La dolce vita

Charles Dark tells Philip Reynolds about his Italian influences – and his ambition to make a small corner of Wales a ‘must’ for sportsmen

- Charles Dark

You could be forgiven for thinking that leaving behind la dolce vita in Italy for the drizzle-cloaked hills of mid Wales was, well, a strange decision. To do it twice, perhaps falls into the category of needing your head testing.

Those tempted to agree with that assessment have not reckoned with the pull of the green, green grass of home. The word​ hiraeth in Welsh expresses an indefinable feeling of missing something; a longing for something from the past.

Charles Dark, owner of the Wynnstay Inn in Machynlleth, may have been brought up in the Surrey hills from seven but he is from a Welsh family, and Wales made a lasting impression. His longing was such that he decided to make his life there with his wife Sheila. He had a plan. That plan revolved around his love of good food and wine, allied to a passion for the sporting life. Besides, Wales is beautiful, too, if not quite so climatically favoured.

Charles discovered shooting towards the end of his school years in the late 1960s. His friends used to visit his home in Surrey with their muzzleloaders, no doubt high up on many schoolboys’ wish lists. His first serious experience of shooting was on a relative’s farm in Dolgellau, where he spent holidays.

As with his friends in the Surrey hills, this was old school shooting, with hammerguns. Charles describes it as a touch of “le longue carabine”, Hawkeye-style in The Last of the Mohicans.

He progressed to a side-by-side, which he still shoots – a BSA. A “gentleman’s gun”, as he calls it. “It has always been side-by-sides. They just feel comfortable. They are lighter than other guns and do the job.”

Italian job