ABOVE: These partridges on the Hilborough Estate are being held back in pens and reared ready for next year’s season, under the expert guidance of head gamekeeper Gerald Gray (left), a keen shot who lives in the middle of the estate just outside Swaffham
Face to face with the modern gamekeeper... Gamekeeping is one of the most traditional English professions, and it’s also one of the most misunderstood. Bel Greenwood meets Norfolk gamekeeper Gerald Gray to discover more
H
unting and shooting have been the sport of kings and nobles, and culturally it’s stitched firmly into the rural tapestry. These days, the country shoot is practised on estates and farmland all over Norfolk. It can be a commercial enterprise or a private passion of particular landowners. Shooting came to greater prominence in Victorian times where the gamekeeper and the huntsman stalking the hills and striding over heath land with a cocked gun became a romanticised image. Weekend shooting
KLmagazine September 2012
parties have featured in literature and in period dramas as the pastime of choice for the leisured classes, and as a script device would be used to show who really was in control. In the real countryside, a whole supporting industry has sprung up in the wake of the ‘Guns.’ Companies like Holt’s Auctioneers on the Sandringham Estate supply shotguns to the shooting fraternity, dog breeders and feed suppliers support the sport – but if there’s one man who’s pivotal to the provision of the shoot and the conservation of habitat for all birds (not only the game bird in the
wild) it’s the quiet man at the back, the gamekeeper. There are only 5,000 full time gamekeepers in the UK, and a small number work part-time but between them they look after hundreds of thousands of acres of estate and farmland. It is a profession but far more than that, it’s a way of life. Gerald Gray is a sixth generation head gamekeeper who lives and works on the Hilborough Estate just outside Swaffham. It is 4,400 acres of Norfolk Breckland owned by the Van Cutsem family who bought the estate at the end of their lease of Anmer Hall on the
13