My favourite bit of shooting kit – by Tim Bonner

Tim chose his Cogswell & Harrison boxlock ejector, with 27 ½inch barrels, 2½ inch chambers – and weight 5¾lb.

He explained: “My great-aunt Nancy Metcalfe-Gibson, a legendary sporting lady from Westmoreland, gave it to me when I was 15, over 30 years ago. She had inherited it from her mother, my great-grandmother. I am not sure if she was the original owner but the serial number suggests it was built in 1904.

“I don’t believe a better roughshooting gun has ever been made. I have shot everything from ptarmigan in Sutherland to snipe in Cornwall with it. But it is as a woodcock gun that she really excels with incredibly fast handling and loaded with 7/8ths of an ounce (25g). Just this season we had four woodcock with five shots in one of my favourite coverts on the edge of a West Wales estuary and, as far as I’m concerned, shooting does not get much better than that.

Tim Bonner, Chief Executive of the Countryside Alliance, with his beloved Cogswell & Harrison

Irreplaceable

“I am not sure it is replaceable. Certainly there are lightweight guns capable of doing a similar job, although finding something as light and shootable would be a challenge, but no other gun would have been used for over 100 years by my family.

“Its value to me is huge, but in the market I would have thought it was negligible. Roughshooting is an increasingly niche activity and side-by-sides are not exactly fashionable. On top of that she bears the marks of a properly used gun: a cracked stock held together by a lengthened top strap, a fore-end worn smooth with use, and barrels scratched from a fall on a Highland scree and thinned with use. Value is irrelevant anyway, I am more likely to sell a child than the Cogswell!”