The Shoot at Belvoir Castle

As good as the shooting is at Belvoir Castle, the estate’s history is even more compelling. The house, if we can call it that, is perched squarely atop a knob rising abruptly out of the English Midlands, and belvoir is French for “beautiful view.” The panorama is beyond reproach, but the original intent wasn’t mere scenery-gazing. A castle is, by definition, a fortified stronghold (whereas a palace is simply the residence of a king), and the original Belvoir Castle was built on this rise by a French knight in the 11th Century. Baron Robert de Todeni was William the Conqueror’s standard-bearer at the Battle of Hastings, in October 1066. Because until then the invader from Normandy had been known as William the Bastard, he had every incentive to win—and of course he did. This set British history on a new path and also kicked off the traditional English love-hate affair with all things French. When the dust cleared and the blood dried, William began settling his officers in his new territory, judiciously locating them so they could keep an eye on the restless natives. Fortresses and overlords require a good view of the countryside.
    All’s well that ends well, even if it takes a few centuries for the bad feelings to dissipate. The French taught the English about food, wingshooting and break-action guns, and the English now flock to France on holiday. Nevertheless, to the dismay of us Americans, who think we’ve found a French word we can say convincingly, Belvoir is to this day pronounced “Beaver.” So there.
    During the War of the Roses, in 1461, Belvoir Castle was sacked and ruined. Then, in 1525, Sir Thomas Manners—descended from Robert de Todeni through blood and marriage—was made the first Earl of Rutland by King Henry VIII and began to rebuild his ancestral home. The second Belvoir Castle was completed in 1534. But 115 years later, during the English Civil War, it too was pulled down, by order of the new Parliament led by the radical Puritan Oliver Cromwell. Belvoir’s owner at the time was John Manners, the eighth Earl of Rutland and too close a friend of King Charles I, who was out of favor, having been beheaded. (The government did, however, compensate the Earl to the tune of £7,000. By the way, it was Cromwell’s professional New Model Army that settled on 12 gauge as the standard bore for the English gun.)
    The third iteration of Belvoir Castle, begun in 1660, was erected upon the remnants of the second. It stood until 1799, when the fifth Duchess of Rutland (the ninth Earl had been elevated in 1703, becoming the first Duke of Rutland; his wife henceforth would be a duchess) talked her husband into letting her rebuild it as a grand and romantic palace. This was a lengthy process. On October 26, 1816, with a certain grim inevitability, the unfinished house caught fire. Forty-five paintings by Titian, Rubens, Van Dyck and Reynolds, including one of William Shakespeare, were destroyed, along with new construction worth £120,000. Despite a lack of insurance, not to say the earlier death of the architect and then, afterward, the Duchess herself, Belvoir Castle rose once again from the ashes and took the shape that we see today—on the outside, anyway. The family and guest quarters have frequently been modernized, most recently by the current Mrs. Manners, an entrepreneurial lady of taste and charm who is becoming known as “the driven Duchess.”
    Belvoir Castle famously has a room for each day of the year, and the castle roof spans nearly 2H acres, but it is not one of the UK’s largest stately homes. Because of its age and the eminence of the Manners family, however, it is one of the most historic. The fire of 1816 notwithstanding, it is also stuffed to the turrets with antiques, paintings and objets d’art, many of them extraordinarily valuable and part of the heritage of the United Kingdom.
    One more story about the estate’s place in history: Early in the Second World War, British Intelligence learned that Adolf Hitler was planning to hand over Belvoir Castle to his Reichsmarschall, Hermann Göring, as his pied-à-terre in a conquered England. Reckoning that, since Göring was commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, no other place in the UK would be as safe from German bombs and rockets, the Churchill government moved its most precious documents into the castle for safekeeping through the war. The Luftwaffe used Belvoir as a navigation point but did indeed spare it. Of course we all know how this story ended, and the castle remained in the Manners family’s hands.

Today there’s a shoot seemingly off of every country lane in Britain, but the grand old estates have been at this for a very long time and have built a community-based sporting legacy founded upon great experience. The Belvoir Hunt, for example, and the lineage of its pack of foxhounds can be traced to the mid-1700s and the third Duke of Rutland. Shooting at Belvoir goes back only a couple of centuries—well before the Prince of Wales acquired Sandringham, in 1862—but Belvoir has learned to present a good bird and a memorable meal and a dusty port.
    Today the estate spreads across some 16,000 acres on which there are 50 drives with more being added, and a full season is a hundred days. Much of the credit for Belvoir’s standing as one of Britain’s top shoots goes to its staff and especially its gamekeepers, who know exactly how to bring their birds across the line. The head keeper is a new man named Tim Rolfe, who earned his stripes at an estate in the south of England and now lives on-site with his wife and two children. According to Phil Burtt and Sara Buck, Belvoir’s shoot captain and shoot manager, the 2011-’12 season got off to a “flying” start.
    The 11th and present Duke of Rutland is a fine shot and host who believes in the total experience of what his home has to offer. “Anyone who considers shooting birds the be-all and end-all really has his priorities in the wrong place,” he said. “I see it as an ideal combination of nice high birds, good company, good wines and good food—as well as the perfect opportunity to get together with great chums who you haven’t seen for months.” Rutland himself shoots a pair of Purdey 12-bores that were made in 1898 for his great-grandmother’s father, Sir Charles Lindsay. (The five Manners children all started with .410s before moving up to a 28-bore Watson.) The Duke keeps three days each year for family shoots; the balance are let to friends and certain clients. Guns and guests alike return home delighted by the opportunity to experience the Golden Age of British shooting—and hospitality.

Silvio Calabi is an Editor at Large for Shooting Sportsman.