Something a little bit different, sir?

Most of use a .243 or a .308 rifle but there’s no reason that more unusual calibres can’t make a good go-to

- Diggory Hadoke

My first deer — in fact my first three — that cold and misty morning, fell to a 6.5x54 Mannlicher Schoenauer — not everybody’s idea of a perfect deerstalking cartridge. Today, every rifle shooter has his favourite super-cartridge. Modern, synthetic and stainless-steel options deliver Olympic gold-winning accuracy in the field, yet there is a charm in the old cartridges and the rifles for which they were chambered a century ago.

My first African antelopes were taken in Botswana with a 1920s 8x57. Since then, I have made a habit of hunting around the world using old-fashioned and out-of-favour cartridges in old rifles, whenever I get the chance. I have shot turkey in Texas with a .22 Savage Hi Power double rifle by Watson Bros and buffalo in Tanzania with a .577 Westley Richards.

Deer have changed little, if at all, during the 130 years or so that magazine rifles and ‘smokeless’ powders have been in existence. Contrary to what some seem to believe, they did not develop a special resistance to certain sizes of bullet during the 1980s, nor do they suddenly fail to succumb to any bullet travelling below some arbitrarily manifested magic speed.

Killing a deer is a fairly straightforward matter. It involves making a hole in it. That hole simply has to be in the right place. The job of the hunter or stalker is to place a bullet in the right place, so the hole it makes does its lethal job of work.

Legislators apparently think differently and, in the 1980s, decided to mandate certain bullets and certain speeds of travel for those bullets for them to be legal to hunt deer within England and Wales.