Pheasants
VIC VENTERS
Over
Primland
Driven-style shooting with
Holland & Holland
F
rom the hill came a staccato sound I’d heard in
Scotland, in Shropshire, in Slovakia, in Spain. It
was faint at first. Toc-toc, toc-toc, toc, toc, toc, toc.
My pulse quickened as the tapping came closer. Toc,
Toc, Toc.
“It sounds like chopsticks,” said Ben Hardy, grasping a
Hussey pigeon gun and scanning the skies above the hill in
front of us. Then, through the trees that crowned the ridge,
came the muffled clatter of pheasants flushing.
Hardy’s posture tightened; he glanced back and forth,
searching for a flash of wings through the foliage. There! To
the right, over another shooter, a bird appeared above the
trees, wings locked—a rooster trailing his tail and skidding
in the crosswind. He was high . . . really high. The shooter
below was armed with a smallbore, and he fired once, then
again. The bird sped on untouched. Then another rooster
came cackling over the oaks and evergreens, and another—
almost “archangels,” as the British call tall pheasants.
Down the line muzzles rose to address birds as the pheasants topped the trees, a few of them clapping for height but
most streaking over the shooters on set wings and picking up
speed as they sailed for safety over a pond behind.
Next came the boom of guns in the valley, the schnick of
ejectors, the sound of pheasants splashing, Labs retrieving,
laughter, cheers, groans, the odd oath—and still the steady
toc, toc, toc of beaters unseen in the woods tapping sticks and
driving birds our way until a blast from a bullhorn signaled
the drive’s end.
Holland & Holland’s Guy Davies, who had been loading for Hardy, smiled and glanced to colleague David Cruz.
“That,” Davies said, “was a really good drive.”
68 July/August 2012
shootingsportsman.com
69
Sited in the Blue Ridge
Mountains, Primland's
wooded hills and
valleys offered
shooters challenging
birds amongst
beautiful surroundings.
Holland & Holland's
David Cruz (below left)
and Guy Davies (below
right) brought “best”
guns and plenty of
shells for shooters to
test and try.
Virginia's 12,000-acre Primland resort was host to Holland & Holland's first driven shoot held in America.
T
hat you’d expect a good showing
when London gunmaker Holland
& Holland hosts a shoot stands without
saying; surprising, though, was the location—not Scotland, or Shropshire, or
Devon, or the wooly hills of Wales, but in
the mountains of southwest Virginia.
Last December H&H held its first-ever
driven shoot in America. Guy’s and David’s plan was simple: Find a good shoot
with accommodations to match, gather
like-minded folks, bring lots of Holland
guns to try and test, shoot game and
clays galore for three days, eat, drink (after shooting) and be merry—essentially
capture the ambience and atmosphere of
a weekend English shooting party. Everyone has a grand time and goes home
happy—maybe even with a new Holland
gun on order.
One obstacle they encountered is that
good driven-game shooting isn’t readily
found in America. Let’s exclude from the
get-go the ersatz imitations: “Continental
Shoots” where caged birds are released
from towers or elevated platforms to a
circle of surrounding Guns.
70 July/August 2012
Proper driven shooting—where wild or
semi-wild free-range game is driven over
Guns by teams of beaters directed by a
gamekeeper—is quite rare in the States.
Yes, there are some billionaires with
private shoots and several commercial
operations—notably Blixt & Company’s
well-regarded ranch in Idaho—but predator-protection policies make Old World
game husbandry virtually impossible in
the US, and consequently driven shooting is the exception rather than the rule.
Virginia’s Primland offers one of those
exceptions. The Blue Ridge Mountain resort has had a driven-style shooting program in place for more than 20 years, begun at the behest of its late Swiss-French
billionaire owner Didier Primat.
Driven shooting was at first a private
affair for the Primat family (which still
owns the resort), but it gradually has become commercial as the resort has expanded. Today about 20 days of driven
shooting per year are on offer.
Given easy airport connections from
H&H’s American base in New York and
other major cities, Primland was seem-
ingly a sensible choice; but one question
nagged: Could a sporting resort on this
side of the Atlantic offer driven shooting
to the standards expected by one of the
world’s greatest gunmakers?
