The Cartshed Restaurant

Hospitality is a huge part of the day — we call it an Armed Eating Experience for a reason.

We meet at the multi-award-winning Cartshed Restaurant for a proper full English breakfast with our own home-reared pork sausages.

Elevenses are served in the field: smoked duck breast, warm pheasant and pork sausage rolls, game terrines, pies and other treats from the Cartshed kitchen.

After the final drive we return to the restaurant for a proper late three-course lunch with seasonal game, great local produce and good claret. The guns are away by then — good wine and loaded shotguns have no business being introduced.

Breakfast, elevenses and lunch are all included.

This is traditional lowland Essex shooting rather than extreme high-bird country. The farm is predominantly flat, but mature tall hedgerows, established game covers and several small woods allow us to show plenty of fast, sporting birds.

Expect varied drives with pheasant and partridge presented over hedges, cover crops and woodland, giving enjoyable shooting for mixed abilities while still providing plenty to keep experienced guns interested.

Our emphasis is on showing a team good, shootable sporting birds throughout the day rather than trying to manufacture impossibly high birds that simply don't suit our ground.

We sit on heavy Essex clay and I’m an unashamedly terrible farmer. Over the years I’ve become far more interested in curating the farm for wildlife than trying to eke an impossibly small profit from every last acre.

The result is a wonderfully untidy patchwork of tall mature hedgerows, small woods, rough margins, game covers, ponds and bits of ground deliberately left for nature. It may not win any prizes for agricultural efficiency, but it has created fantastic habitat for game and an extraordinary amount of other wildlife.

The land is predominantly flat, but full of character — and these days I’m rather proud of being a terrible farmer.

Conservation is at the heart of how we manage the shoot. We undertake rigorous predator control, particularly through the breeding season, alongside extensive habitat management, cover crops, rough margins and feeding that benefits far more than just our gamebirds.

We are particularly proud of our wild grey partridge programme. From seeing very few birds, we now regularly have multiple wild coveys across the farm each year. They appear to have found a healthy balance alongside our released French partridge and are breeding successfully.

For us, the measure of a successful shoot isn't simply the number of pheasants and partridges in the drives — it's the amount of wildlife thriving around them.

Your host for the day is William Alldis, owner-chef of the Cartshed, lifelong shooting man and former shooting instructor who has represented Great Britain in clay shooting.

William has spent much of his life around shooting, food and hospitality, and the atmosphere reflects all three. Expect a relaxed, good-humoured day rather than unnecessary formality, but with the shooting run properly and safely.

William will be with you throughout the day, from breakfast and the first drive to the final bird, before swapping shooting hat for chef’s whites and taking you back to the Cartshed for lunch.

The aim is simple: great sport, exceptional food and eight guns going home having had a bloody good day.

Exceptionally easy to reach for a completely private country shoot. We are just 18 miles from the City of London, around 5 minutes by taxi from Epping Underground station on the Central line, and a short drive from Junction 7 of the M11.

Guns can therefore come straight out from central London by Tube, drive themselves, or arrange a taxi directly to the farm. Despite being so close to London, once through the gates the shoot feels remarkably secluded, with no public footpaths across the farm.

The farm has been in our family for generations, but the shoot began rather less grandly — a few mates, a handful of birds and some fairly enthusiastic rough shooting.

Over the last ten years I’ve gradually developed it into the shoot we have today. Hedgerows have been allowed to grow, covers planted, woods and margins managed for wildlife, drives developed and, inevitably, food became an increasingly important part of the day.

What started as a few friends wandering around the farm with guns has evolved into something I’m enormously proud of: a beautiful, completely private family shoot with plenty of sporting birds, thriving wildlife and the Cartshed Restaurant at its heart.

It still feels like having friends over for a day’s shooting — we’ve just got rather better at it.