This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
It might seem unlikely, but the game larder where I hang deer carcasses is a very sociable place. On Saturday mornings, I often find myself up there chatting to the gamekeeper about everything from foxes to his latest bit of kit. Quite frequently there is a lad from the village cutting bones for his dogs, and my wife’s grandmother is an increasingly regular presence. Usually, she talks of what makes a good vicar, farmers that left the village five decades ago, and fishing trips to Scotland after the War.
Last week, on what was an unseasonably cold summer’s morning, I met the new shoot tenant at the larder. I was dropping by to pick up some pigeons that I was planning to barbecue in spite of the rain and he was familiarising himself with the setup, ahead of the shooting season starting in September. Often farmers or landowners don’t actually manage a shoot on their holding themselves but rent out the sporting rights to a third party.
It’s not easy, the tenant admitted, when you take on a new bit of ground, to learn countless field names, which meadows are too wet to drive through, and who — amongst local second homeowners — hates shooting. There is one local retiree who chases the gamekeeper around at night on a bicycle if he thinks he is out after rabbits.
The last shoot tenant on the land where I do most of my deer stalking was pushing 70. The new guy is not yet 30. Where the old boy was set in his ways, his successor has at least 15 thoughts on how to do things differently and seems to be very receptive to any suggestions that come his way. Should they, for instance, also offer duck shooting in the evenings after a day on the pheasants?
Should they sell deer stalking packages where you get to take the butchered beast away with you for the freezer, and might they also do very small rough days where people shoot everything from woodcock to snipe and hares? Increasingly, those who buy shooting seem to want variety rather than numbers.
and his dog in 1908 (credit: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
Two things really struck me whilst we chatted. The first was that the new tenant is very keen to create what I suppose those with proper jobs would call “business synergies”. Would the vineyard on the estate be interested in supplying wine, he wondered. He wanted to know if the farm shop might do venison pies.
Crucially, he asked if the local butcher can process game, and was I aware if there are any decent taxidermists in North Norfolk. People often want a woodcock stuffed for their mantlepiece if they’ve shot three or four. It might sound Victorian, but I’ve always thought that to have a creature stuffed is the apotheosis of respect.
It’s clear that with the arrival of the new tenant, there will be fresh revenue streams for all sorts of other businesses. A good shoot is a boon for the local economy, but it’s also a good thing in terms of “place-making”. Just as fishing makes the Tay, and wildfowling was once such a big part of local culture on the Solway Firth, Norfolk would no longer be Norfolk, in quite the same way, if people weren’t out shooting on a Saturday and drinking at the local pub afterwards.
At the end of our conversation, talk turned to the ever-growing number of challenges that shooting faces. Our current government has made it harder to control foxes, which prey on gamebirds; they have mooted a ban on trapping magpies, a species that love pheasant and partridge eggs; and last year they went the whole hog and said they might license the sport in its entirety. Anybody who wants to shoot would have to ask governmental permission.
There is certainly an argument that shooting, carried out in a sustainable and ethical way, has little to fear. Labour has explicitly said they are not anti-shooting. But what would a licence look like, and who would manage the whole licensing process? It did not come as much of a comfort to those who shoot that the government’s recent deer strategy quoted Chris Packham at length, a man who makes no bones about being fiercely anti-shooting.
It’s a long way from Whitehall to that deer larder, in more ways than one, but if any government officials had been there when I was chatting to the new tenant, I like to think they might have gone away with a bit of a sense of what shooting really is and what it really means. It’s a business for sure — game shooting supports around 129,000 full time jobs — but it’s so much more than that too.
