A Room Of One's Own

What would your private game shooting retreat/ cave/ hideaway look like?

- Jeremy Hobson

In his book Men and Sheds (New Holland, 2002), Gordon Thorburn tells us that ‘‘wise men’’ were generally hermits – and that hermits had a retreat where they lived and kept things of significance. According to Thorburn, they “collected strange objects, the importance of which others could not understand” and in time, these places became the hermit’s “intellectual pantry, his workshop, his spiritual home”.

Understandably, given the title of his book, Gordon Thorburn was talking of sheds but much of what he writes applies equally to readers of Shooting Gazette. While I’m not suggesting we’re all hermits – far from it bearing in mind the generally gregarious nature of game shooting – most of us, where household space and finances allow, like to escape into a place of our own where, like the hermits of old, we can collect and keep things of interest and personal importance appertaining to fieldsports.

Sadly, few of us are fortunate enough to possess a specifically designated gunroom and it is more likely that a place to keep ones’ guns safely and store all the game shooting-related paraphernalia is to be found in a shared part of the house. A traditional gunroom was once the ‘Big House’ prerequisite of every sporting estate and would have provided a safe and secure place for guns, rifles, rods, telescopes and binoculars, ammunition, fishing flies, clothing, boots and other key items of sporting equipment. Usually, it also contained facilities for cleaning firearms or fishing tackle after use, and often housed gamebooks and diligently completed fishing registers.

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