Lady killers
Now that salmon have been appearing in some of our rivers, it is perhaps worth remembering that women are better at catching heavier and greater numbers of fish than men.
One of the explanations given is their pheromones. Because the biggest salmon are cock fish, they are said to be attracted to women’s pheromones, which transmit themselves to the water through lures and lines.
I wonder if the same might apply to their prowess on the hill with the stags, especially during the rut, even although they are generally shot from downwind?
It all began with Diana the Huntress. Diana was associated with wild beasts and woodland, and was said to have the power to talk to and control animals. Although her name was eventually supplanted by Hubert, eldest son of the Duke of Aquitaine, who was declared patron saint of hunting, her legacy survived and she re-emerged as the Goddess of the Chase in 14th century Renaissance Europe.
Anne Boleyn, one of King Henry’s many wives, was a skilled archer. Her decapitated head would eventually lie in an elmwood box in which arrows were once stored.
European women of noble birth were taught to ride and hunt from childhood. During the Baroque period, marriages were plotted and arranged at extravagant hunting pageants in the forests in order to expand royal dynasties.
Long ago deer were killed with bows and arrows. A rare woodcut from a work published in 1555 shows a Lapp woman and her husband on skis, each holding a bow fitted with an arrow, their hunting dog at their side and the startled quarry, running above them. Hunting remains popular in Finland where, despite its small population, there are at least 10,000 women registered as hunters.
The early Victorians looked on women who hunted as “not quite nice”.
Lady Mildred Boynton, one of the contributors to a famous book, Ladies in the Field (1894), wrote: “A few years ago, a shooting lady was almost as rare as the Great Auk; if here and there one member of the sex, more venturesome than her fellows, were bold enough to take to the gun in preference to the knitting needle, she was looked upon as most eccentric and fast, and underwent much adverse criticism.” Lady Boynton urged the novice lady shooter to go straight to Mr Purdey in London for her firearm. She also suggested that the rifle should be fitted with an India-rubber butt plate to avoid a bruised shoulder and arm which, “if you happen to be going to a ball, does not perhaps add to your beauty”.
Today it helps to appear in the Sunday Times Rich List before heading off to be fitted for a Purdey!
The primeval Highland landscape provided the backdrop to many deer-killing expeditions.
Queen Victoria, although not a stalker herself, left vivid descriptions of accompanying Prince Albert to the hill in Leaves from the journal of our Life in the Highlands. Her passion for the mountains helped cultivate an environment which produced a special breed of highly adventuress and bloodthirsty women.
The first was Alma, daughter of the 4th Duke of Montrose and wife of the 7th Earl of Breadalbane, who owned several huge sporting estates, including the 100,000-acre Black Mount on Rannoch Moor. Here she indulged her passion for shooting which reached its peak on September 30, 1897, when dressed in a heavy, full-length tweed coat, she killed six stags with six bullets.
Her memoirs, The High Tops of Blackmount, became a famous classic.
Hard on the heels of Lady Breadalbane came Mrs Peter Fleming who, on Blackmount Forest, killed her 600th stag at the beginning of the 1968 season. By the time it had ended she added a further 23 to her total. When Mrs Fleming finally gave up stalking in 1985, aged 84 years, she had accounted for 930 stags.
Other ladies who shot stags in old age and who have since “gone to the hill”, were; Mrs Jessie Tyser of Gordonbush, Sutherland, who died in 1978 at the age of 85, and Irene, Marquesa de la Torrehermosa, who owned Achanalt estate in Ross-shire.
Top of the list though was Mrs Patricia Strutt of Kingairloch whom I had the pleasure of stalking with for nigh on 25 years. She shot her first stag at Kingairloch in 1930 when she was 19 and her last shortly before her death in 2000. At the age of 80 she sold her “Granny Bonds” and with the proceeds bought a custom-built rifle – probably the only woman in Britain to do so.
A superb markswoman and extremely quick, Mrs Strutt killed in excess of 800 deer over open-sights, a record broken only by Anne, the 86-year-old Duchess d’Uzes of France, who died in 1933 having shot slightly more in her life time.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Lady Isabel Graham, nee Sellar, holds the record for catching the heaviest salmon on the river Aline in
Morvern. It weighed 27lb and was landed along with another fish of 22lb on September 29, 1927. The fishing ghillie was Allan Macpherson from Claggan Cottage.