Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 45 total)
  • shooting on public access land
  • dylan
    Free Member

    Anyone know if it’s legal to shoot on land that’s used by the likes of us?
    I was out this morning early on holmbury hill, on the Peaslake side and saw the ranger out with a rifle (it wasn’t an air rifle either!) admitedly he put it in it’s case as soon as he saw me, but just made me feel a bit uneasy, especially as there had been some problems with bikers recently 😳

    woody2000
    Full Member

    He wasn’t shooting, just carrying a rifle (sure it wasn’t a shotgun? Quite hard to get a rifle licence AFAIK). Is it permissive access, or open access?

    CaptainFlashheart
    Free Member

    AFAIK, that’s not public land either.

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    mrmichaelwright
    Free Member

    perfectly legal. if the land is private and has an access agreement then this should be displayed at access points and will include statements about shooting/pest control. there are rules about public rights of way and proximity to them as well though

    antigee
    Full Member

    tis the countryside and its impossible for anyone who has ever lived where there are stret lights to understand the way of life 😀

    Ranger? and he put it away when saw some one
    CROW land only if posted and advised i believe
    but i see a lot running out in the peak protecting their birds usually

    wwaswas
    Full Member

    “protecting their birds usually”

    they just use a broken Stella bottle round here, in the land of the street light.

    mattsccm
    Free Member

    just beacuse its open to the public, doesn’t mean its not owned. Very few if any place where a properly authorised individual cannot carry a fire arm. The fact that the rifle was put away could well indicate a responsible attitude as well. Probally worry about nothing.

    bigyinn
    Free Member

    Its a ranger FFS! Whats the problem? Clearly he put the rifle away as soon as he saw you.
    I have no issue with people who clearly know how to behave, i’d have been concerned if it was a member of the great unwashed.

    mrmichaelwright
    Free Member

    he probably put it away because SOME people who object to hunting/pest control with guns CAN be extremely violent and threatening. the last thing you want in your hands when someone is being violent towards you is a loaded gun.

    Jenga
    Free Member

    It’s very difficult for townies to understand the way the countryside works. Generally speaking rangers, gamekeepers et al., have a much more responsible attitude to the general public, than the general public shows to them. Also, carrying what was probably a shotgun would be an intrinsic part of his job. He’s not going to jeopardise that by shooting off at every passing cyclist.

    5thElefant
    Free Member

    Sure. Guns are a common sight in the country. It’s like the Somme round here at the moment. Technically they shouldn’t shoot over rights of way but that obviously isn’t taken too seriously.

    antigee
    Full Member

    wwaswas – Member
    “protecting their birds usually”

    they just use a broken Stella bottle round here, in the land of the street light

    😆 thankyou

    dylan
    Free Member

    I wasn’t trying to start a townie v county folk debate, I know shooting goes on round here all the time, but usually it’s big Pheasent shoots on private land with no access. I was just thinking it seemed a bit dodgy using a high powered rifle with a long range on land that’s riddled with bike trails.

    Anyone know where I can get a bullet proof vest? 😕

    marty
    Free Member

    It’s very difficult for townies to understand the way the countryside works.
    do you really think that? is it that your quaint country humour?

    mrmichaelwright
    Free Member

    rifles are used for controlling crows and fox’s (and possibly muntjack where they occur although this is a guess) and also sometimes for rabbits. A rifle license is not hard to get if you use it for your job. rifles are also safer to use when you need to work in a very controlled space, shotguns aren’t the most accurate/safe of things when shooting things at ground level.

    if it was early morning then they may have been after foxes. it’s unlikely a warden would do this though, it’s a gamekeepers responsibility usually. are you 100% it wasn’t an air rifle? i’d struggle to tell the difference between my air rifle and my old mans 22/250 at more than 50m

    CaptainFlashheart
    Free Member

    Harrods had a fair selection on the Fifth last time I was up there.

    5thElefant
    Free Member

    Unless you’re ginger with a bushy tail you’re not going to get shot by accident.

    Nico
    Free Member

    My guess is that it would be a rifle he was carrying, for shooting (culling) deer. The rangers up on Cannock Chase used to do that. I was working up there at the time and a mate was building the centre at Marquis Drive. After a cull we’d have venison steak and chips cooked on a bottled gas heater. Lovely. Obviously the rangers were licenced and knew what they were doing. There were some poachers around who weren’t so controlled.

    wormhole
    Full Member

    M T F U

    bent_udder
    Free Member

    I can’t really add much to what’s been said above about gun use, aside from the fact that the ranger for Hurtwood Control is a good egg, and someone I’d happily trust with a gun. It may not be him, of course. If he was driving a blue Defender, it’d be Hedley, who is one of the pest control guys round here. He’s very much alright as well.

