Linhope Estate (Northumberland)

Owned by Lord James Percy (noted in a 2014 Gentleman’s Journal article as “a keen shot, averaging 100 days [shooting] a year” and the brother of Ralph, the 12th Duke of Northumberland who runs Alnwick Castle’s Northumberland Estates and the Percy Hunt and who is also a ‘passionate’ shooter, described in slavering terms in a 2011 Shooting UK article as “having shot his first pheasant in 1966 at the age of 10 and his first grouse the following year”), the 14000 acre Linhope Estate lies within Northumberland National Park at the foot of the Cheviots and “includes a wide range of nationally important wildlife habitats and archaeological features.” Given its bird-killing owner, it’s perhaps not unsurprising that it is the venue for a huge partridge and pheasant shoot. It was featured in a typically hyperbolic puff piece ‘Four English estates to know this season’ on the website of gun manufacturers Purdey in October 2023 (“offers the visiting gun some of the most exciting and challenging shooting in the UK, in a truly wild and rugged landscape largely untouched by man“) and in far less subservient tones in a ‘Secret Monitor’ post on the Protect the Wild website in July 2024 which observed that far from being untouched some parts of the moorland were intensively managed for shooting and that predator traps were widespread. Par for the course for many of our ‘nationally important wildlife habitats’ shamefully…