Pearsie Lodge & Cottage (Angus)

“Pearsie Lodge & Cottage are the ideal venues for a family getaway, a shooting holiday, or corporate event.” A peculiar mix, but somehow not unusual in Scotland – a country where the tourism industry sees no problem with attracting families and attracting people to kill wildlife in the same sentence. Confusingly, the Lodge’s website goes to great lengths to describe the beautiful countryside (“from the sprawling country parks, 50 miles of dramatic coastline and ample nature reserves to the vast forests and deep lochs”), and barely mentions ‘shooting’ at all other than that one almost throwaway line. It sounds like one of those ‘everyone else is, so we may as well do it too’ half-hearted pitches to a noisy, destructive minority that the Lodge could otherwise do without…but the following text on GunsOnPegs proves that the Pearsie Estate is very much in the bird killing business: “Beautiful scenery with a great variety of drives. Driven partridges off of the edge of the moorland, and quality driven pheasant with birds for everyone. We also have two fantastic duck drives that usually shoot at a ratio of 10-1!” Interesting to note that of course pheasants and partridges are not naturally moorland species and are non-natives introduced for the gun – so much for respecting that ‘beautiful scenery’ then…