Grimsthorpe: new season, new shoot

The team who took on the Park Syndicate used the first day of the season to test its potential on friends and family

- JANET MENZIES

The thrilling anticipation of waking up on a sunny September morning to the first day’s partridge shooting of the season is unmatchable – only surpassed when it is also the first day of a new shoot, and that shoot is your shoot. Anything could happen. All your work and planning alongside the keeper over the spring and summer could have perfect results, with squadrons of partridge screaming “Banzai” as they race toward the guns like kamikaze pilots. Or it could be miserable, all birds grounded by some unexpected side-effect of climate change. Or it could be somewhere in between.

At eight o’clock on a sunny September morning at Lincolnshire’s Grimsthorpe Castle shoot, set in shimmering Capability Brown-style parkland, Al Benton-Jones’s feelings must have been as mixed as the shooting he was aiming to present to guns in the season ahead. Benton-Jones and his business partner, Robert Bell, have recently taken on the shooting lease of the Park Syndicate at Grimsthorpe Castle, which had been in a private syndicate for nearly 30 years.

Just getting all the guns to the right place at the right time was a challenge. Grimsthorpe Castle’s logo is a Saracen’s head with ducal crown. Estate managing director and heir to Grimsthorpe’s Barony of Willoughby de Eresby, Sebastian Miller, apparently calls it ‘man with boobs’ but even so it is a fairly grim-faced greeting at the gate. Miller’s daughter, Hermione, explained: “When a family fought in the Crusades, as my ancestors did, the Saracen’s head was a kind of badge of honour.”