Shooting and Fishing: Grousing expedition a family affair

By ALASTAIR ROBERTSON
Published on 09/09/2012 16:31

TO THE Monaliadths, the bit between Loch Ness and the A9, for the weekend, to try and find a grouse. One of my brothers had assembled the usual ragbag of friends, wives, girlfriends and children, and jointly rented a slightly rundown lodge of collapsed leather armchairs, Turkish carpets, undersized double beds, hideous mock Jacobean sideboards and a strong whiff of dead mouse.

The estate has some grouse, some fish, quite a few rabbits and deer – something, but not in huge quantity, for everyone. My brother then hired, or rather his wife did, Emma, the 19-year-old daughter of a friend of a friend in his London office who was said to be a cook and was expected to produce three meals a day for between four and 14 people, including a daily mountain of cold fried egg and bacon softies for picnic lunch on the hill or loch or wherever it is the various sporting parties were headed that day. (Barbara Cartland, the romantic novelist, always claimed to have invented the cold fried egg roll on her annual family jaunts to Sutherland. Not sure about that one). Emma the cook brought a friend to help her. The friend clearly had what my mother called “a message for the boys” and 48 hours into their stay was found on the gunroom table with a half-bottle of vodka and a keeper’s son, home on leave after a tour in Afghanistan.

My brother’s wife, nominally in charge of catering, felt obliged to take both girls aside for a grown-up talking to along the lines of “what would your parents say?” and “I don’t care what you do, but don’t do it under my roof.”

The next day the poor girl looked pretty hangdog doling out scrambled egg for 14. The 11-year-old twins in the party knew something pretty interesting had happened, but couldn’t work out the jocular references.

Donnie took us all up the hill with his father’s pointers. After a 45-minute spine-crunching lurch uphill in Land Rovers we found ourselves, gloriously, on top of the world in baking sun and thick tweed. We walked. And walked. (My father-in-law had a heart attack and died doing just this near Newtonmore). Donnie’s pointers pointed beautifully. Crumpet, our cocker spaniel tore about after every smell and scent and found a bird none of the dogs could find. We ate our fried egg rolls in the sunshine and eventually arrived, miraculously, back at the vehicles with a bag of just eight brace – we’d seen and missed dozens more – and a hare carried for at least three miles by the 18-year-old who’d been fool enough to shoot it. That’ll learn him.