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004.jpg A Somerset welder makes up a rig to go on the back of a pic-up that can be used by foxshooters, 3456 x 2304
 
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003.jpg A Somerset welder makes up a rig to go on the back of a pic-up that can be used by foxshooters, 3456 x 2304
 
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002.jpg A Somerset welder makes up a rig to go on the back of a pic-up that can be used by foxshooters, 3456 x 2304
 
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001.jpg A Somerset welder makes up a rig to go on the back of a pic-up that can be used by foxshooters, 3456 x 2304
 
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011.jpg Foxshooter's bookshelf: DPM, Foxing with Rifle and Lamp; Robert Bucknall, The Badger, Predator Control, Fox Control; Sean Frain, Modern Vermin Control; Michael Roberts, Fur Feather and Fin Series The fox; T.F. Dale, Reynard The Fox; John Masefield, Hunting Scenes from Surtees, Fox Control The Warrener Way; The Warrener, Fanastic Mr Fox Roald Dahl.3288 x 2020
 
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010.jpg Foxshooter's bookshelf: DPM, Foxing with Rifle and Lamp; Robert Bucknall, The Badger, Predator Control, Fox Control; Sean Frain, Modern Vermin Control; Michael Roberts, Fur Feather and Fin Series The fox; T.F. Dale, Reynard The Fox; John Masefield, Hunting Scenes from Surtees, Fox Control The Warrener Way; The Warrener, Fanastic Mr Fox Roald Dahl.2932 x 1632
 
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009.jpg Foxshooter's bookshelf: DPM, Foxing with Rifle and Lamp; Robert Bucknall, The Badger, Predator Control, Fox Control; Sean Frain, Modern Vermin Control; Michael Roberts, Fur Feather and Fin Series The fox; T.F. Dale, Reynard The Fox; John Masefield, Hunting Scenes from Surtees, Fox Control The Warrener Way; The Warrener, Fanastic Mr Fox Roald Dahl.3036 x 1544
 
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008.jpg Foxing with Rifle and Lamp; Robert Bucknell1280 x 960
 
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038.jpg Cumbrian foxshooter Graham Askew, 3456 x 2304HEAD: Foxing on top of the worldSTAND: Bringing in foxes and shooting them on high hills has its own challenges. Charlie Jacoby meets Cumbrian foxshooter Graham AskewLucky that Graham Askew was there. It was the middle of the night and he was sat on top of hill in one of his foxshooting areas and he had his night vision trained on a likely patch of gorse. It’s not far from Junction 36 of the M6 and this was about the time of the Appleby Horse Fair. A white van backed through the gate and on to the land where the farmer keeps his sheep. A man got out and swept the field with a big torch.Graham felt nervous. The last thing you want to do when you are in charge of a Remington 7 .22-250 rifle is confront a sheep rustler. Happily, the man got back into the van and drove off without knowing he had been watched. Graham reported the incident to the farmer. “That’s it,” said the farmer. “We lock things up from now.”Thanks to his vigilance, Graham is a valued key-holder. And that’s good news, too, because Graham loves it here. It’s a glorious piece of North Country with views of the Yorkshire Dales one way, the fells of the Lake District the other and, far out to sea, the Isle of Man on a clear day. The 300 acres of land itself is sheep pasture dotted with clumps of gorse that are havens for rabbits and foxes alike. The farmer called in Graham five years ago to deal with the rabbits. He does that gladly but his main sport is the foxes.Graham has other foxshooting areas. A foxshooter for 17 years, there’s a wild pheasant shoot he looks after and a fishery where he has a DEFRA permit to deal with cormorants, too. This piece of land near Junction 36 is the place he likes to come and just sit. He is out on it twice a week. In the last fortnight of August he had nine foxes off it. He expects to shoot 20 there a year. “It’s fox paradise,” he says.He is having an effect on the fox population – though maybe they are becoming mo
 
