He'd rented it from the owner, Lady Norton, of Norton motorcycle fame.
That summer was for shooting. There's a fine stream running through the property, the Glenfiddich Ee, the very one from which the famous single malt draws its waters. And I'm guessing, just in retrospect, mind, that it may have had trout or salmon, but for some reason none of the guests were fishers.
So it was daily shooting of grouse. For the season, morning and arvo they would head out, all jolly and jaunting, guns casually slung over shoulder, to the grouse lands, the warm blue heather moors of the Scottish highlands.
My boss the butler showed me a chart in the drawing room, of grouse numbers on the property, going back to Victorian days and up to the present. There were two big hills and valleys on the chart: the two world wars. In each case the numbers of grouse had shot up, then just as precipitously crashed. Numbers were much more steady and on a gentle upward path, when normal shooting seasons were in place.
That was something I always remembered. That regulated hunting seasons could be good for game management. And that seems to be the message from the article below, just that it's got out of kilter with grouse.
We, my family, went back to Glenfiddich Lodge a few years back. You get to it via Dufftown in Banffshire, but while the Lodge was well known in '74, now no one knew where it was. No one at the Tourist office or the gas station had even heard of it. Weird. I had to buy a large scale map before I pinned it down and even then it wasn't easy to find. When we finally made it, we find the Lodge abandoned, falling apart. Apparently — we were told by a local cooper who'd given us directions — it had been bought by a large distillery, combined with another landholding and just let go. We peered in through cracked and dusty widows, to the kitchen, the dining room where I'd served dinner to those long ago worthies, to the servants' scullery, to our own dining table where we'd feasted well, as well as the worthies, in grouse and the full Scottish, black pudding and grouse baps.
We — at least, the guests — didn't just hunt grouse with guns back in 1974. Mr Davidson also employed a falconer called Hamish, and yes, he was the classic Scotsman, ginger beard and flowing hair (I have pictures!). So we, the staff, Hamish, the butler and his two valets, went hunting grouse in our free time, while the squires were out shooting, we went with the falcons, the dogs - Pointers and Labradors - all doing our allotted tasks. For some reason the guns didn't seem to have much interest in Mr Davison's falconer, so we had Hamish, falcons and dogs to ourselves, to hunt in the ancient way, the natural way, man and beast and prey in the high highland skies.
What fun!
So that's why I'm interested to read this article about the damage that grouse shooting has done to the British moors. I didn't know this.
Below the fold, with thanks to The Spectator
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The scourge of the grouse moor
Our upland wildlife has been destroyed – but there is an answer
Britain's hunting estates were once beautiful. Walking through the New Forest, we can all appreciate how the purchase of land for hunting can radically protect our countryside. Almost a thousand years after William the Conqueror set aside this wooded wonderland, we can still enjoy its aged oak pastures, Britain's largest herds of free-roaming grazing animals, and a chorus of birdsong that has been lost in most other corners of our land.
Britain's original royal forests model is recognised around the world as a commonsense approach to hunting. From Alaska to Scandinavia, hunters, alongside ecotourists, invest huge profits to sponsor the natural world. Hunters take a quota of animals from these special places — and leave the rest. This approach, known as 'sharing', ensures landowners make enormous profits, enjoy the respect of society and bequeath to the nation extraordinary biodiversity. A Finnish hunting estate will be hunted for elk, boar, deer and grouse. It will also abound with eagles, cranes, four species of grouse and thousands of wading birds. This is the kind of paradise that any British landowner would love to own.
Sadly, 150 years ago, our hunting estates made a terrible mistake. They decided to turn red grouse into the equivalent of living clay pigeons — and shoot them, without skill, in their thousands. To do so, they created grouse farms in our uplands: wastelands, scorched to feed just one bird.
After more than 100 years of destroying our national heritage, grouse moors have left our countryside immeasurably poorer. Our upland wildlife — an ecological gallery of wildcats, eagles, hen harriers and many other iconic species — has been relentlessly wiped out. One shooting estate's infamous record illustrates the industrial scale of the killing. On Glengarry Estate in the Highlands, between 1837 and 1840 alone, 27 white-tailed eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, 275 red kites, 63 goshawks, 462 kestrels, 285 buzzards, 63 hen harriers and 198 wildcats were killed. To put this in perspective, just 35 wildcats remain today.
For the 8 per cent of British land that grouse moors use, they contribute one job for every 6.5 square kilometres
Extraordinary acts of desecration are usually repaired a few generations later, especially in a country as cultivated as our own. But the grouse moor debt has never been repaid. Now, amid the burned wreckage, we are supposed to be thankful for the grouse that are sustained by what was once an extraordinary landscape.
Yet it is the staggering economics of our hunting estates that would make any Conservative financier see blue. For the 8 per cent of British land that grouse moors use, they contribute one job for every 6.5 square kilometres. In all, English and Scottish moors together contribute 0.005 per cent to Britain's GDP. Astonishingly, they create 0.008 per cent of its jobs. These are economic deserts without parallel.
Grouse moors claim they boost local economies. Those economies beg to differ. In all, 16 per cent of shooters spend just one night in a B&B each year. The RSPB's tiny but popular reserves brought the same income to the UK economy in 2009 as all our grouse moors combined. The English adult population makes more than three billion visits to the natural environment each year, splashing £21 billion in the process. In Scotland, nature-based tourism is estimated to produce £1.4 billion per year, along with almost 40,000 jobs. Britain's grouse moors, meanwhile, account for just over 1,772 jobs directly involved in the industry.
Grouse moors are running at an epic loss, while destroying both jobs and wildlife. Unsurprisingly, there is now increasing pressure to call it a day. But there could be a very different route — which would be to follow the older royal forests model. What I suggest is simple: landowners must rewild these estates.
Our hunting estates, empty and depopulated, are suited to extraordinary acts of natural restoration in a way that no other British land is. Rewilded estates are beautiful and their opportunities diverse. Running costs are far lower, being governed by free-growing trees and free-roaming animals, which help maintain those crucial open habitats for birds such as curlews. Famous and profitable estates such as Knepp, in Sussex, are already revealing the astonishing biodiversity seen when herbivore rewilding takes place. But in our uplands, it could take place on a different scale altogether.
In the past, landowners have acted with extraordinary vision. More than a century before the RSPB came into being, the enterprising Marquess of Breadalbane reintroduced the capercaillie to Scotland. This irate turkey still rampages through our Caledonian woodlands.
Imagine, then, the steps that could be taken to rewild a large hunting estate in northern England. Defying our country's savage bureaucracy and the small-minded people telling you 'no', you could regrow birch and pine forests, reintroduce black grouse and capercaillie, and release wild horses and free-roaming cattle on to the hills.
Millions would pay to photograph elk rutting on your land — but first you would need to put them back. Needless to say, the hunting bounties on an animal that last walked Britain in the Bronze Age would be enormous. In Finland, spectacular banquets of the day's hunt — elk, boar and grouse — are served. Impressive animals are harvested from impressive landscapes. Grouse moor owners, meanwhile, can only flaunt their tracts of burned heather.
Those who have the time and money to hunt also have the capacity to undertake epic endeavours — and to oversee acts of restoration. Britain's landowners have the power to change past mistakes. Just 175 people in England own all our grouse moors. They could transform our country for ever.
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