Cloud shadows raced across the landscape below us as the south-westerly wind freshened, causing the first pheasants to lift high and curl over the pegged guns GWCT Fantastic Four Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire

A party of guns enjoy the ultimate shoot raffle prize: four thrilling drives on four exceptional sporting estates

- Graham Downing

FOR MOST of us, being told that a shoot day is to include the estate's signature drive is quite enough to heighten levels of excitement and to ensure cartridge bags are topped up to the brim. But when Matt Riddington and his fellow guns arrived for coffee at the Luton Hoo shoot room, they had every reasonable expectation that their day's sport would feature the prime drives of no fewer than four of the best shoots in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.

The GWCT's 'Fantastic Four' day had been in gestation since 2019, Luton Hoo's owner Ed Phillips told me as guns and guests greeted each other. "We did a day like this in 2017 and always planned to do another, though with COVID19 and bird flu, things rather got in the way. But it helps if you've already got the blueprint." And what a blueprint: four shoots, each donating one of its best drives for a single peripatetic day of top-class game shooting to be offered in a raffle for the benefit of the GWCT.

"They're all shoots with a certain reputation, and I think that's the key," Phillips added. The day was to be run with military precision and timed to the minute to ensure that the shooting party was steered accurately across two counties and that four teams of beaters were in place to start each drive at the appropriate moment. Therefore, no time was wasted in getting the guns to their pegs for the first drive: Wheelers at Luton Hoo.

"We've had everything here from an intensive commercial shoot to a family farm shoot. Nowadays we're a family shoot with a few let days," Phillips explained. And as the beaters brought in a long L-shaped block of cover, there was not a conventional game crop in sight. "This year we haven't drilled any maize; it's all permanent cover, mostly canary grass that we're using as a base for woodland planting," he added.

Birds started coming from a long way back, some dropping back into the drive and thereby ensuring a splendid climax.