Plas Dinam Swells Bettws Roll Call

It may be the new shoot on the books but this estate in the Welsh Marches offers diverse drives, well-presented birds and exceptional scenery

- Rory Knight Bruce

It is shooting in Wales – but not as we know it. The birds may be high, fast and furious, the terrain majestic if steep, wreathed in the autumnal foliage of ancient woodland, but it is the sheer luxury, comfort and organisation of the stay and day that assaults the senses and leaves the world outside behind.

Welcome to the Bettws Hall Lodge in the small Welsh border village of Bettws Cede wain, where the River Nant Bechan runs past whitewashed houses and the Bull & Heifer pub, complete with open fires, offers an excellent and informal restaurant and a demon dominoes team. This is the childhood home of Gwyn Evans, who founded Bettws Hall in 1988, and the two lodges form a courtyard around a Georgian house on his former family farm. His aim has been, quite simply, to take on or establish shoots to “combine the finest driven pheasant and partridge shooting in the UK with sporting destinations of the highest standards”.

It is all a far cry from the first syndicate I joined, as a teenager, in Northamptonshire in the 1970s, albeit on a ducal estate, where we spent the weekends in a rented council house and the long, rather magnificent shoot lunches were in a wooden shed. My fellow guns included a White Russian prince and a racehorse trainer with a wooden leg.

At Bettws Hall, the attention is to detail from the moment the guns arrive. There is a gunroom (in which are displayed top-end Holland & Holland 12-bores and Boxall & Edmiston over-and-unders), kennels for visiting dogs and lodges manager Anne Humphreys is on hand to settle the most weary traveller. A recent seasonal addition to the team has been 18-year-old, Shrewsbury-educated Hamish Foden to help with luggage and questions. “The emphasis here is to do everything before the guest requests it,” he told me.