This land of hope and glory

“If what you’re buying is shooting focused and the law changes, your asset has changed considerably”

Some 200 years ago, the moorlands of northern England and Scotland were most likely much as they are now. Local farmers would use the inhospitable landscape to graze their sheep and cattle in order to draw a living out of a landscape that would not accept crops and was largely disconnected from the riches of metropolis.

Then, of course, two things changed: the advent of the railways and the invention of the breechloading shotgun. Suddenly, the whistling low-flying grouse became less of a curiosity to passing farmers and transformed into the second most exciting form of shooting after drey poking, as this author has opined before (, 27 March 2019). A landscape that was largely unfit for human existence became the playground of the nation’s elite. What