GROUSE SHOOTING 



ever shot so well — I killed seven or eight quite out of all 

 distance. It was quite a scramble ; birds flying all directions, 

 men swearing and dogs howhng from the whip. I walked from 

 half-past three until six at night, when we gave up — not a bird 

 to be found. The birds were as big as old ones and very wild. 

 The day also was wild — wind and showers. The birds got up 

 at sixty to one hundred yards off at times.' 



But let us return to Scotland and trace the rise of grouse 

 shooting as a fashion before we go farther. ' When I first trod 

 the heather, gun in hand,' wrote Captain Horatio Ross in 

 1862,^ ' letting shootings in the Highlands was almost unknown. 

 I think the first shooting quarter ever let was Glen Dye in 

 Kincardineshire (extent about 36,000 acres) : for this the late 

 Lord Panmure, then the Hon. William Maule, gave £150 a year. 

 This gentleman was the proprietor of immense moors in Forfar- 

 shire which marched with Glen Dye, but so great was his kind- 

 ness and so extended his hospitality, that his own 200,000 or 

 300,000 acres did not suffice for all the friends to whom, to the 

 last houi" of his life (some eight or nine years since) he gratui- 

 tously gave sport, and he for several years rented Glen Dye 

 that he might still further oblige his friends.' 



Captain Ross refers to the ' forty-eight consecutive seasons 

 that I have shot on the moors of Scotland ' ; his first season, 

 therefore, would have been 1813. 



Mr. Barclay of Ury, famed as a pedestrian, took some 

 60,000 acres in Inverness-shire soon after Lord Panmure took 

 Glen Dye ; and for these he paid. Captain Ross thought, only 

 £50 a year. Mr. Barclay was followed as tenant by the Duke 

 of Bedford, who paid £300 ; and Captain Ross, who succeeded 

 the Duke, held the shooting for five years at £400 a year. In 

 1862 the shooting was rented at £1000, ' but a deer forest has 

 been formed, the grazings of which are worth about £300. 

 The actual shooting rent has, however, risen in my memory 

 from £50 to £700.' The cause of this rise in rents is easily 

 explained : in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century 



' Letter to the Field. 



87 



