Upping your game

With challenging targets and first-class tuition, these top shooting schools are the perfect place for game shots to hone their skills

- Miles Malone

SHOOTING can level us all. Many of us have suffered the ignominy of the day when things have just not gone right, when our shots find open sky without touching a feather and we cannot conjure up any way to correct ourselves back into 'form'. Worse, perhaps, are the pre-shoot-day anxieties this then brings to future outings in the field. The answer, we all know, is to build confidence through tuition and practice. Alarmingly, a fair proportion of guns fail to take heed of their inner voice. It remains, for a few, somehow unsporting to train and improve their shooting: a bizarre Edwardian legacy of thinking that is, fortunately, now being steadily consigned to the past.

Shooting is undoubtedly a skill; something that must be learnt, trained and maintained in order to perform. Many will be horrified by the association but golf and shooting do require the same controlled physical movements, sense of timing and focused concentration. Few golfers take to the tee without ongoing lessons and time on the driving range, yet many game shots put their guns in the cabinet in February and do not touch them again until their next invitation, be it to the purple moors of August or the September stubbles. The worst a golfer can expect is a lost ball but for game shots the responsibility lies altogether more heavily.