HOW WE USED TO SHOOT
For 17 years my cousin, Bill Tallis, and I managed the shooting over the Crown Estate in Leicestershire. We organised the sport for 5,000 acres of the 9,000-acre estate. In those long years, we have seen the progress of modern farming destroy hedges, fill in ponds, fell old trees, reclaim two marshes, grub our rough corners and in turn reduce its sporting potential.
My middle daughter, one of three girls, Belinda, now 18, has grown up with the shoot as has Bill’s son Robert, now 19. The shoot has, over that time, become a way of life to all of us. Now it is all finished as the Crown Estate Commissioners, in their wisdom, decided to split up the whole of the sporting estate and let the shooting farm by farm. No doubt more people will have shooting as a result, but it is sad to see a great sporting estate finished as a single-unit
