Shooting and fishing: ‘It’s easier to sleep in the van with the dogs, we keep each other warm’

Last year I came across Barry Atkinson freezing to death in a van with his spaniels, waiting for the day’s shooting to begin. They had been parked up for the night in the snow, ready for an early start in the beating line on the shoot to which I had been invited to pick up.

Or rather, Crumpet the cocker spaniel had been invited to pick up. I tag along and look after the £30 she gets for rootling out runners and barking at birds stuck up trees. That evening after a day’s beating, Barry moved on to the next shoot, sleeping again in the van and beating the next day. And so he has travelled with his Spider Appeal in aid of Cancer Relief and the National Gamekeepers Organisation for five years, from Highland grouse moor to Norfolk Partridge days and Devon pheasant shoots.

The original Spider was the brown and white Springer cocker spaniel after whom he named the appeal and which, by one of those awful coincidences, died of cancer. These days there is a grandson, Spider ll, carrying on what started not so much as a charity, but simply a celebration of dogs, the countryside and good health.

When I caught up with Barry this year he was in Kintyre, where at least it is relatively warm, if damp for overnight sleeping. He was moving on to Langholm in Dumfriesshire, then heading for Berwickshire. By the time you read this he, and Spider and Sally, who shares the beating load, will have been on 870 shoots across the UK in 96 counties. His target is 1000 shoots in 100 counties (I think he must mean the old counties, the ones we used to learn in Geography, rather than today’s local authority areas of maladministration).

“It’s not that people aren’t hospitable, it’s just easier to sleep in the van with the dogs and we keep each other warm,” he says. I know the feeling. Staying with people always necessitates endless late night talk when all you want is bed. At the end of the shooting day Barry, a retired design lecturer from the English Midlands, gives a quick talk to guns and beaters about the appeal and Crumpet is given a pack of Yumove doggie joint care tablets. Yum yum. The day we were out with Barry, the beaters gave their entire day’s wages and more, while the guns were frankly pretty miserly given their joint income.

Barry is campaigning to have the red grouse named UK National Bird, as it is the only exclusively native bird. His MP, Patrick Mercer, has put down an early day motion in Parliament, backing this. I’m for it, but there might be resistance in some quarters to the idea of shooting the national bird.

www.spiders appeal.co.uk