A HISTORY OF RUTLAND The Cottesmore country is especially fortunate in being chiefly in the hands of large landowners, good friends of fox hunting. . . . Most of the coverts are woodland, some of them very large, and there arc only a very few gorse coverts, Berry Gorse, Ranksborough, and Manton Gorse in the west, Gunby Gorse, Cottesmore Gorse, and Lax Hill in the east being the most important. Happily there are no artificial earths, which are modern deve- lopments. RACING There is no flat-racing meeting now held in the county, nor has there ever been as far as we are aware. The annual steeplechases in con- nexion with the Cottesmore Hounds are run over the Burton Lazars course, which is just outside the county boundary. The Marquess of Exeter's Point to Point Races have been held at Tinweli, and seem likely to become an annual fixture. There are generally four or five races on the card. There are some good training gallops in Exton Park, where Mr. E. C. Clayton has trained racehorses for the last twenty-five years with considerable success, Noble Chieftain and King's Messenger being among the best of them. On Barrowden Heath are traces of the gallops that were at one time used by Sir Gilbert Heathcote. SHOOTING The eastern half of the county, in which there is a good deal of ploughed land and some large woodlands, holds a good stock of game and gives some excellent shooting. The large estates of Burley, Exton, and Normanton, owned re- spectively by Mr. Finch, the Earl of Gains- borough, and the Earl of Ancaster, yield good bags of partridges, pheasants, hares, and rabbits, with a few woodcock and snipe. The big wood at Burley is a particularly pretty shoot. It clothes the side of a steep hill, and the trees are so high that the pheasants get up splendidly and give most sporting shots ; the Greetham Woods on the same estate also provide an excellent day's sport. The chief coverts on the Exton estate are Cot- tesmore Wood, Tunelly Wood, and Barnsdale Wood. A few years ago as many as 800 to 1,000 pheasants used to be got in a day in Cot- tesmore Wood, but so large a number are not reared there now. On the Normanton estate the coverts in the Park and Empingham and Bloody Oaks Wood are heavily stocked and yield large bags. Owing to the nature of its soil, which is in the main somewhat wet and heavy, Rutland cannot compete with Norfolk and other more favoured counties in the matter of partridges ; but it holds a very fair stock, and bags of from 30 to 40 brace have been often got by three or four guns. Partridge-driving on a large scale has never been attempted, as the county could hardly carry a sufficiently heavy stock of birds to make it worth while. The western half of the county, comprising the parishes of Whissendine, Braunston, Brooke, Ridlington, Uppingham, Wardley, and Lidding- ton, is almost entirely under grass, and therefore cannot be expected to hold a large stock of game. It is, however, a most interesting country for a lover of wild nature, for here the game and their natural enemies have to fight it out between themselves with little or no interference from keepers and others interested in the gun, and more magpies, jays, carrion crows, and hawks are met with here than in most parts of England. Foxes, of course, are plentiful, and badgers are quite common. Old farm labourers who have lived in the county all their lives say that badgers have increased greatly in number during the last fifty years. Quite recently, when shooting in Tunelly Wood, the writer saw three foxes and two badgers cross a ride near at hand, almost to- gether, a beautiful glimpse of wild life. One does not often meet a badger in the middle of the day, but these two had been stopped out of their home in the rabbit warren just outside the wood owing to a net having been run all round it during the night to keep out the rabbits. In common with the rest of England wood- cock are probably scarcer in Rutland than they were thirty or forty years ago. Six or seven are now considered quite a satisfactory addition to a day's covert shooting, and twelve is the best bag known to us in the last five or six years. There are a few cases on record of woodcock breeding in the county. Snipe are plentiful in the Welland Valley, and a few may be met along the banks of the various little streams and brooks, such as the Eye, Gwash, and Ashwell Brook. They are also found about Fort Henry Lake and Burley Fish Ponds. A few pair of wild duck and teal generally nesl on the Burley and Exton ponds and a good ?o6
