Bog Myrtle & Peat

After having been repeatedly soaked by rain over the past few weeks, I decided to take matters into my own hands with a new raincoat. Going into the situation fairly blind, I was pointed in the direction of a brand named “paramo” by the wise council of a Dumfries jacket salesman. After years of optimistically pushing woolen outdoor clothing well beyond its tolerable limits, I have realised that tweed is a fine fabric for everything except rain. The doggy smell of wet wool is as much a part of my shooting routine as the smell of Young’s 303 gun oil, but now that there is such a range of different artificial fabrics available to the wide-eyed consumer, I could hardly avoid colliding with the world of synthetics at some stage.

Every waterproof jacket I have ever seen for sale has had a tag on the cuff with a diagram to show how water bounces off the outer shell and sweat somehow comes through from the inside, so that nothing ever gets damp. I take this ubiquitous nonsense with a pinch of salt, because of all the jackets I have ever seen, none have kept both rain and sweat out with any appreciable success. As the salesman waxed lyrical on how paramo jackets “really do” keep rain out as well as let sweat out, it occurred to me that I have actually seen a few of my keeper friends wearing paramo kit. This was a ringing endorsement, particularly since every touch of the glossy, fragile-looking fabric convinced me even further that here was an item of clothing designed to please the suburban bobble-hat.

Although I shied away from the “deluxe” model, I found myself leaving the shop with a standard “paramo cascada” jacket in a strong, Nitrogenous green colour. Better that than one of the many other garish colours on the rack, several of which were so luminous that they would even make a French cyclist blush.

Fast forward three days to a bleak hillside in Morayshire, where gathering rain had built to a slicing crescendo of sleet, hail and the occasional fist-sized gobbet of snow. A coarse flail of precipitation was raking into the pallet butts, and I squatted down behind the only cover available to me not to conceal myself from the grouse, but more to win some degree of shelter. Encased within my jacket, I listened to the downpour as it rattled off my hood like the sound of a battalion of Wellington’s infantry firing muskets at a sheep shed. As the first mass clouds of packed grouse came swinging into the wind, I pulled my cap down over my glasses and watched them slash over the line. Thrilled and delighted by the jacket, my only discomfort in this world of miserable water were the beads of moisture collecting on my lenses.

A beautiful lone bird came racing over at such height that I felt sure he was a blackcock until a sudden buzz of wingbeats gave him away. Shots crackled quietly in the rush of wind and sleet, then the horns sounded and shortly afterwards the drive was over. I was shooting on a dogging moor where bag targets had been left fractionally low. This half day of driving was more an attempt to get a few more birds off the hill before Winter, so while it wasn’t a big day, there was some value in getting the job done. After the first drive, there was only a single bird in the bag, and we reversed the butts to bring it all back in again from behind.

With the wind behind us, it was easier to get a clear view of what was happening as the first grouse started to appear on the second drive. Buffeted by the wind, the birds came slowly, but what they lacked in speed, they made up for in agility. They seemed to flicker up and down like turbulent aircraft, and I was very pleased to connect with a hen bird as she came bearing down onto my pallet, only to crack a cock behind a few moments later after my neighbouring gun had touched it in front.

With a great sigh of relief, the horn sounded and we all bounded away downhill and out of the icy blast. The paramo jacket had kept me perfectly dry during two and half hours standing motionless in a satanic downpour, and the thought occurred to me that if the conditions are ever any worse than that, the jacket won’t matter; I’ll be indoors. The only possible downside is that the pockets are very rudimentary on this type of jacket, and water was inclined to trickle down my cuffs when I raised my arms. The adjustable cuffs are designed to tighten off and stop this from happening, but the wind was so cold that if I had tightened anything around my wrists, my hands would have fallen off. Otherwise, I honestly can’t fault it.

Even with the appalling wind and sleet, the few hours had been a joy from beginning to end. There really is a magic to shooting driven grouse, and I would go anywhere and suffer any weather to see those exhilarating shapes come swarming in over the hill. We came home with ten birds; enough for all the guns to take a brace and no more. With this small victory, the quota for that area of hill had been reached and the overall population will now benefit from a lack of over-crowding and an abundance of accessible resources when the breeding season begins.