Glaston Shoot

Glaston Shoot

The shoot is situated in the beautiful rolling countryside of Rutland. It is conveniently situated 10 miles west of the A1 just to the east of Uppingham and is also easily accessed from the A14 and M1.

Percy and Tom Gilman have been running the shoot for fourteen years, mainly on the land they farm, with adjoining and infill areas added to make up the total. The shoot has an enthusiastic first rate full time keeper called Andy Swallow. We normally let 200-250 bird days.

Glaston shoot covers some 3,000 acres of woodland, arable land and grassland in one block. In the main, birds are driven from cover crops back to wooded areas with the guns well below the covers. The north half of the shoot is mainly used for partridges on south facing light land. The south half is mainly for pheasants but we have some partridges in all drives to keep the guns alert early in a drive! We start shooting partridges at the end of September and the main pheasant drives start in around mid November.

The ethos of the shoot is to aspire to provide a full days sport and hospitality as we would like to receive when invited to another shoot.

With this in mind we use a ‘shoot bus’ to travel to the drives with plenty of room for guns and dogs so that we can all converse and have plenty of banter. We normally stand eight guns and would aim to have birds over all the guns on each drive by placing guns to take account of the wind and topography. We hardly ever have back guns as we feel the birds should be left in peace if they have avoided the line of guns. At the end of the drive the pickers up stay well back and give the guns with dogs the opportunity to pick up first before they sweep through from the back.

On a typical shoot day we meet at 9am at the local inn where we introduce ourselves over a cup of coffee, a bacon roll and a sloe gin. One of us will welcome you to the shoot and give the do‘s and don’ts, we draw peg numbers and shoot cards are handed out with the gun’s names printed already. I can never remember names and it makes the day so much easier when you have a card to refer to. The ‘gun bus’ picks us up from the inn and takes us to the first drive.

We normally have six drives in the day, with numbers as even as possible on each drive. We do not start with a big drive. After two drives we stop for a sloe gin and a nibble and after the fourth drive return to the inn for a two course hot lunch with cheese and biscuits and wine. We aim to do two drives in the afternoon finishing with tea and cake in the inn. All guns are given a brace of dressed birds at the end of the day.