The heyday of the Home Shootings

David S D Jones charts the rise and fall of one of Scotland’s most famous private sporting estates

- David S D Jones

One of the greatest lost shoots of the British Isles is the Lews Castle Home Shootings, situated on the outskirts of the town of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. It provided superlative walked-up wild gamebird shooting, deerstalking and angling facilities for successive owners and their guests, as well as a number of seasonal sporting tenants, from the mid-Victorian period until 1924.

Sportsmen usually travelled to this far-flung outpost of Scotland on the overnight sleeper from London to Inverness, then onwards by train to Stromeferry or Kyle of Lochalsh, before taking a steamer or private yacht to their final destination, a journey that took around 24 hours.

Shots, stalkers and anglers enjoyed home-from-home comforts either in Lews Castle, a 19th-century, castellated pile complete with walled vegetable gardens, hothouses and a dedicated farm that produced the raw ingredients for sumptuous meals, or in a local farmhouse that offered simpler lodge-type accommodation.

The Lews Castle Home Shootings story began in 1844, when the wealthy Scottish Tai-Pan Sir James Matheson, Baronet, co-founder of the Hong Kong mercantile house of Jardine Matheson, purchased the 404,000acre island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides from the MacKenzie family for the sum of £190,000.

Having amassed a huge amount of money in the East India and China tea and opium trades, he not only began to develop the property for sporting purposes, but was also instrumental in establishing various industries to provide employment for some of the local crofters.

Efficient gamekeeping