An ardent and capable defender

The sun starts to disappear behind Criffel and as the poet Gray would have written: “Leaves the world to darkness and to me.” There are few more peaceful ways to spend an evening than waiting for a duck in the gloaming of a Galloway day with only the owls and the whisper of the wind for company.

And as the Editor has asked me to pen something for Shooting Times’s “Fowling in the footsteps of the greats” series, there is no more fitting way to mark this week’s great: my uncle, Archie Blackett. But for his untimely death in 1970 at the age of 37, I would not in all probability be sitting by what was once his flightpond.

Archie lived and breathed ducks and geese. Living by the Solway shore in