Conservation and curlew at Tidgrove
In addition to providing habitat for these rare birds, this North Hampshire estate offers a relaxed air and a genial partridge shoot
Duff Hart-davis visits a genial partridge shoot in North Hampshire
Driving into the Tidgrove estate in North Hampshire is like entering another world, for the gentle hills and valleys are given over to conservation on a scale rarely attempted elsewhere. Untrimmed hedgerows run for miles; patches and belts of scrubby young trees and shrubs break up the fields; and long, slender lakes lie between beautifully sculpted banks of mown grass.
All this is the creation of the genial owner, Raleigh Place. Some people, he concedes, may find him a little eccentric. In the 1990s, wanting a larger abode and “with nothing better to do”, he knocked down an old tin barn and re-fashioned it into a handsome house with Palladian façades front and back, and protuberances like flat ears sprouting from the roof. The Norman spelling
of his name is Plaice, and some members of his family still use it – among them his elder son, Field contributor Charlie Sainsburyplaice. But Raleigh himself dropped the “i” some years ago because, as he says, he was “tired of being called Fishface”.
A few minutes in his company show how passionately he is devoted to his land and its history. “This is a Roman road,” he said, as we moved towards the first drive, Roman Villa, on a private partridge day laid on for family and friends. “It never gets pot-holed, because the Romans laid flints together as in a jigsaw. A 2,000-year-old road and it needs no maintenance.”
Fog had threatened to delay operations and there was a disappointing lack of wind, but by 10am the early mist was lifting as the eight guns lined out at generous intervals along a shallow grass valley, with their backs
to tall trees and large stands of maize on the hill opposite. In the middle of the line was Ian Dennis, who once loaded for Place during a grouse shoot at Glenlivet. Now owner of Conigre Game Farm near Cheltenham, he soon showed that membership of two fine syndicates, at Chatcombe and Taunton, keeps his eye in. With the beaters advancing from right and left simultaneously, he downed a dozen high partridges aiming to clear the trees. The other guns were less fortunate, for many of the redlegs managed to slide out downhill to the left, hugging the contours at almost ground level, in spite of vigorous flag-waving by the flankers. “When they start going the wrong way, it winds you up,” acknowledged James Campbell, the 6ft 3in beanpole of a keeper, after the drive. “I could have let it get to me, but then I thought, ‘Ah well, that drive’s done. Forget it.’”
Moving on along the valley, Place enthused about the wildlife that his stewardship has attracted. Already a couple of red kites had floated overhead and now he spoke enthusiastically about owls. “We’ve got the only long-eared owls in Hampshire. Very secretive birds: they live in the hedgerows and colonise magpies’ nests.”
His outstanding achievement, however, has been his husbandry of rare stone curlews. Odd-looking birds, also known as “thick-knees” due to their heavy leg-joints, they have bulging yellow eyes that enable them to see at night. They become active at dusk, giving off lovely whistling calls like those of common curlew, foraging for insects in the dark.
Once they were common in the south of England but today they survive only in Norfolk and Wessex, summering on open fields. Thanks to beneficial management, the Tidgrove estate has become one of their strongholds. “There were none here when I started, 25 years ago,” said Place, “but now in the summer we’ve got about 30. I do special plots for them and we plant maize widely spaced, so they can nest between the rows.” Badgers are one enemy, crows another. “We used to mark a nest with a stick either side but the crows got wise to that, so now we mark with stones.” Rats are a further menace. When the maize is cut at the end of the season, Campbell can easily shoot 150 a night.
After the first drive, a leisurely stroll brought guns and beaters to a magical spot where a large fishing hut stands poised above the bank of a lake. Lavish elevenses had been laid on by another of the guns, Hector Ross, of the Bel & the Dragon group of country inns, which now has seven shootfriendly establishments spread across the south of England. As Ross plied the company with perfectly singed sausages and various potent drinks, whopping rainbow trout – of at least 10lb or 12lb – were rising and jumping all over the surface of the water. As an experiment, Place had released salmon into the lake and they survived for about five years, but now the trout have taken over. “It’s 20ft deep,” said Place, “but because the water table has dropped about 200ft since Roman times, we had to dig a bore-hole – and now I top the lake up from a fountain at the top end, which I can switch on by remote control.”
