keep, prostrate themselves before hosts who offer them an early entry to paradise, shooting the red grouse amid some of the most glorious landscapes in this island.
I became an addict very young, and almost ruined myself renting a little place in Sutherland where we walked miles, shooting grouse over pointers. If one of my children had started renting grouse moors aged 24, I would have rushed him into counselling. But, back in 1970, it seemed to me a perfectly rational thing to do. Indeed, for 11 months in the year I lived only in anticipation of the August morning when I would go north again.
The setting, the thrill of the sport in those great heather wildernesses, seemed incomparable — and so they still do. I shoot over pointers when I can, and also get the odd driven day — the Rolls-Royce end of the sport. The cost has gone up a bit. In 1970, I paid £500 for the right to shoot 100 brace. Today, such is the demand, the price of driven grouse-shooting nudges £200 a brace. A 100-brace day, therefore, sells for almost £20,000, or over £2,000 a gun.
At this time of year, because I love to connect the present to the past, before driving north I bury myself in 19th-century sporting books, recalling the distant days when the English discovered the Highlands.
The pioneer was one Colonel Thomas Thornton, who first ventured north in 1782, taking with him 80lb of gunpowder, six hawks, four setters, six pointers, a pack of foxhounds, two small boats, a portable kitchen and housekeeper, which were transferred from his sloop the Falcon at Forres to be conveyed to his sporting headquarters at Kingussie in a column of 49 carts. William Scrope, writing in the 1840s, referred nostalgically to Thornton’s expeditions as ‘the spacious days of sport’.
Scotland in the early 19th century was viewed as an alarming wilderness populated by brutish people and dangerous creatures. Scrope’s groom, told that he was to accompany his master to the Highlands, inquired: ‘Pray, sir, is that the country as is infested with eagles?’ Scrope confessed that there were indeed birds of that description there. ‘Then I am sorry sir, but I must beg leave to decline going.’ The craven fellow was replaced.
Lord Malmesbury asserted that 1833 ‘was the first year the Highlands became the rage’. For most of the century, however, deer-stalking was much more highly esteemed than grouse-shooting. A tenant might pay £300, a vast sum, to rent a forest. Only less accessible estates remained cheap. Malmesbury was offered the entire shooting, fishing, and stalking rights of Skye and Harris for £25 a year.
Some preferred to buy. The industrialist Octavius Smith purchased 9,000 acres at Achranich in 1854 for £12,000, and added the 22,000 acres of neighbouring Ardtornish five years later for 36 shillings an acre, which was thought dear.
Even in those days, many Scots were less than enthusiastic about the English invasion. A Glasgow lawyer named Donald Ross wrote to the Northern Ensign in 1845: ‘Talk of secret diplomacy and Russian intrigue and aggression forsooth! Are not whole straths and districts bargained for, and quietly let to some rich sportsman, months before the unhappy occupants know about it!’
It was a source of indignation to grandees that cockneys, as they categorised almost everybody who did not belong to the Upper Ten, began to worm their way on to moors. The Oakleigh Shooting Code, published in 1836, offered minute instructions to novice grouse-hunters on their equipment: ‘Before the shooter leaves a place where something of civilisation exists — where gay shops and accomplished artisans are in readiness to supply real wants and create imaginary ones — for a clime where nothing but barrenness prevails, he should ascertain that nothing be forgotten: dogs, fowling piece, two extra pivots, a pivot-pricker, pivot-wrench, gun rod, a small bottle of olive all, powder flask, dram flask, shot belt, a canister of powder, a punch for cutting wadding, dog whistle, dog whip, sealing wax and seal to mark birds when sent by coach or carrier, card of permission to show to game-keepers, sandwiches, cigars, Prometheans, brandy’. And that is only half Oakleigh’s list.
There is much modern mockery of the alleged vulgarities of the hedge-fund managers who have bought up a string of moors, of which their helicopters are the least. It was the same a century and a half ago. A chestnut popular among the toffery described a cockney tenant of a Highland lodge ordering the butler: ‘Angus — bring in the pipers’, to be rewarded with the Times on a silver salver.
By the late 19th century, grouse-driving vied with stalking and salmon-fishing in sportsmen’s esteem. The entire landed class agreed that once Cowes and Goodwood were over, there was only one place to be: on the train northwards, with a vast equipage of family, servants and baggage. The August night-sleeper became a social institution. As the 7.20 prepared to depart from Platform 1 at King’s Cross, the station-master moved among the gilded passengers ‘like a Grand Vizier’, in the words of a sportsman, ‘greeting old friends, introducing others, a word of cheer in the ear trumpet of some querulous dame... Like the first swallow or cricket umpire emerging from the pavilion before a Test Match, he seemed a harbinger of good things to come.’
Nowadays, almost everybody drives north. Motorways have diminished the remoteness of the Highlands. I abandoned the train when told that Health & Safety requirements now make it necessary to steam-clean any compartment in which dogs travel, at a cost of £100. My wife protests bitterly about my insistence that we leave home at dawn. ‘But we don’t need to be there before dinner,’ she says reasonably. Yes, my darling, but it is the excitement, the anticipation as one enters hill country south of Penrith, then climbs towards the grouse. I never much cared for the Duke of Omnium’s son Lord Silverbridge after he caught his first sight of a moor and said to his companion, the fanatical shooter Reginald Dobbes: ‘Don’t you call this a very ugly country?’ Dobbes replied brusquely: ‘If you come after grouse, you must come to what the grouse thinks pretty.’
Most of us, of course, share the grouse’s idea of beauty. I shall be crouching in a butt this weekend, thinking of nothing else save the thrill of that moment when the coveys burst over the horizon, weaving and jinking. I almost always miss, but no matter. The only human sensation that approaches the joy of trying to shoot grouse is eating them. One of the few reasons I resent my approaching 65th birthday is that today I can no longer sustain my happy August custom of 40 years ago, devouring three at a sitting.