Newton Mulgrave North Yorkshire

Before Covid confined us all to barracks last December, one lucky group of Guns enjoyed a testing partridge day near Whitby

- GRAHAM DOWNING

The stars of the show are the banks below the moorland edge; these steeply sloping, hanging woodlands enable birds to be launched off the fringe of the heather moor and flown over Guns.

From the edge of Borrowby Moor the views over the North Yorkshire countryside, across wooded ghylls to the North Sea beyond, are spectacular. And on a crisp December morning, with pheasants curling high off the moorland edge in a south-westerly breeze, there must be few more uplifting places to be in Northern England.

Borrowby Moor is one of the signature drives of the Newton Mulgrave shoot, which for the past three years has been run by seasoned North Yorkshire Guns Phil Bottomley and Alistair Reed.

“When our local farm shoot folded in 2005 I really missed it, so I approached local landowners, became shoot captain and got it going again on a syndicate basis,” said Bottomley. “I had shot three or four times at Newton Mulgrave and when I heard on the grapevine that the sporting lease over the estate was being offered, I approached Ali and we visited the estate on a shoot day just so that he could see the potential. The result was that we set up a shoot business together, we took the lease and we had our first season in 2019-20.”

There has been a shoot over the 1,600acre estate for many years, though in the past it was privately run. From the edge of the North York Moors, the country dips east towards the coast, taking in both rough grazing and, lower down the hill, improved pasture, all of it laced with wild, straggling hedgerows and banks of gorse, oak and beech. Cover crops of kale, maize and triticale back up the natural cover on the shoot’s 11 drives.