Walked-up grouse moor popular

About our feeds

Home
News

| Next

Wednesday, 16 August 2006

Experts say that shooters now prefer walked-up to driven grouse shooting

Grouse numbers have been hit badly over the past couple of seasons, causing the price of
a day on the moor to rise. Driven days have become increasingly difficult to come by and this week ST spoke to a number of agents to find out whether walked-up sport was consequently becoming more popular.

Robert Cuthbert who runs Serious Shooting Ltd, a sporting agency selling days nationwide. Many people use Robert’s agency for the wild bird shoots he specialises in, grouse included. He explained: “We were told by many of the estates that we’d have no driven grouse to offer, so we can only sell what we have available. Having said that, we will still have days over pointers, and walked-up days are always popular. There was a serious fall of rain at a crucial time, but hopefully we’ll still have some let days to come this summer. In our opinion, wild partridge days will become the new grouse, unless grouse come back in good numbers. People still want to shoot challenging birds. Even if there were enough grouse around, there would still be a big demand for the driven days. The Americans are still keen and we have a large client base in the UK that is eager for driven grouse days.”

To find out what others are saying, see this week's issue