Going beyond the wall

In February there is a place of wonderment where only wildfowl and wildfowlers venture. It is a place of salty isolation, beautiful yet stark in equal measure, sometimes dangerous and occasionally deadly. This watery and wintry Asgard of which I write is the foreshore below the high tide mark.

At season’s end, while inland shooters are cleaning their guns to put away, the coastal fowler still has 20 days in which to enjoy his sport, if he is prepared to venture over the sea wall. With winter barely arriving until January these days, the tail end of the season is the time when wildfowl are in their greatest profusion on the foreshore. North-easterly winds, snow and sleet force them down to shootable heights. Many inland flightponds that had been a guaranteed source of food have now ceased providing their bounty. Farmland