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037.jpg Cumbrian foxshooter Graham Askew, 3456 x 2304HEAD: Foxing on top of the worldSTAND: Bringing in foxes and shooting them on high hills has its own challenges. Charlie Jacoby meets Cumbrian foxshooter Graham AskewLucky that Graham Askew was there. It was the middle of the night and he was sat on top of hill in one of his foxshooting areas and he had his night vision trained on a likely patch of gorse. It’s not far from Junction 36 of the M6 and this was about the time of the Appleby Horse Fair. A white van backed through the gate and on to the land where the farmer keeps his sheep. A man got out and swept the field with a big torch.Graham felt nervous. The last thing you want to do when you are in charge of a Remington 7 .22-250 rifle is confront a sheep rustler. Happily, the man got back into the van and drove off without knowing he had been watched. Graham reported the incident to the farmer. “That’s it,” said the farmer. “We lock things up from now.”Thanks to his vigilance, Graham is a valued key-holder. And that’s good news, too, because Graham loves it here. It’s a glorious piece of North Country with views of the Yorkshire Dales one way, the fells of the Lake District the other and, far out to sea, the Isle of Man on a clear day. The 300 acres of land itself is sheep pasture dotted with clumps of gorse that are havens for rabbits and foxes alike. The farmer called in Graham five years ago to deal with the rabbits. He does that gladly but his main sport is the foxes.Graham has other foxshooting areas. A foxshooter for 17 years, there’s a wild pheasant shoot he looks after and a fishery where he has a DEFRA permit to deal with cormorants, too. This piece of land near Junction 36 is the place he likes to come and just sit. He is out on it twice a week. In the last fortnight of August he had nine foxes off it. He expects to shoot 20 there a year. “It’s fox paradise,” he says.He is having an effect on the fox population – though maybe they are becoming mo
 
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014.jpg Somerset foxshooter Chris Whitfield, 3072 x 2304ORIGINAL ARTICLEFox vs TitanTake RWS’s new centrefire to shoot a fox. Sporting Rifle joins Haggis Hartman and his Somerset lamping team to try out a .22-250 TitanPoint the lamp into the night sky in most other counties in England and that’s what you will see. Sky. Point it in that direction on the edge of Exmoor and the chances are you will see hillside. For anyone who enjoys lamping with a rifle, it makes this wonderful foxing country. You shoot in three dimensions here, not just two.The “loop” from Haggis Hartman’s home takes in two shoots and any number of ewes in lamb. It’s fox heaven. It’s a distance of no more than 10 miles but it takes an hour to drive if you’re lamping and it has taken Haggis and his friends up to four hours to complete. They regularly lamp and shoot foxes into double figures. Near here is land owned by prominent anti Sir Paul McCartney. Locals believe that animal sanctuaries dump foxes on his ground. Haggis and Chris have not seen it firsthand but one shooter locally describes knocking down 19 in just a few minutes. He says the foxes stood and looked at him – and one of them had evidence of stitching which, he said, was “better than you get on the NHS”.Shotgun shooters may be surprised to read Haggis’s name in a rifle magazine. Clay shooters will know him as a Great Britain and England International. He has shot for Great Britain as part of the gold medal winning team at the World FITASC championships in New Zealand 2001, and also for the England FITASC team in 2003 achieving high gun at one of the selection shoots. He has also shot for England at Olympic Skeet in 1989 and 1990. Pheasant shooters indulging in England’s finest pheasants will know him as the manager of West Country Guns in Wiveliscombe, Somerset.If they had that kind of sense, foxes should learn to recognise Haggis, however. Foxing is one of his great passions – as it is for other team members Justin Sully who was dri
 
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007.jpg Northamptonshire pest controller Danny Sumpter shows his foxing rifle, based on a Sako .223 and customised by Norman Clarke of Rugby. It has a Swarovski scope. 3456 x 2304
 
