George M Mitchell: How grouse shooting became big business in Scotland

The “Glorious Twelfth” of August was, like now, when it began each year. In those days, the farm was part of a relatively small estate, and the shooting was let out to a private customer. He was a relatively local businessman, whom one could depend on to turn up along with a few pals every Saturday during the season to have a bit of “sport”.

The men with the guns would spread out across the moorland and have a pot-shot at basically anything that moved. There wasn’t anything, at that time, in the way of organising the shooting season into big money, big business, as would be the case later. The worst one would have to deal with, as the tenant farmer, was to cope with disturbance to your sheep.

That was soon to change however. The elderly estate owner passed on and the land fell into the hands of a much larger and unsympathetic estate. It fell into the control of a family with wide business interests and the shooting would become a serious part of their lifeblood as it apparently became an important part of company hospitality for business associates from around the world. It also heralded the arrival on the scene of a whole regiment of gamekeepers.

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At that time, the new laws which gave a large amount of protection to other varieties of the bird population were still some years off, so few things were safe. I can recall quite vividly finding, as I went about my daily business of walking the moorland to check on the sheep, finding a gin trap. In its jaws struggled an unfortunate seagull.

There were areas of very wet ground – sufficiently wet that one would not normally walk across it – and in the centre of such an area the trap had been set, baited with part of a rabbit carcase. Enter the unfortunate gull. The snapping shut of the trap had shattered the leg of the bird, and the best which could achieved was to liberate it and let it fly away.

Nearby was a second similarly laid out trap. Both were taken away and flung into a deep pool in the local burn, where I trust their rusty bits remain.

At that time, it was standard practice for hill farms leases to include a clause which forbade muirburn by the tenant, muirburn being the Scottish legal description for heather burning by a farmer.

This could only be carried out by a tenant farmer who had acquired written approval to do this from the landowner. You could be evicted for disregarding this rule. Needless to say this permission was never, to my knowledge, granted.

Around this time, I was fortunate enough to be recommended by the local Agricultural Department representative for a place on a three-month course for tenant farmer’s sons being held at the Agricultural College in Ayrshire.

We had a useful and enjoyable time covering everything one could imagine, including an interesting session on matters legal. Naturally, as we were all around our late-teens or thereabouts, we all returned home convinced that we knew it all!

My father had now obtained a tractor, and there was a nice area of land which could have been brought into efficient use by ploughing; sadly it was covered in grouse protecting heather, and no, permission to muirburn it would not be given.

This is where the college course came into play. I persuaded my father that if we used the ancient hay-making mower to cut off the offending heather at the ground, let it wither for a couple of weeks and then collect it into piles and set fire to it, the muirburn clause would not be relevant.

One hitherto uneventful afternoon, the first pile of collected “rubbish’” having been set fire to, the smoke rose peacefully into the sky. I continued to collect together the next pile to be incinerated, when over the hill arrived at great speed in his Land Rover, the gamekeeper.

For some time, we had been under surveillance by the estate’s squad of them, their field glasses reflecting the sunlight through the leaves of the trees behind which they were hiding.

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BUT this was no ordinary run-of-the-mill keeper.

This was the top man who had been alerted by one of his spies as the smoke rose heavenwards.

He proceeded to stop my tractor and then drag me down on to the ground out of the seat – they didn’t have cabs in those days. As he was a former Second World War sergeant major, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it.

Even if I had, I fear that any objection on my part would have been useless. The forelock-tugging attitude towards the landed gentry was the order of the day then.

We were, however, able to proceed with the ploughing up and bringing into good productive use the area of land without any threat of eviction.

The relentless pursuit of game shooting as a “sport” has continued apace. It is quite a number of years since a nesting hen harrier was seen in these part. As recently as about three years ago I came upon a dead buzzard, which was handed over to the police. Verdict – death by poisoning with an illegal substance. No perpetrator could however be identified. And so it goes on; this must be one of the serious avenues for action by a future government of an independent Scotland.