Very British hunting blinds

Grouse butts, smart and simple, are part of our sporting heritage, says Patrick Laurie, but in lots of places only ghost butts now remain

- Patrick Laurie

Deep in the dark plantations of Galloway, there are lines of long-forgotten grouse butts that lie along the forest rides. Many have tumbled down into ruin, and more moss grows over the old stones with every passing year. These butts are an eerie reminder of days gone by, but it can be hard to imagine grouse being shot on moors that have since become commercial forests. Butts are often all that survives of an old tradition, and it feels strange that they should persist so long after the moors have vanished.

Most of these old butts are made from stacks of dry, unmortared stone. They're wonderful creations, and many would have been topped with sods of peat for camouflage. Given they are made from the very fabric of a place, they often have a sense of permanence, but the truth is that few butts are more than 150 years old. Driven grouse shooting is something of the baby of fieldsports, and it only emerged in force during the late Victorian period. Until that point, grouse had been pursued entirely with dogs on walked up days.

Many of the old purists were disgusted by the idea of driven grouse when it began to gather steam in the 1870s, but the fashion spread like wildfire. The first drives were improvised affairs, and most Guns were expected to crawl into position behind rocks or walls where birds were known to fly. There they would wait until the grouse had passed, then emerge to shoot them from behind.

As the quality of guns improved and shotguns were produced in pairs to support a growing appetite for partridge and pheasant shooting in the lowlands, sporting folk aspired to take two in front and two behind from a comfortable, carefully positioned butt. The word butt may come from the French battue, a formal word for most kinds of driven shooting. Soon it was de rigueur, not only to shoot grouse as they were driven but also to make that shot from the comfort of a butt.