| Lovely description of a day spent in cultivated wild loveliness. |
[Financial Times] Iain Smith hops through a patch of thigh-high heather, the barrel of a shotgun resting idly on his forearm. "If it looks green and mossy, don’t step on it," he says. The only way forward is green moss. "Is there another way?" I ask. He shushes me and points to the hill up ahead.
Smith and I are on a grouse hunt. The British way of describing this is "walked-up shooting", a practice that has been common in the UK since the 16th century, where birds are flushed out as a group crosses a moor. The event has been organised by Scottish country-house hotel Gleneagles, of which Smith is head shooting coach, and includes 10 humans, four guns and eight dogs. So far two birds have been shot: one by the hotel’s marketing director — an event that seems to surprise everyone — and another by its director of leisure, a man whose "wife has banned feathers in the house" and who likes to roast his catch wrapped in bacon.
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