A Good Season Shows What Our Uplands Stand To Lose
The last two grouse seasons were among the poorest in living memory. Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust monitoring showed a poor 2024 breeding season led to an average 40% drop in pair counts across England and a 34% decline in Scotland, with brood counts revealing a further fall in adult birds. Two seasons were wrecked by weather and heather beetle, and moor after moor cancelled some or all of its programme.
As some policy makers, including worryingly Defra officials, seem to forget sometimes, grouse are wholly wild. They cannot be reared and released like pheasants or partridges, so when the spring is cold and wet and the beetle strips the heather, there is nothing anyone can do but wait.
What is easy to forget from outside the uplands is who does the waiting. It is not primarily the guns. It is the beater who has counted on four months of wages. It is the publican who blocks out every room from the Twelfth to December. It is the caterer, the game dealer, the garage that services the 4x4s, and the village shop that stays open because a season's worth of trade is coming through the door.
This year, at last, the counts were much more positive. July field data showed brood averages of eight and nine on the best-keepered moors of northern England and southern Scotland, and the season is shaping up to be the best for three years. The relief in upland villages has been palpable, and the money has followed.
The scale of that money bears repeating. A North Pennines Moorland Group survey of 31 moors found 318 driven grouse days planned for 2026, expected to generate around £1.06 million in wages for beaters, flankers and pickers-up alone. That is one region, and that is only the casual wages before a single lunch is ordered or a room booked. Each shoot day puts between 50 to 100 people on the hill, all of whom go on to spend in local hospitality, shops and businesses, and shooting carries these communities through the quieter months.
North of the border the picture is the same. A study of seven estates in the Angus Glens found annual expenditure of £6.6 million, including £3.66 million on wages, supporting 86 full-time equivalent jobs and 768 seasonal workers. In a glen of a few hundred households, that is not a contribution to the economy. It is the economy.
It would be tempting to treat this season as a return to normal and move on. We should do the opposite. The last two years were an unplanned experiment in what these communities look like without grouse shooting, and the results were bleak.
We have seen this before. In the last comparable collapse, around 70% of planned shoot days in the north of England were called off. A single inn near the Forest of Bowland lost £16,500 in restaurant and accommodation bookings when nearby moors cancelled 24 days between them, and a Northumberland inn that normally fills its ten rooms from mid-August lost a month's worth of business, roughly £10,000 to £15,000.
Across England that season, the hit to rural businesses was put at about £11 million, felt hardest in the shoulder months when hotels, pubs, game dealers and contractors depend on shooting custom. One Highland estate owner described how 350 man-days of employment vanished and the local community shop, reliant on the wages of beaters and casual workers, was left struggling to stay open.
Those were single bad years. The past two came back to back, against a national backdrop of rising costs, stagnant wages and shrinking rural services. Strip grouse shooting out permanently, as some campaigners would like, and the question is not whether these villages would be poorer. It is whether they would survive as working communities at all.
The economics are the easiest thing to count, but they are not the whole story. A shoot day is a social institution. It brings together the retired farmer, the teenager on the first job of the summer, the keeper's family and the incomer who has found a way in. It is where people who live miles apart see one another every week for four months of the year. When the days were cancelled, that went too. Anyone who spent time in an upland village last autumn will have noticed the difference: quieter pubs, fewer faces, and a sense that a place was losing its rhythm. Rural isolation is a well-documented driver of poor mental health, and the season is one of the few things that reliably pulls people together on the hill and in the bar afterwards.
This recovery was not handed to anyone. It was earned through the worst wildfire summer the uplands have faced. July 2026 was the driest for England and Wales since records began 190 years ago, with 71.3 per cent of England now in drought, and fire and rescue services had responded to 966 wildfires this year, including 185 in the first ten days of August alone. For many upland keepers, protecting the moor from fire became just as important as preparing it for the season.
The same people who bring in the season are the people who stood between tinder-dry peat and catastrophe, cutting firebreaks, watching the hill through the night and turning out alongside the fire service when the calls came. That capacity exists because grouse shooting pays for it. Take away the season and you take away the keepers, the kit, the local knowledge and the year-round presence on the hill that stops a dropped barbecue becoming a thousand-acre fire.
This season has been a lifeline. It has restored wages, filled rooms and put heart back into communities that had begun to fear the worst. But the last two years should not be filed away as bad luck. They are the clearest evidence we have of what happens to remote rural economies when grouse shooting stops. Policymakers who talk about a "just transition" for the uplands should look hard at what the transition actually looked like in 2024 and 2025, because nobody on the ground would call it just.
There has been a recovery this year but if ever there was a lesson to show what happens when grouse shooting stope this was it.
