Waffle and I find our footing for first shoot

Turnip” Townsend has a lot to answer for. He may have revolutionised 18thcentury farming with his four crop rotation – “neeps” being one of the crops. What he didn’t do, I imagine, was spend a whole day trudging through his “neeps” after heavy rain. The unintended upside of neeps is that they offer excellent cover for pheasants. The down side is that Sod’s law dictates you are almost always walking across the ridges, rather than along them, at severe risk of sprained ankles and injured pride.

Still, it’s an occupational hazard and good for the leg muscles, nipping (ahem) from ridge to ridge while trying to stay in line with the guns and fellow beaters.

This was Waffle and my first day of walked up beating taking six farmers on a day’s pheasant shooting around the fringes of the big shoot. One field of neeps is fine but we ended up having to do four and a half, mainly because there were cattle in all the wrong places.

They don’t mind the shooting, in fact they are always quite interested, but their owners tend to get cross if they are shot, even by mistake.

So some of our favourite scrubby dens and ditches were off limits for the day, which meant we were landed with the neeps. Waffle, let loose in neeps for the first time this season, showed initial signs of misbehaving, which is largely because pheasants will run along the rows, and there is nothing like a running pheasant to raise the dander of a cocker spaniel. I’m happy to say the underkeeper’s labs weren’t a lot better.

It is always a relief when someone else’s dog misbehaves. But everyone settled down after the first field. Birds flew in all directions but went largely unscathed, through the guns’ age or inexperience it’s hard to tell, to the point that by lunchtime we had half the bag we should have had. Which for beaters is rather disheartening especially when you’ve produced the birds.

By the last walk through, Waffle looked like the proverbial downed rat but miraculously made the retrieve of the day. A hard hit hen pheasant dived over a row of round bales, out of sight and the wrong side of an enormous overgrown gully surrounded on every side by barbed wire and old bits of corrugated iron. And Waffle just took off: through the neeps and wire, into the gully scrabbling up the other side and disappeared round the top of the bales.

Moaning inwardly we all (beaters and keepers that is) prepared to follow her. When, just as we were all stuck, cursing, on the wire shouting on the other dogs, she reappeared with the very un-dead runner. “Well done Alastair,” shouted the keeper. As if I had anything to do with it. But it made up for the light bag. n