Serendipity! Just as I was wondering what to write about ‘Game’ for our December calendar blog, into the shop walked my good friend Mark Coleman clutching and envelope of old pictures that he wanted advice on how to frame. The pictures were all taken on the Glanusk Estate during the ‘Golden Age’ of the sporting estate before WW1 and have more than a whiff of Downton Abbey about them.
Luckily Mark also new what each picture was showing and supplied the captions to each picture.
Today such ‘Sporting Estates’ are still around but now operating commercially and much of the countryside around Ledbury looks as it does because it is managed for game birds as well as agriculture. My friend Mark runs the Glanusk shoot, lives in a cottage on the Glanusk estate and clearly loves the countryside that is his home and workplace ‘This is fantastic ground, steeply wooded valleys, small hedged fields; it is a rare setting’
Also under Mark’s supervision is the Stoke Edith shoot a few miles out of Ledbury, which coincidentally is also centered around a ‘lost’ country house, that of Stoke Edith. Stoke Edith was a particularly fine country house built in the 1690’s and was a sad loss to Herefordshire’s built environment when it was demolished following a fire in 1927. We have featured the ‘Stoke Edith Tapestry’ in a previous blog about Ed Kluz and his particular interest in ‘Lost’ houses.
Getting back to the subject: game is extremely good for you being super low fat, low cholesterol and high in protein, and for my money there is little better than a good game casserole on a winter’s evening, the subject of November’s blog Ledbury butcher Dave Waller always has a good selection of game when in season and for recipes and tips on cooking game try www.eatgame.co.uk.