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078.jpg Remington 700, 3456 x 2304ORIGINAL ARTICLEKeith Varley’s foxing rifle started life as a 22-250 Remington 700. A friend of his had it for target shooting and liked its groups, so he sent it down to Norman Clark Gunsmith for some customisation. Norman Clark converted it to 6mm PPC, put on a Shilen trigger and a barrel by Border Barrels, glass bedded into the stock. Then the friend found an even better rifle, so sold this one to Keith. “I would have had a Jewell trigger but the Shilen trigger is what Norman did,” says Keith.The set-up includes a Nightforce 8-32x56 scope with ladder reticle instead of mil-dot and a sidewheel adjustment. Keith explains: “There’s a lot of woodland where I shoot. You get foxes creeping around. You will see an eye; you have checked it’s a fox not a roe deer. The beauty of this scope is you can zoom in from the back and adjust the focus on the sidewheel.“With a Swarovski scope, you daren’t do that, because if you start fiddling with the focus/zoom at the front, you can lose the fox. The only problem with the Nightforce scope is its pop-up lens protectors, which swivel when you zoom in.”The rifle has a Harris bipod. Keith likes the heavier bipods but prefers shooting off a bag when using the car bonnet as a rest.He also has a monopod near the butt of the rifle, which he grips with his left hand when he takes a shot. “I was brought up to believe that the less contact I have with the gun the better,” he says.“I’ve got quite a lot of money tied up in the rifle and scope but, if I’m doing a job, I’ve got to do it well. Every shot I take, I put a rod through it.”He doesn’t use a moderator on this gun because the extra weight would make it feel awkward but he has a Reflex T8 on his other gun – a Mannlicher .243 Rem he bought for deer. He says he has a friend who worked in forestry and went deaf because he used an unmoderated rifle. Scope on that is a 6-18x50 Swarovski on Mannlicher snap-on mounts. He also owns a .22 Hornet.“I don’t think
 
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040.jpg Cumbrian foxshooter Graham Askew, 3456 x 2304HEAD: Foxing on top of the worldSTAND: Bringing in foxes and shooting them on high hills has its own challenges. Charlie Jacoby meets Cumbrian foxshooter Graham AskewLucky that Graham Askew was there. It was the middle of the night and he was sat on top of hill in one of his foxshooting areas and he had his night vision trained on a likely patch of gorse. It’s not far from Junction 36 of the M6 and this was about the time of the Appleby Horse Fair. A white van backed through the gate and on to the land where the farmer keeps his sheep. A man got out and swept the field with a big torch.Graham felt nervous. The last thing you want to do when you are in charge of a Remington 7 .22-250 rifle is confront a sheep rustler. Happily, the man got back into the van and drove off without knowing he had been watched. Graham reported the incident to the farmer. “That’s it,” said the farmer. “We lock things up from now.”Thanks to his vigilance, Graham is a valued key-holder. And that’s good news, too, because Graham loves it here. It’s a glorious piece of North Country with views of the Yorkshire Dales one way, the fells of the Lake District the other and, far out to sea, the Isle of Man on a clear day. The 300 acres of land itself is sheep pasture dotted with clumps of gorse that are havens for rabbits and foxes alike. The farmer called in Graham five years ago to deal with the rabbits. He does that gladly but his main sport is the foxes.Graham has other foxshooting areas. A foxshooter for 17 years, there’s a wild pheasant shoot he looks after and a fishery where he has a DEFRA permit to deal with cormorants, too. This piece of land near Junction 36 is the place he likes to come and just sit. He is out on it twice a week. In the last fortnight of August he had nine foxes off it. He expects to shoot 20 there a year. “It’s fox paradise,” he says.He is having an effect on the fox population – though maybe they are becoming mo
 
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039.jpg Cumbrian foxshooter Graham Askew, 3456 x 2304HEAD: Foxing on top of the worldSTAND: Bringing in foxes and shooting them on high hills has its own challenges. Charlie Jacoby meets Cumbrian foxshooter Graham AskewLucky that Graham Askew was there. It was the middle of the night and he was sat on top of hill in one of his foxshooting areas and he had his night vision trained on a likely patch of gorse. It’s not far from Junction 36 of the M6 and this was about the time of the Appleby Horse Fair. A white van backed through the gate and on to the land where the farmer keeps his sheep. A man got out and swept the field with a big torch.Graham felt nervous. The last thing you want to do when you are in charge of a Remington 7 .22-250 rifle is confront a sheep rustler. Happily, the man got back into the van and drove off without knowing he had been watched. Graham reported the incident to the farmer. “That’s it,” said the farmer. “We lock things up from now.”Thanks to his vigilance, Graham is a valued key-holder. And that’s good news, too, because Graham loves it here. It’s a glorious piece of North Country with views of the Yorkshire Dales one way, the fells of the Lake District the other and, far out to sea, the Isle of Man on a clear day. The 300 acres of land itself is sheep pasture dotted with clumps of gorse that are havens for rabbits and foxes alike. The farmer called in Graham five years ago to deal with the rabbits. He does that gladly but his main sport is the foxes.Graham has other foxshooting areas. A foxshooter for 17 years, there’s a wild pheasant shoot he looks after and a fishery where he has a DEFRA permit to deal with cormorants, too. This piece of land near Junction 36 is the place he likes to come and just sit. He is out on it twice a week. In the last fortnight of August he had nine foxes off it. He expects to shoot 20 there a year. “It’s fox paradise,” he says.He is having an effect on the fox population – though maybe they are becoming mo
 
