Ducks as an art form

Not a fan of driven duck? Neither was Patrick Galbraith — until he accepted an invitation to a join a shooting party in Wales for a day

It’s not smoking,” says the Yorkshireman, passing an old wooden pipe across the table, “it’s an art.” I pack down the tobacco, tilt the bowl and watch the leaves start to smoulder. Twenty seconds later, the glow fades and half an hour on, after innumerable attempts — fingertips burned and eye lashes singed — I put the pipe back among the others and admit defeat.

Grisedale, as his second wife calls him, looks momentarily saddened then launches back into recounting fierce battles he fought with local poachers “in more boisterous times when you could still punch a man”.

With his beehives to tend and a private pack of foxhounds to hunt, I don’t imagine Charles Grisedale has much time for amateur dramatics but one imagines he’d make a superlative Heathcliff.

Early the following morning we sit atop a hill, surrounded by Devon cattle, looking down on to “ a very large pond. “Almost everything that flies up the Welsh coast stops off here,” says Charles, gesturing towards the sea. “The behaviour of migratory ducks really stirs up the mallard I put down.”

It was the fabled wildness of the birds that brought me to Cefngwyn Hall. Some months earlier, I had written a piece suggesting that self-respecting Guns should decline invitations to shoot driven quackers — in total silence. As we shelter with our backs to a wooded bog, the rain starts to fall, a sleety squall sweeping in across Cardigan Bay on the north wind. It is one of those September mornings when you stand there with your thumb going numb on the safety catch, feeling entirely robbed of all that mellow fruitfulness and mist.

“Picking out the lowest flyer, I fire both shots in quick succession. The drake flies on”