HENRY II’S HALLS
On, then, to the Valley of the Kings, once the course of the River Test but now dry grassland. Here excavations have revealed the remains of two palaces or great halls, built on top of each other early in the 12th century for King Henry II and used by him as a stopping place as he and his entourage moved between Windsor and Southampton on his frequent journeys to and from France. All round the site in a rough rectangle, carved from the side of the hill, runs a deep defensive ditch, now fully cleaned-out, and the rectangular floor-plan of the palaces lies open to the air. Excavation of the cellars brought up a massive iron key, and animal bones in the ash on the hearth showed that royal parties dined on swan, oxen, deer and pigs, but apparently not on sheep. A still more striking find was the skull of a wolf, claimed by some to be that of the last wolf killed in Hampshire, in 1212. “Pitting for wolves was common then,” explains Place. “People dug pits with vertical sides and baited them with offal. Any wolf that fell in couldn’t get out.”
CATTLE STAY CALM
For the second drive, the partridges were flushed steadily from an enormous thicket of young trees and shrubs. With the wind getting up, they flew better and were more evenly spread but still had a tendency to swing to the left of the line. Watching from a distance was a herd of fine Belted Galloway cattle, their black-and-white livery standing out vividly against the green of the grass. Sensible creatures, they scarcely reacted to the volleys of shots going off below them. It was as if they knew that one of the guns, Jeremy Loxton, was their owner. In a deal with Place, he buys the cattle, Tidgrove provides the grazing – and the pair share the meat, some of which appears every
now and then as a superlative main course for the shoot lunch.
For the third drive, The Thorns, Ian Dennis’s daughter, Charlotte, at the end of the line, found herself in a slightly awkward place, where the birds tended to appear suddenly over tall trees, giving her little time. Although she does a good bit of clay-shooting, she reckons to get only three formal days in a season and this was her first outing of the year, using a Beretta over-and-under 20-bore instead of the 12 she favoured earlier. No wonder, then, that she missed a couple of early partridges but she soon made amends with a cracking right-and-left (or is it an over-and-under)? Her attitude to life seems admirably robust. “I’ve been brought up to work,” she said, and now, having done stints as a groom for the Heythrop and as an assistant in the Cotswold Country shop in Cirencester, she helps her father on the game farm, along with her brother, Rupert.
editor in action
For the first drive after lunch, Jeremy Loxton – the sales and marketing manager for Arthur Brett, the makers of high-class furniture based on classic English designs – set off on a long, encircling hike, climbing righthanded up a field littered with millions of small flints, to act as an extra flanker and cut off any birds that broke over the top of the hill. In the event, none did, and it was only when he hastened back into the valley that he began to get some action.
By then the wind had freshened still more, and Jonathan Young, Editor of The Field, found himself in the hot seat as partridges stormed through the corner of the drive. Between shots he lamented the stupidity of some so-called country people, recalling how he had spent a year persuading a reluctant farmer to allow the local hunt to cross his land – only for the field, on its first day out, to canter straight across the winter wheat. “That was the end of that,” he said. “In one day.”
final drive
“This will be the pièce de résistance,” announced Place, as the guns lined out for Rob’s Drive, the last of the day – and so it was for most of them. But on the left, Charlie Sainsbury-plaice’s brother-in-law, Jonathan Laughton, was left in the cold. Not that he minded: he has plenty of other shooting, when not working for a firm that produces medical cannabis or running a profitable sideline in the renovation of farm cottages in Wiltshire, of which he now has 16.
The final bag was 177 partridges and four pigeon; and when the clicker lady reported that she had counted 524 shots, it was clear that the guns had performed pretty well. Their only regret was that no one had set eyes on a stone curlew. This was hardly surprising, for Place had taken trouble to keep the shoot well away from the birds, which by then (the end of September) were grouping-up on their winter roost – a big cultivated field. In a couple of weeks they would take off on their annual migration to Africa. Unlike woodcock, the long-distance flights of which to northern Russia and other points east are being successfully monitored by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, the curlew’s precise movements are not yet known. But there is every chance that, in the spring, they will return to an estate that offers them hospitality as welcome as that bestowed on humans.