    Holmbury Hill is privately owned land with a deed of trust to allow public access. The ranger is employed by Hurtwood Control, which administers the land.

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    Countryside is full of folk with guns! Like it or not the numpties that shoot for “sport” pay a lot of money and that money helps keep the countryside pretty* – ie planting strips of trees to provide shelter for game and create and maintain paths to allow access for the shooting fools

    Recently I was out in the Pentlands and got to somewhere we didn’t know we wanted to go to. We stopped near a game bird shoot to check a map and very politely they suggested we went over the brow of the hill to stop – which we did. We then had bits of spent shot land on our map as we tried to work out our route.

    Now I hate hunting and shooting – I think it is barbaric – but I have never met anyone who is engaged in it who was anything other than polite and who didn’t consider the safety of passers by. I am veryaware of the value of hunting shooting and fishing to the countryside and the people who live there

    * except grouse moors which are awful green deserts

    cinnamon_girl
    Full Member

    There’s a squirrel shooter at Swinley Forest.

    mrmichaelwright
    Free Member

    except grouse moors which are awful green deserts

    😯

    horse crap, grass is rubbish for Grouse, they thrive in heather. Heather is burnt to provide varying ages of growth for feeding/shelter. It’s overgrazing by sheep that stunts the heather growth and allows grass and bracken to take over. The vast majority of the heather regeneration and reseeding done in the Peak District is done by the National Trust in conjunction with the (often very generous) shooting tennants. Perhaps it is golf you are thinking of, patronised by similar fools 😉

    I’m actually surprised at your comment TJ, you are normally fairly well researched/informed with your posts

    scaredypants
    Full Member
    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    mrmicheal – you misunderstand me. “Green desert” as in area of vegetation that is very poor for wildlife. Burning off the heather prevents regeneration of trees and stops the heather growing as it would naturally. Good for game birs, bad for other wildlife. I regularly ride accross grouse moors and they are ugly messes. I’d much rather they didn’t burn the heather off as over time the land would regenerate to a more natural state. Grouse moors are ugly messes and are not natural.

    mrmichaelwright
    Free Member

    i see.

    you wan;t to ask Australians about what happens if controlled burning does not take place……

    they are not natural i will agree but for moorland to return to it’s natural forested state you would have to abandon all agriculture on them. I’m sure we’ve been here before with countryside stewardship though so we’ll leave it where it ended last time, most likely the same as it started.

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    And kill all the fekking deer as well. Bastid things are worse than goats for eating everthing is sight.

    Different solutions for different areas I guess. I want the caledonian forest back

    james
    Free Member

    “Unless you’re ginger with a bushy tail you’re not going to get shot by accident”

    Not even panning round (not realising you are there) following something move in front of them, with eyes pointed the barrel? and end up with a loaded gun pointed at you?

    TinMan
    Free Member

    MTBers getting shot in the countryside, big problem round here. You must see the stories in the meeja all the time. 😉

    CaptainFlashheart
    Free Member

    TandemJeremy – Member
    And kill all the fekking deer as well.

    Yum….venison….!

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    Yup – anytimne there is venison on the menu I’ll have it – bambi burgers as well. Tasty, freerange, and they are vermin. Bingo!

    smiffy
    Full Member

    Sounds like Bambi-Plugging to me.

    james
    Free Member

    “You must see the stories in the meeja all the time”

    Maybe not, but theres still the potential for it to happen, all it would take was human error.
    It just worries/scares me that its possible when I see someone with a gun near me. Either on the bike, truck or tractor
    The gamekeepers coming down, surrounding whats left of the uncut crop (As the combine is operating, and me having to buzz up, down and around to catch corn (As they shoot) unerves me a fair bit. Especially as a lot of them are of an older generation, with quite possibly a lesser concentration level.

    On the bike I’ve encountered shoots too, (on the road (on an MTB) – slowly winching uphill) and they haven’t noticed me until I pass right by them (they (30 of them?) being on the road edge, in gateways etc… )and they’re panning the guns round without realising whos in their immediate vincinity.

    MrSmith
    Free Member

    there are high seats on holmbury leith and pitch hill, in fact there is one at the end of summer lightning. a high seat is what you sit in to wait for the deer to come out so that when you shoot them you are usually shooting down into the ground plus you get a better view of the area around you.
    shooting rights would have sold/leased or the landowner would give permission to certain individuals. the way the firearms licence (not shotgun)system works means unless you have an open ticket the firearm is effectively licenced to you and the specific land/farms listed on the licence. so it’s a well controlled system and firearms licenses are not just handed out on whim.
    personally it doesn’t bother me when i ride round there as they will be shooting responsibly and usually at hours i’m unlikely to be there

    antigee
    Full Member

    [enidblyton]the fact that the ranger for Hurtwood Control is a good egg[/enidblyton]

    JonBurns
    Free Member

    Although year on year participation is growing rapidly it is still a minority sport and therefore much of the public don’t really understand what it’s about. That means the public generalize based on stereotypes or what little experience people have of the people who partake in the sport. One bad experience with some prat and the pereception is that everyone who does it is a prat.

