The Over And Undergraduates

The Cambridge University Clay Pigeon Shooting Club has flourished as students find a day in the countryside a welcome release from the pressures of academia, says club secretary Maximilian Yale

- Maximilian Yale

North of the Fenland village of Cottenham, the flat fields are disrupted by an island of ridges, valleys, ponds, and young woodlands. One weekend in December, a heavy fog obscured the landscape. Cars crawled slowly along the surrounding roads, while tractors remained in barns. Yet a passerby could hear the sporadic sound of shotgun fire from the Cambridge University club.

A cadre of students was practising maintained lead on crossers and cutting a line across the path of looping midis. Nearly 20 of them had put down books and lab equipment to pull on boots and caps for the resumption of clay pigeon shooting after the November lockdown. As the morning ended, the sun began to shine through the fog. By then the students had expanded their cartridges, cleaned the barrels of their Brownings, and were preparing to drive back towards end-of-term deadlines and journal submissions.

As they returned to Cambridge, the smell of cordite clung to their clothes. During the long week ahead that scent would make them long to don their boots and head back to that Fenland isle.

The Cambridge University Clay Pigeon Shooting Club (CUCPSC) was founded in 1978 and has been using this shooting ground, in its different iterations, ever since. Originally comprising a team half-a-dozen strong, the student membership has now grown to 77. This makes it one of the largest sports clubs at the university. Over the past five years, it has gone through a period of reorganisation and growth, with membership more than tripling and the dedicated team of coaches expanding.