A magical day at Miltons

As another season draws to a close, a party of family and friends gather to celebrate a milestone birthday with a testing day on a singular Exmoor shoot

- Rory Knight

THERE IS something about the last day of the shooting season that speaks of school desk lids being firmly shut and caps being thrown into the air. All winter long, from early September, keepers and beaters, guns and gundogs, lodge chefs and fragrant front-of-house managers have worked all hours to produce fine sport and sociable hospitality. And then suddenly, for another year, it is gone.

So the last day of the season is, in many ways, a 'final hurrah' where the significant pressures of a shooting day are to some extent relaxed, not by standards but by a cheerfulness that says 'it is the end of term.' Nowhere was this in better evidence than at the Miltons shoot on Exmoor, one of six in the spectacular Loyton Sporting portfolio.

Its teams had been going out with guest guns six times a week all season. But it was a testament to their unremitting commitment to good sport and hospitality that the group of family and friends shooting, who had travelled from Kent for a 150- to 200-bird day, were doing so with Loyton for the fifth time this year.

Nor was it destined to be an ordinary day. Host Bill Barling, who has been bringing parties to shoot on Exmoor for many years, would be celebrating his 90th birthday over the weekend, with all guns and their partners staying at the Exmoor White Horse Inn at Exford. “They know us and we know them, which always makes for a happy atmosphere,” Barling's partner, Lesley Pettett, told me over coffee in the well-appointed shoot lodge at Miltons. This 6,000-acre private estate, owned by the hugely sporting Thomas-Everard family, offers 20 drives in picturesque woodland surroundings, some with streams running dreamily past the pegs.