WOODLANDS, GAME, AND SPORT 299 
bien, mon Cher! What Chance? How many 
Braces to your Bags?’ In the royal forest of 
Wolmer, a sandy tract in Hampshire extending to 
about fifteen square miles covered with heath and 
fern, now bearing pinewoods in parts, though 120 
years ago it stood ‘ without having one standing 
tree in the whole extent,’ Gilbert White tells us 
how ‘ This lonely domain is a very agreeable haunt 
for many sorts of wild fowls, which not only 
frequent it in the winter, but breed there in the 
summer; such as lapwings, snipes, wild ducks, 
and, as I have discovered within these few years, 
teals. Partridges in vast plenty are bred in good 
seasons on the verge of this forest, into which 
they love to make excursions: and in particular, 
in the dry summer of 1740 and 1741, and some 
years after, they swarmed to such a degree that 
parties of unreasonable sportsmen killed twenty 
and sometimes thirty brace in a day. But there 
was a nobler species of game in this forest, now 
extinct, which I have heard old people say 
abounded much before shooting flying became 
so common, and that was the heath-cock, black 
Lame, or grouse.’ 
What would the ‘reasonable sportsmen’ of 