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036.jpg Cumbrian foxshooter Graham Askew, 3456 x 2304HEAD: Foxing on top of the worldSTAND: Bringing in foxes and shooting them on high hills has its own challenges. Charlie Jacoby meets Cumbrian foxshooter Graham AskewLucky that Graham Askew was there. It was the middle of the night and he was sat on top of hill in one of his foxshooting areas and he had his night vision trained on a likely patch of gorse. It’s not far from Junction 36 of the M6 and this was about the time of the Appleby Horse Fair. A white van backed through the gate and on to the land where the farmer keeps his sheep. A man got out and swept the field with a big torch.Graham felt nervous. The last thing you want to do when you are in charge of a Remington 7 .22-250 rifle is confront a sheep rustler. Happily, the man got back into the van and drove off without knowing he had been watched. Graham reported the incident to the farmer. “That’s it,” said the farmer. “We lock things up from now.”Thanks to his vigilance, Graham is a valued key-holder. And that’s good news, too, because Graham loves it here. It’s a glorious piece of North Country with views of the Yorkshire Dales one way, the fells of the Lake District the other and, far out to sea, the Isle of Man on a clear day. The 300 acres of land itself is sheep pasture dotted with clumps of gorse that are havens for rabbits and foxes alike. The farmer called in Graham five years ago to deal with the rabbits. He does that gladly but his main sport is the foxes.Graham has other foxshooting areas. A foxshooter for 17 years, there’s a wild pheasant shoot he looks after and a fishery where he has a DEFRA permit to deal with cormorants, too. This piece of land near Junction 36 is the place he likes to come and just sit. He is out on it twice a week. In the last fortnight of August he had nine foxes off it. He expects to shoot 20 there a year. “It’s fox paradise,” he says.He is having an effect on the fox population – though maybe they are becoming mo
 
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021.jpg Foxing set-up: Austin (left) and Somerset gamekeeper Steve Hamar, 3072 x 2304
 
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015.jpg Somerset foxshooters Haggis Hartman (left) and Chris Whitfield, 3072 x 2304ORIGINAL ARTICLEFox vs TitanTake RWS’s new centrefire to shoot a fox. Sporting Rifle joins Haggis Hartman and his Somerset lamping team to try out a .22-250 TitanPoint the lamp into the night sky in most other counties in England and that’s what you will see. Sky. Point it in that direction on the edge of Exmoor and the chances are you will see hillside. For anyone who enjoys lamping with a rifle, it makes this wonderful foxing country. You shoot in three dimensions here, not just two.The “loop” from Haggis Hartman’s home takes in two shoots and any number of ewes in lamb. It’s fox heaven. It’s a distance of no more than 10 miles but it takes an hour to drive if you’re lamping and it has taken Haggis and his friends up to four hours to complete. They regularly lamp and shoot foxes into double figures. Near here is land owned by prominent anti Sir Paul McCartney. Locals believe that animal sanctuaries dump foxes on his ground. Haggis and Chris have not seen it firsthand but one shooter locally describes knocking down 19 in just a few minutes. He says the foxes stood and looked at him – and one of them had evidence of stitching which, he said, was “better than you get on the NHS”.Shotgun shooters may be surprised to read Haggis’s name in a rifle magazine. Clay shooters will know him as a Great Britain and England International. He has shot for Great Britain as part of the gold medal winning team at the World FITASC championships in New Zealand 2001, and also for the England FITASC team in 2003 achieving high gun at one of the selection shoots. He has also shot for England at Olympic Skeet in 1989 and 1990. Pheasant shooters indulging in England’s finest pheasants will know him as the manager of West Country Guns in Wiveliscombe, Somerset.If they had that kind of sense, foxes should learn to recognise Haggis, however. Foxing is one of his great passions – as it is for other team member
 