On paper Primland—which at 12,000
acres, in the words of one observer, “is
just a tad smaller than Bermuda”—appears to offer it all. Its 7,000-yard, par72 Highlands Course has won a slew of
accolades from prestigious golf publications; its rugged hills and forested gorges
are veined with more than a hundred
miles of horse, hiking, mountain bike
and ATV trails; the nearby Dan River
and feeder streams teem with trout; and
its new 72,000-square-foot mountaintop
lodge provides not only luxurious accommodations and gourmet fare but also
panoramic views of Blue Ridge vistas.
The shooting sports have been at the
core of Primland’s existence since Didier Primat purchased the property in the
1970s. Sporting clays, deer hunting and
turkey hunting are attractions, but Primland’s bread-and-butter has been upland
shooting over dogs for quail, chukar
and, especially, pheasants.
The hunting has been good
enough to earn an Orvis
endorsement. Driven-type
shooting—what Primland
calls its European-Style
Shoots—is becoming increasingly popular.
I
arrived at Primland to
December-gray skies and
drizzling rain to meet Guy
and David and their team
of shooters. The weather
had proved no obstacle to
a British firm that has for
the past century and a half
crafted guns for precisely
such conditions. Since English shooting attire was the
order of the day, I tugged
on my Wellies and donned a
flat cap and joined the line of
Guns at the base of a hill for
some “simulated driven”—
oncoming clays launched by
a battery of traps hidden on
the hilltop.
David, who hails from
New York City and describes
himself as “the only Puerto
Rican in the British gun
trade,” handed me a Holland
Royal over/under and stood
behind me to load. Then the
clays came—on, and on, and on—and I shot
them until the gun was smoking in the rain.
The Royal, like its sister side-by-side of the
same name, is a sidelock built to exquisite standards. The pair of craftsmen charged with designing it in the early ’90s once told me that they
were instructed to make it “as beautiful as a Boss
and as reliable as a Browning.” By all accounts
they succeeded. The Royal’s modern ejector system is a substantive improvement on older British designs, and its action is drop-dead gorgeous
with Holland’s trademark serpentine bolsters.
It is now Holland’s best-selling gun in America
(and most expensive, starting out at just less than
$120,000), and it is a magnificent example of
contemporary “best”-quality gunmaking.
Continued on page 132
shootingsportsman.com
71
PHEASANTS OVER PRIMLAND
Continued from page71
With rain falling and dusk arriving
early, we retired to the lodge—which despite its size has only 26 suites and guest
rooms. Completed in 2009, the lodge
marries the clean, spare elegance of
modern northern European architectural
design with the material sensibilities of
the southern Appalachians—chestnut
and hardwoods reclaimed from area
barns, for example, and stone from local
hillsides. Aboriginal art from the Primat
family collection hangs on the walls. It
sounds cliché, but the effect is opulence
without ostentation.
Around the dinner table that evening
our team of eight Guns and wives became fast friends, dining on the likes of
risotto with local wild mushrooms, Virginia-raised Border Springs Farm lamb
in brown butter and capers, and a mouthwatering mountain-berry torte. A glass
or two (or was it three?) of port, and all
went to bed happy and sated—although
I wondered how well, when the blearyeyed morning came, the first day of driven would come off.
I would not describe myself as an expert
driven shooter, but I have done enough
of it abroad to have seen it great, good
and, on more than one occasion, dreadful. For the Guns driven shooting is not
a test of field craft but rather a challenge
of marksmanship and poise (everyone is
watching you). For the gamekeeper and
his army of beaters each drive is a new
battle to bring the birds over the line in
such a way to provide sporting shots to
everyone as regularly as possible and for
as long as the drive lasts.
Gremlins abound to confound a gamekeeper: The wind can change and the
bulk of birds can zip back over the beaters, the birds can scoot out the sides of
the beating line and escape, or the birds
can scurry forward until the very end and
rise in one cacophonous flush—the socalled “royal flush”—which is exciting
for the 10 seconds it lasts but provides
no sustained shooting. Most problematic
are low birds, which are simply unsporting and are especially common in flat
terrain.
