A wing and a prayer

We often think of woodcock as haunting Britain’s wildest places but Tim Maddams finds some for the pot just beyond London’s suburbs

- S. FARNS WORTH

I love eating woodcock but in recent years I have, like most Guns, reined in my enthusiasm for this wonderfully tasty bird. I have my own set of rules that work in terms of aiming to be sustainable and very careful with woodcock.

I never shoot the inspiring waders on driven pheasant days, with the exception of one shoot where I am told there are no resident birds and the migrants have yet to offer me a shot in six years of shooting there. I will shoot woodcock in the far north if rough shooting and I will shoot one rough shooting in the counties in which I most often find myself — Devon, Dorset and Somerset — but only one per year from each.

With these thoughts chasing around my head and Radio 4 warning of the impending Storm Brenda, I trundled my old van towards an unlikely place to shoot woodcock — Hertfordshire, and not just Hertfordshire but less-than-four minutes-from-the-M25 Hertfordshire.

Had I not been on my way to meet Shooting Times’s pigeon guru Tom Payne, I might have been even more sceptical than I already was. Woodcock like it quiet and wet.

I arrived a little late at Tom’s and apologised to the gathered team.

Orders were issued and, as most of the team set off into the growing wind on foot, I was told to “get in the Land Rover” by the ever charming Tom, who wanted to fill me in about the slice of woodcock nirvana at the back of his cottage.

“It breaks my heart, Tim,” he began as we bumped up the lane past a few dog walkers, who seemed to dismay Tom. “We used to shoot this little patch of woodland about twice a year and once shot more than 17 woodcock in one morning. We get nothing like that now.