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005.jpg Robert Bucknall author of Foxing with Lamp and Rifle. Lamping foxes using a CAM EX4
 
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006.jpg Charlie Jacoby uses a Callmaster call, 3456 x 2304ORIGINAL ARTICLEI had with me an electronic caller from Decoying.co.uk, which Howard Heywood tested in the last issue of Sporting Rifle. A point he made was to use it sparingly. A few squeaks of a rabbit here and there is more realistic for a fox than a rabbit squeak going on and on. The digital caller comes with chips loaded with sounds. It did not have, I noticed, the mewing of a vulnerable kitten.Surveying the farmyard where there were cats, chickens, duck and all of it a potential feast to a fearless fox, I reckoned the predator could only come through one of two gates. The wind was wrong for one of them, so I followed the fox’s future path back out into the field from whence it would come. There was another gateway on the other wide of the field and covering both it and the farmyard gate was a perfect thorny corner. I’m a great fan of these. I use my pigeon hide kit but I use the camo net to make a roof as well as a wall to take the sun off my face. Having set up the digital foxcaller, built the hide and put the stool and dog inside it, it was a question of waiting. And waiting. And waiting.It took two hours, during which time the pheasants went noisily to bed, the thin winter sun ducked behind the hedgerows then sat sulkily for 30 minutes, I could hear the poultry being shut up, I could see two cats scouring the hedges for rabbits (leave some for me) and a bat flitted over head. It’s December – shouldn’t they be hibernating?As the fox slipped through the gate in front of me, I leveled the M03 and silently cocked it. The first shot was a definite hit but the fox bolted forward, then slowed. It took a couple of seconds to work the bolt and send another round in as a safety shot. The fox was dead.The Callmaster costs £165 and spare chips are £39.99 each. www.decoying.co.uk
 
Callmaster Predator call
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030.jpg Somerset fox lamper Chris Whitfield, 2304 x 3072ORIGINAL ARTICLEFox vs TitanTake RWS’s new centrefire to shoot a fox. Sporting Rifle joins Haggis Hartman and his Somerset lamping team to try out a .22-250 TitanPoint the lamp into the night sky in most other counties in England and that’s what you will see. Sky. Point it in that direction on the edge of Exmoor and the chances are you will see hillside. For anyone who enjoys lamping with a rifle, it makes this wonderful foxing country. You shoot in three dimensions here, not just two.The “loop” from Haggis Hartman’s home takes in two shoots and any number of ewes in lamb. It’s fox heaven. It’s a distance of no more than 10 miles but it takes an hour to drive if you’re lamping and it has taken Haggis and his friends up to four hours to complete. They regularly lamp and shoot foxes into double figures. Near here is land owned by prominent anti Sir Paul McCartney. Locals believe that animal sanctuaries dump foxes on his ground. Haggis and Chris have not seen it firsthand but one shooter locally describes knocking down 19 in just a few minutes. He says the foxes stood and looked at him – and one of them had evidence of stitching which, he said, was “better than you get on the NHS”.Shotgun shooters may be surprised to read Haggis’s name in a rifle magazine. Clay shooters will know him as a Great Britain and England International. He has shot for Great Britain as part of the gold medal winning team at the World FITASC championships in New Zealand 2001, and also for the England FITASC team in 2003 achieving high gun at one of the selection shoots. He has also shot for England at Olympic Skeet in 1989 and 1990. Pheasant shooters indulging in England’s finest pheasants will know him as the manager of West Country Guns in Wiveliscombe, Somerset.If they had that kind of sense, foxes should learn to recognise Haggis, however. Foxing is one of his great passions – as it is for other team members Justin Sully who was dri
 
