SPORT ANCIENT AND MODERN 



a year or two before Mr. Hartley of Armath- 

 waite killed a roe and a rabbit, ' right and 

 left.' Roe are occasionally found in the park, 

 but this does not exhaust the list. Half a 

 century ago, a Greystoke keeper made, with 

 evident indifference, two entries in the game 

 book which certainly none of his successors 

 would care about making now : '1852, 

 February 1 5th. I shoot a fox that come out 

 of Dickson's planting, fine day.' The next 

 entry is still more cold blooded : ' 1854, 

 October loth, i fox in Neb side, sitting, 

 fine day.' We have got no entry out of any 

 game book so interesting and suggestive as 

 this ; the eight words form a perfect photo- 

 graph. 1 



Some three miles as the crow flies from 

 Greystoke is Gowbarrow Park, one of the 

 few places in England where red deer, though 

 fenced in, live in a natural state, and have to 

 be stalked just as in a highland forest. Here, 

 in 1894, Mr. C. B. Balfour shot a stag 

 weighing 24 St. 4 lb., and in September, 

 1899, the Right Hon. J. W. Lowther got 

 one weighing 28 st. 3 lb., both clean. These 

 are the two heaviest stags killed at Lyulph's 

 Tower, and they probably owed their size to 

 many outside visits to cornfields and potatoes 

 in the low country. 



The average deer of Gowbarrow and 

 Martindale are probably heavier than those 

 in most Scotch forests. The stags just men- 

 tioned as killed in the former park were 

 exceptional beasts. No genuine Scottish hill 

 stag of our own time ever brought down the 

 pointer of the scale to 396 lb. Though 

 these Gowbarrow deer are imparked ' they 

 are,' writes Mr. Macpherson 8 ' the lineal 

 descendants of the stags which populated the 

 dales and hills of Cumberland in the days 

 when the Auroch and the Beaver were 

 living in Lakeland.' In 1612 a Greystoke 

 keeper was paid five shillings for taking 

 two fawns to Naworth. 3 The deer are both 

 red and fallow, and are only fed in snow 

 time. 



The game book dates back to 1825; in 

 that year 279 grouse, 272 partridges, 55 

 snipe, 72 hares, 143 woodcocks and one 

 pheasant were killed. In 1827 two gentle- 

 men must have been made uncomfortable by 

 the following entry opposite their names : 



1 Mr. Howard writes : ' Two or three solitary 

 snipe have been killed, but I cannot find out 

 when.' 



2 In a letter written six days before his death. 



3 Selections from the Household Books of the Lord 

 William Howard of Naworth Castle, p. 29 (Surtees 

 Society). 



' September 131)1, 2 guns had forty shots and 

 killed 2 partridges.' The best year for part- 

 ridges was 472, and the best day 90. For 

 woodcocks the best day 1 6. 



' Grouse abounds,' writes Hntchinson about 

 this place ' on the mountains and commons, 

 partridges on the lower grounds. Upon 

 Saddleback and in Graystoke Park many foxes 

 are allowed to breed.' 4 He also mentions 

 that the Duke of Norfolk kept nearly 1,000 

 head of deer ' fallow, red, and a few Ameri- 

 can.' 



Owing to its favourable position and to the 

 care which has long been bestowed upon it, 

 the shooting at Edenhall has been of a very 

 high class for many years. One is struck 

 here as at Netherby by the small number of 

 rabbits killed. A search through the many 

 great calf-bound folios, business-like ledgers, 

 more like those we associate with commercial 

 houses than records of sport, shows how few 

 these have been. Two years before the 

 Ground Game Act was passed the late Sir 

 Richard Musgrave gave all the tenants on his 

 estate the right to kill rabbits with ferrets, 

 nets and traps during the whole year. Hares, 

 no doubt chiefly because of this scarcity of 

 rabbits, have always been very numerous ; 

 during the best years from 1866 to 1879 

 bags of 300 to nearly 500 in a day were not 

 at all uncommon, and the average for big 

 days during this period works out at about 

 250 a day, 2,179 in eight days in 1870-71 

 being the best. Since 1890, hares have 

 become scarcer, 550 were killed in the season 

 of 1897. The best day for grouse was in 

 August, 1872, when four guns got 210 birds 

 on Ousby Moor, and that famous year also 

 gave the largest total, 1 8 1 o. 



Partridges also flourish abundantly: 53 'big' 

 days between 1865 and 1874 give an average 

 of 8 1 birds ; 102 brace were shot in one day 

 in 1873, and on 6 September, 1869, the 

 late Sir Richard Musgrave shot to his own 

 gun 87^ brace. From 1896 to 1899 an 

 average of 536 partridges was obtained. The 

 best day's cover shooting was in 1873 when 

 1,237 nea< ^ were killed, chiefly hares and 

 pheasants. Mr. Raine, who was head keeper 

 at Edenhall for thirty-four years and who has 

 now retired on a pension, says that during his 

 time both Hungarian 5 and a change of blood 

 of English partridges were tried, and he 

 found the last do best ; but the former were 

 imported birds, and the latter, introduced in 



4 History of Cumberland, \. 406. 



6 Very few attempts to introduce Hungarian 

 partridges seem to have been made in Cumber- 

 land. 



435 



