Fishing and shooting: It was always a great party wrapped around some of the best shooting

MY friend Jo died last week. It is, as he would have remarked, a bloody nuisance. Not only had he created one of the best pheasant shoots in Scotland in the Pluscarden valley in Moray, he was also a terrific host.

Now it’s all over.

It was a lifetime’s addiction to roll-ups that finally got him. I wouldn’t be surprised if a healthy intake of Bordeaux didn’t play a part too. But there was no telling him. Some people are like that.

Jo had been my shooting mentor from boyhood. It was Jo who had the 16-shot .22 Winchester semi-automatic rifle with which we blew holes in the tennis court trying to hit balls. It was Jo who produced a double-barrelled .410 pistol with which we tried, hopelessly, to hit clay pigeons (apparently the pistols were made to shoot dogs in the days when wild packs attacked rural riders). It was with Jo that I went poaching pheasants on a local golf course with a .410 hidden among the clubs. And it was Jo who first asked me to a “proper” driven shoot on his parents’ farm in Hampshire (He was also to introduce me to a motorbike called the Aerial Square Four).

And so it was that we all went our different ways until one day, or so it seemed, he suddenly popped up in Moray with Jo Jo, his wife, to farm at Westerton, fish the Findhorn and carve out a spectacular shoot from the high sides of the Pluscarden valley.

Creating a shoot is a labour of love demanding often expensive decisions, longterm commitment – trees to be felled, plantations planted – and an ability to get on with your keeper, your neighbours (in Jo’s case the monks at Pluscarden Abbey in whom he delighted), local planners, the RSPB, tradesmen, beaters, dogs ... and the rest. It requires knowledge and determination. With Jo Jo, who died tragically young, he would throw together an astonishing mishmash of shooting friends, neighbours, wives and girlfriends.

On one shoot we numbered a German count, a butcher from Forres, a retired Met chief superintendant and a couple who made shirts in Dundee for the Laura Ashley sales. Goodness knows where he found them all. But it was always a great party wrapped around some of the best shooting we could ever hope for. And Westerton was a magical spot. Over lunch, the week before he died, he stopped talking, suddenly. Out of the window he had spotted a heron, a brace of pheasants, two canoodling swans, a pair of oyster catchers and four ducks, all on or around the lochan at the end of the lawn. “Unusual – five species,” he mused. “All we need now is the osprey.” Too late.