Fieldy Boxing Days

Do you favour a sporting St Stephen's Day or one spent in the sun? Find your tribe with The Field's guide to post-Christmas capers in the field and beyond

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THE CHRISTMAS season is full of rituals and routine but Boxing Day is when true sporting colours are tied to the mast. Are you a festive-blowout type that likes a potter to the pub the following day? The sort that requires adrenaline and vin chaud to function? Or a family-shoot stalwart? One can leap between loyalties but we're not sure that those who shun the Boxing Day Meet ever lose a niggling sense of needing to be somewhere else when lying on a sunbed. Does that post-festive tan trump the lot? Whichever St Stephen's Day tribe you're part of, we wish you a very sporting one with its rituals receiving the solemnity they deserve.

Shooting

The Boxing Day shoot is not usually a day of set drives ordered with military precision. Often more of an 'armed ramble' around boundaries or areas only accessible on such holidays, it is a test of concentration and carrying capacity: transporting what you need, anything you shoot, quite possibly your dog and even small children over rough ground and fences. Your quarry, as likely a grey squirrel as a gamebird, might come from anywhere and can leave the guns feeling rather like Elmer Fudd. The benefit of all this is that there is likely to be much hilarity.

Festive jumpers, Christmas hats and an array of new kitwillbeondisplay. It is frequentlyanoccasionatwhich whole families can turn out together: smalls wrapped up like the Michelin Man compete with the dogs to pick up, young guns are given their chance, while canny old stagers offer to act as a stop only to be discovered by the rest of the guns, at the end of a fruitless struggle through undergrowth, standing within hailing distance of their car and with a neat pile of birds at their feet.

Hunting