    I’m not entirely sure if I’m talking about biking or shooting. I do both and there are some similarities with how other people perceive both sports.

    To say shooting/hunting is barbaric I think is a bit strong, to also say that shooters destroy habitat is also a bit off mark. I mainly go clay shooting but have been pigeon shooting a few times. I know that if I kill a bird I’ll be eating it later. I’ve never done pheasant shooting and I’m not sure if I fancy it but each to their own (although I do like pheasant). If you eat meat you should accept where it comes from and the methods used to despatch it quickly and as humainly as possible.

    With regards to habit etc shooters do a lot of management of the countryside in the same way as farmers, gamekeepers and estate managers. Without the management the countryside will turn into wilderness and not have the diversity of species which we have had for hundreds of years.

    I’m a member of the BASC – British association of shooting and conservation, It’s the biggest association for shooting in britain and they have conservation in the title so it must be pretty important to them too.

    Have a look at the website http://www.basc.org.uk/ and see what shooting is about.

    After a week of been stuck in an office with crap lighting my weekend has to include a day in the countryside whether it’s biking or shooting.

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    JonBurns Of course killing animals for sport is barbaric. Find a moral justification for killing animals for fun. You can’t.

    Look at pheasant shoots for one. The birds can hardly fly, they are reared in pens and released just before the shoot and then shot with shotguns. where is the sport in shooting what is a fancy chicken with a shotgun. Not even much skill needed.

    AS for conservation – again very much a mixed bag – grouse moors are a ugly scar on the landscape. Burning of heather causes erosion. Gamekeepers regularly kill birds of prey. 1/4 of the sea eagles have been poisoned by poisoned baits by gamekeepers despite the actual scientific evidence that predators do not reduce the overall population of prey species.

    Deer stalking encourages the landowners to feed deer thru the winter meaning that there are far more deer on the land than the land can sustain leading to erosion again and to the impoverishment of the landscape. Large tracts of Scotland have had to be fenced off to stop the deer from eating young trees.

    Its not all bad news tho – the money that the hunting shooting fishing lot spend goes a long way in the rural community and some types of hunting shooting fishing activities encourage the protection of the countryside.

    grumm
    Free Member

    Just as the flipside to the ‘shooting is great’ angle of this thread – when I was a young kid out walking with my parents near our house, we more than once encountered people shooting very near to/across a legal right of way, despite them having a whole huge open fell to shoot in.

    When my mum suggested that this wasn’t very clever they basically said ‘this is our land and you peasants should be grateful you can walk on here at all, and we’ll shoot where we bloody well like’, and were actually quite aggressive and unpleasant. These were ppl shooting for sport rather than any kind of ranger though.

    ourmaninthenorth
    Full Member

    Unless you’re ginger with a bushy tail you’re not going to get shot by accident.

    No bushy tail, but i was chased by foxhounds as a child – my mother just managed to get me indoors before they, like a pack of hounds of the baskervilles, were all over the back door.

    She politiely asked the master to get them off our land. And when he started spouting off, she closed her breached shotgun and asked again. They soon went!

    wysiwyg
    Free Member

    “Look at pheasant shoots for one. The birds can hardly fly, they are reared in pens and released just before the shoot and then shot with shotguns. where is the sport in shooting what is a fancy chicken with a shotgun. Not even much skill needed.”

    Ive got to call you out on this and say what a load of b@llo@x im afraid.
    Pheasants are reared indoors for a couple of weeks, then they get let into an outdoor pen during the day and put in at night. At the end of July they are crated up and taken to their various woods. Here placed in a large at least tennis court sized pen (in general) as soon as they can fly they are free to go wherever they want. So by the middle of Aug theyre technically wild. The Pheasant shooting season doesnt start until Oct 1st and to be honest most repecting shoots will be partridge shooting only until at least early nov. So thats 2 and a half months of freerange wildness, nowhere near your “just before the shoot”. And if you think there is no skill involved and the Pheasants cant fly maybe you should try it once, no actually maybe not, as youre more likely to wound than kill – maybe you should wander down to the local clay shooting ground and take a round of high pheasant. If you break more than 15% i’ll buy your cartridges.

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