Chris Whitfield
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042.jpg Cumbrian foxshooter Graham Askew, 3456 x 2304HEAD: Foxing on top of the worldSTAND: Bringing in foxes and shooting them on high hills has its own challenges. Charlie Jacoby meets Cumbrian foxshooter Graham AskewLucky that Graham Askew was there. It was the middle of the night and he was sat on top of hill in one of his foxshooting areas and he had his night vision trained on a likely patch of gorse. It’s not far from Junction 36 of the M6 and this was about the time of the Appleby Horse Fair. A white van backed through the gate and on to the land where the farmer keeps his sheep. A man got out and swept the field with a big torch.Graham felt nervous. The last thing you want to do when you are in charge of a Remington 7 .22-250 rifle is confront a sheep rustler. Happily, the man got back into the van and drove off without knowing he had been watched. Graham reported the incident to the farmer. “That’s it,” said the farmer. “We lock things up from now.”Thanks to his vigilance, Graham is a valued key-holder. And that’s good news, too, because Graham loves it here. It’s a glorious piece of North Country with views of the Yorkshire Dales one way, the fells of the Lake District the other and, far out to sea, the Isle of Man on a clear day. The 300 acres of land itself is sheep pasture dotted with clumps of gorse that are havens for rabbits and foxes alike. The farmer called in Graham five years ago to deal with the rabbits. He does that gladly but his main sport is the foxes.Graham has other foxshooting areas. A foxshooter for 17 years, there’s a wild pheasant shoot he looks after and a fishery where he has a DEFRA permit to deal with cormorants, too. This piece of land near Junction 36 is the place he likes to come and just sit. He is out on it twice a week. In the last fortnight of August he had nine foxes off it. He expects to shoot 20 there a year. “It’s fox paradise,” he says.He is having an effect on the fox population – though maybe they are becoming mo
 
Cumbrian foxshooter Graham Askew
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041.jpg Cumbrian foxshooter Graham Askew, 3456 x 2304HEAD: Foxing on top of the worldSTAND: Bringing in foxes and shooting them on high hills has its own challenges. Charlie Jacoby meets Cumbrian foxshooter Graham AskewLucky that Graham Askew was there. It was the middle of the night and he was sat on top of hill in one of his foxshooting areas and he had his night vision trained on a likely patch of gorse. It’s not far from Junction 36 of the M6 and this was about the time of the Appleby Horse Fair. A white van backed through the gate and on to the land where the farmer keeps his sheep. A man got out and swept the field with a big torch.Graham felt nervous. The last thing you want to do when you are in charge of a Remington 7 .22-250 rifle is confront a sheep rustler. Happily, the man got back into the van and drove off without knowing he had been watched. Graham reported the incident to the farmer. “That’s it,” said the farmer. “We lock things up from now.”Thanks to his vigilance, Graham is a valued key-holder. And that’s good news, too, because Graham loves it here. It’s a glorious piece of North Country with views of the Yorkshire Dales one way, the fells of the Lake District the other and, far out to sea, the Isle of Man on a clear day. The 300 acres of land itself is sheep pasture dotted with clumps of gorse that are havens for rabbits and foxes alike. The farmer called in Graham five years ago to deal with the rabbits. He does that gladly but his main sport is the foxes.Graham has other foxshooting areas. A foxshooter for 17 years, there’s a wild pheasant shoot he looks after and a fishery where he has a DEFRA permit to deal with cormorants, too. This piece of land near Junction 36 is the place he likes to come and just sit. He is out on it twice a week. In the last fortnight of August he had nine foxes off it. He expects to shoot 20 there a year. “It’s fox paradise,” he says.He is having an effect on the fox population – though maybe they are becoming mo
 
Cumbrian foxshooter Graham Askew
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044.jpg Lamping foxes in Cumbria with Keith Varley, 3456 x 2304ORIGINAL ARTICLEHEAD: ‘Find me a fell fox’STANDFIRST: Shooting on England’s uplands requires special skills and kit. Charlie Jacoby heads to the beautiful Cumbrian Lake District to meet professional foxshooter Keith VarleyIt’s a tall order. It’s August – normally Keith Varley’s downtime, when he doesn’t do much foxing. Now I want him to find me a fox and shoot it.We’re in the Duddon Valley in the Cumbrian lake district where foxes have plenty of places to hide. The bracken is high, the trees are in leaf and fox numbers were heavily thinned earlier in the year.Keith hooks up with his friend Eric Morrison and we set out at night to walk the fells with a lamp. In the daytime in this beautiful country, you see plenty of ramblers dressed in state-of the-art walking boots, thermal cagouls and carrying aluminium sticks. It would be interesting to see them attempting their high fell walks in the black cold night. But now Keith, Eric and Keith’s son Stephen are in their element. This is their passion.Keith’s foxing year starts in September, when he is terrierman for local fell packs. These footpacks do “control” days for Cumbrian sheep farmers with two hounds to guns. Keith is also widely used by shoots, which phone him when they have foxes taking their pheasants.In March, Keith heads north to Argyllshire, where a group of 30 local farmers and forestry concerns pays him to spend nine weeks clearing out foxes. He has been doing this job for the last 16 years and his son Stephen has come up to help him for the last three. “I get a fixed fee – it’s a nice earner – and I usually get a bonus,” he says.The same Argyllshire farms has run this system for more than a century. Keith’s predecessor was a local gamekeeper, who was on call all year round. “There are a few cooperatives like this,” he says.Argyllshire is fox heaven. There’s food for them all year– lambs, rabbits and, especially, mice. When he is in Argyllsh
 