But Primland isn’t flat. Perched at
3,000 feet on the eastern flank of Virginia’s Blue Ridge, the resort’s sprawling
forests are bisected by gorges and valleys—and it was in the bottom of one of
those valleys where we began the day’s
shoot under overcast but dry skies. I had
drawn a peg in the center of the line—a
132 July/August 2012
spot at the base of a hill that broke left
and right.
David handed me one of Holland’s
over/under Sporters, the firm’s Anglicized, Italian-inspired detachable-triggerplate gun. It was beautifully balanced
and a little heavier than the Royal. “It’s
perfect for pheasants,” he said.
I looked up the hill, and then to the
bare-branched oaks on it over which the
pheasants would stream. Shooters stood
in English attire, a loader from Primland
attending each. Behind the line were
pickers-up with Labs on leashes. But for
the loaders’ hunter-orange hats, it could
have been a steep-sided drive in Wales.
In the distance gamekeeper Steve Nester
sounded his horn. The woods grew silent,
and chatter among the Guns fell to whispers. I stamped my feet and pretended I
wasn’t nervous. Then, drifting through
the woods, came the tapping toc, toc, toc
and soon after the sound of birds on the
wing.
The drive was what I had hoped for and
more—it was, in fact, startlingly good.
There were a handful of low-flying birds,
but most came out over and through
the trees at heights and speeds sporting enough to more than test the line. I
missed plenty with my usual aplomb—
despite the lovely gun in my hands—and
loved every minute of it.
At drive’s end I turned to Steve Helms,
Primland’s vice president who had come
out to assist. “Wow!” I said, and then expressed some (polite) surprise at how authentic it had all seemed—how well the
birds had been driven and at such heights.
The Primat family, he responded, had
spared no expense to make it so. “Our
gamekeeper was trained in England.”
Later on I spoke to Nester, who grew
up nearby and has worked for the Primat family for more than three decades.
In 1987 he was sent to train as a keeper
at the Primats’ UK shooting estate in
Shropshire, and he spent nearly a year
there learning the tricks of the trade. Back
home that has translated into placing
cropfields in strategic locations around
each of Primland’s dozen drives, managing the food and cover planted in them,
and using sewelling (a cloth fence) and
other man-made barriers that encourage
birds to take flight so that they are fast
and high when they break the line.
Weather—pheasants don’t fly enthusiastically in heavy rain or into bright
sun—can stymie Nester’s best efforts,
but his biggest challenge is a southern
Appalachian environment super-saturated with predators that decimate free-
ranging pheasants. That means Primland
has to release pheasants much closer to
the shoot date than would be the case
in Britain. “You’ve got to adapt to what
you’ve got,” Nester said. “We’ve got
good topography, so I use it to give my
birds height and speed.”
Nester’s skills were soon on display
again, when we lined up beneath the crest
of an open, wind-swept knoll. Davies had
loaned me one of Holland’s round-action
sidelock side-by-sides, a gun I had seen
but never shot. Back-action locks allow
the action bar to be rounded yet retain the
strength to be made as a shotgun or double rifle. The gun had sensuous, svelte
lines that felt good in my hands, and
when the birds began zooming in—one
after another and sometimes in twos and
threes—the gun performed like an old
trusted friend. Over the muzzles I’d pick
up a bird’s flight line, keep my left hand
moving, see daylight in front of the beak,
and then feel the sudden jolt after the gun
settled in my shoulder. More often this
time wings folded above, and down below, from the ravine behind us, came the
command, “Fetch it up!”
A century ago, for an American to
shoot driven game with a best gun he
would have had to board an ocean liner
After a drive: Primland's gamekeeper was trained in Britain, and he uses
hilly terrain with great skill to present pheasants to test a line of Guns.
for weeks of travel across the Atlantic.
These days for the pheasants of Primland
you needn’t even leave the country.
Author’s Note: For more information on
driven pheasant shooting, contact Primland, 866-960-7746; www.primland.com.
For information on best guns or driven
shooting, contact Holland & Holland,
212-752-7755; www.hollandandholland
.com.
Vic Venters is Shooting Sportsman’s Senior Editor.
shootingsportsman.com
133