Heaven is a High Four

A team of guns enjoy a day of the finest sport Devon has to offer, courtesy of the GWCT and a quartet of generous shoot owners

- Rory Knight Bruce

IN THE opening pages of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the narrator, Captain Charles Ryder, finds himself back, in middle age, I in the grounds of a stately mansion he had known in his teenage years. It was for him a strange feeling of elegy and optimism, and one I was to experience throughout the GWCT Devon High Four day as we visited four estates I had first encountered shooting in my teenage years; a feeling tempered by time but also, for the estates, sporting and dynamic futures.

These brilliant GWCT days, which raise upwards of £40,000 for this most worthwhile of charities, are, however, more like a challenge undertaken by Anneka Rice than one of Lord Sebastian Flyte's 1920s 'flapper" parties. First comes the generous consent of the shoot owners. Then the sheer logistics of transporting eight guns and their partners to four different locations (in specially commissioned Land Rover Discoveries, complete with drivers, thanks to Land Rover Experience of Honiton) is some undertaking. There was also the tail-end of Storm Ciarán to throw into the mix.

How do these days come about? "We do an online raffle of 250 tickets at £250 a ticket, and the winner gets the day, a stay in a nearby hotel the night before, and some pretty spectacular shooting," explains GWCT Devon chairman Stewart Priddle, on hand throughout the day to ensure everything ran smoothly. He was ably assisted by regional organiser Sam Middleton and GWCT volunteer Andy Cameron, who made certain, being driven by him, that I was always in the right place. Middleton had created a special WhatsApp group for the shoot owners for the day so they would know at all times where the guns were.

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