Lamping foxes in Cumbria with Keith Varley
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081.jpg Somerset gamekeeper Nathan Hards, 2304 x 3456ORIGINAL ARTICLEThere is a choppy bit of country on the way from the Rest Of The World to Exmoor. It lies on and around the Brendon Hills. Somerset is blessed with several evocative ranges of hills. Romantic poets loved the Quantocks, the quarry companies love the Mendips, Exeter commuters the Blackdowns but shooters love the Brendons.In the 60 square miles of land bounded by Wellington, Tiverton, Bampton and Wiveliscombe, you will not find many visitors apart from shooters. The few roads there are don't follow the valleys and most of the signposts, local folk reckon, are still off being melted down to be made into Spitfires.There are some big shoots there but Saturdays are characterised by numerous small farmer syndicates and family days out. One such shoot is Bathealton Court. Until this season, it was a family shoot providing 30-bird days five times a season. Part-time keeper Nathan Hards would put down and bring on 300 birds every season. The estate changed hands recently and the new owners, both keen shooters, have stepped Nathan's work up a gear to give nine days a season of 100+ with two or three rough days.Bathealton still maintains its relaxed family atmosphere. However, Nathan now has his work cut out.To do that work, Nathan has been thinking more carefully about his kit and his methods. What he worked out is not good news for rimfire shooters. There is plenty of the kind of quarry here that rimfire aficionados are used to shooting - such as rabbits and crows - but there are better ways to get into this kind of pest. He will use a .22LR but he has found that, in this kind of country, characterised by streams among small but steep hills and patches of woodland on both the tops and the bottoms, the most effective methods are his .222 foxing rifle, traps and his shotgun.Nathan is no stranger to rifle shooting. He used to do most of it walking around the estate. When he saw what he was after, he would take
 
Nathan Hards
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080.jpg Somerset gamekeeper Nathan Hards, 2304 x 3456ORIGINAL ARTICLEThere is a choppy bit of country on the way from the Rest Of The World to Exmoor. It lies on and around the Brendon Hills. Somerset is blessed with several evocative ranges of hills. Romantic poets loved the Quantocks, the quarry companies love the Mendips, Exeter commuters the Blackdowns but shooters love the Brendons.In the 60 square miles of land bounded by Wellington, Tiverton, Bampton and Wiveliscombe, you will not find many visitors apart from shooters. The few roads there are don't follow the valleys and most of the signposts, local folk reckon, are still off being melted down to be made into Spitfires.There are some big shoots there but Saturdays are characterised by numerous small farmer syndicates and family days out. One such shoot is Bathealton Court. Until this season, it was a family shoot providing 30-bird days five times a season. Part-time keeper Nathan Hards would put down and bring on 300 birds every season. The estate changed hands recently and the new owners, both keen shooters, have stepped Nathan's work up a gear to give nine days a season of 100+ with two or three rough days.Bathealton still maintains its relaxed family atmosphere. However, Nathan now has his work cut out.To do that work, Nathan has been thinking more carefully about his kit and his methods. What he worked out is not good news for rimfire shooters. There is plenty of the kind of quarry here that rimfire aficionados are used to shooting - such as rabbits and crows - but there are better ways to get into this kind of pest. He will use a .22LR but he has found that, in this kind of country, characterised by streams among small but steep hills and patches of woodland on both the tops and the bottoms, the most effective methods are his .222 foxing rifle, traps and his shotgun.Nathan is no stranger to rifle shooting. He used to do most of it walking around the estate. When he saw what he was after, he would take
 
Nathan Hards
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