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Harvey Carruthers’ stag party in Perthshire was a medley of sport.
Not all Harvey Carruthers’ friends shoot or even fish – and some of the rest haven’t lifted a shotgun for years – but that made it all the more attractive. I booked us in to the Bridge of Cally Hotel at Blairgowrie in Perthshire. The Bridge of Cally is grandly placed for superb pigeon, duck, grouse, roe, occasional red and fallow, salmon in the Ericht, part of the Tay system, and trout lochs. Yet this is not gothic revival or estate Perthshire. This is farming Perthshire. You hardly notice you have risen to 1,000ft above sea level until you hear your first grouse chuckle. Owner Mark Stevens fixed all the sport through a farming friend. Three of us went out but had no luck looking for roe. Then at 10am, Mark’s friend Gordon Church returned to take us to pea and barley stubble where he had put out hides. A gratifyingly large flock of pigeons, rooks and jackdaws took off as we arrived. We set out decoys and divided up the hides so there was at least one experienced shooter in each. Wind was a light southerly, the sun was high in the sky – good weather for a snooze. This is not about bags in the hundreds, even if any of us had been half decent shots. But what a terrific morning, rendering a service to the farmer, paying him to boot, enjoying each other’s company and every five minutes something would show. And sometimes – just sometimes – one would come down. Nobody snoozed. After lunch, the party split into those who wanted to carry on pigeon shooting and those who wanted to fish. Salmon were as elusive as roe. At 5pm, we rendezvoused with the group for duck flighting. For the duck, Gordon had called in the service of a picker-up though, having seen our shooting, more in hope than expectation. We approached a moorland pond quietly before dark, crouched behind the gorse and long grass and waited. Again, any novice shooter had an experienced shooter next to them. After it got dark – and boy did it get dark – the whirr of wingbeats announced the arrival of the birds. The trick was to let them land, then shoot them once well back in the air. By the end of the day, eight of us had put some 150 cartridges in the air, cast lines across the best pools on the Ericht and carried a rifle for eight man-hours across terrain that was heaving with roebuck. All we had to show for it were six pigeon, two crows, a jackdaw and two teal. Shattered, we broke up after supper that night before 12pm. You may ask: what kind of stag party is that? But we couldn’t have been happier. |
