Since telling the shoot we won’t let them use the land we rent, we have been beset by a series of unfortunate events.
It began more than a year ago now, when we first dug in our heels and said there were to be no standing guns in the fields where we keep our horses.
The lady who owns the land backed us. They didn’t help themselves by demanding to use it for free. The idea was, we pay the rent and move our horses somewhere else during the shooting season so they can shoot pheasants in it. I don’t think so.
They argued that they had established a recent history of using the land, albeit unbeknown to the owner. When we took it over, we found a hole in her back fence line and a makeshift stile on to her land across a ditch from a neighbouring field.
The land had been very badly run down by the tenants who had struggled with the small amount of grazing left them in the winter once the shoot had commandeered their biggest field, which was padlocked.
The couple told us they had no idea the shoot weren’t allowed on the land, and never thought to ask their landlady why they were shut out.
After signing the lease, we soon encountered locals walking through our horse paddocks who shouted at us to get out of their way because ‘the shoot let us walk in here and this is their land’.
We nursed the little smallholding back to health, rested it, refenced it, and the landlady was delighted. But the anger of the shoot boys has been a constant refrain in the background.
‘We’ll see how you get on without us,’ said one of them to the builder boyfriend.
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