The study caught the early morning sunshine – it was the only time the sun did reach into that room – and this morning it was full of pale light as the sun broke through the mist outside. Already dusted and tidied, the room invited him to spend some hours there, sorting out his thoughts as he occasionally did in the mornings. This room, which changed so little from year to year, now made him feel nostalgic for the shoots of long ago, of his boyhood, when no one came but country neighbours and the occasional visiting cousin, when the birds were fewer and not always even driven and the bags were smaller and the old Queen was still on the throne, and nobody had ever heard of Lloyd George.

Sitting down at his desk he gazed through the sunlight in which the dust slowly circulated at the picture above the chimney piece, where the dimly discernable horse and rider chafed to leave on their nameless quest, and the blue distance – containing, it was to be presumed, the dragon, the dark tower, or the ideal city – stretched away towards the unknown horizon. Freed from time, he felt influenced towards a familiar state of watchful calm, from which he was aroused by the slow crescendo then rapid diminuendo of the breakfast gong being sounded by Rogers, an acknowledged master on the instrument.

Batty Clump was more or less in the middle of the Park. The long drive to the house passed it, at this stage bordered by a fence of post and rails to prevent the cows and horses from wandering onto the drive. Nearer the house and over a cattle grid, the drive was unfenced, the flock of dark brown Welsh mountain sheep which kept the grass smooth and well-cropped being considered less of a hazard. Batty Clump was a coppice of mixed Scots firs and deciduous trees, which had been planted during the re-landscaping of the Park by Sir Randolph’s grandfather a hundred years before; it afforded good cover for pheasants, and it was usual on the morning of a three-day shoot to send the beaters through it to drive the birds towards the belt of woodland on the outskirts of the Park. Two other clumps were driven in the same way. When the guns arrived the thick belt of wood on that side of the Park was driven towards them, and so by a precise plan of campaign each piece of ground which offered cover was driven towards a succession of stands, until in the afternoon there only remained the great wood which sloped down to the river. Wide green rides had been driven through this wood at intervals, affording stands over which the birds were known to fly high and fast, and culminating in the last stand of all at the end of the wood, where there were sometimes so many birds that even when the guns were placed three deep they were all kept fully occupied.