Cutting-Edge Sport

The much-maligned Dr Beeching and his infamous railway closures gifted generations of Guns some wonderful shooting, says Matt Cross

- Matt Cross

It was a great piece of ground.” Ian Crail was warming to his subject. “We’d drop into a big cutting and work the dogs up the sides; when a bird got up, it already had a lot of height because it was so far up the banking, so you had to be quick — and I mean quick — to get it. They could roll out over the top of that cut and away.”

Ian’s Northumbrian accent seemed to grow deeper and thicker as the memories came back. It was hard, even impossible, to piece together the geography of where Ian used to shoot. It seems most likely that he used the old railway line that once connected Kelso in the Scottish Borders to Tweedmouth on the Northumbrian coast, but it just might have been the Cornhill to Alnwick branch line.

I hoped it was the latter because that’s where I got my first pheasant. I’d like to tell you that, aged eight, I plucked it from the air with a well placed shot. In truth it went down in a hail of catapult stones. The Woodcock brothers and I ambushed AL the unsuspecting bird as it ambled its way down the disused track bed that crossed the farms where we lived. We had spotted it pecking along the open ride. So we waited for it, crouching among the thickets of rosebay willowherb, and on a shout from the older Woodcock we opened fire.

After the shot bird had been caught and despatched we took it to a decaying railway hut beside the old bridge. Our plan was to cook it in the old fireplace. Lacking the coal and kindling that had been freely available to the railwaymen, we managed to produce little more than a thin stream of smoke. In the end we abandoned our dreams of roast pheasant and the Woodcock boys carried their trophy home in an old feed bag.