Venison and the Glorious Twelfth: Scotland's Game

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Deer population estimates vary and are periodically revised by NatureScot. The economic and environmental effects of grouse moors are strongly contested, and this card reports the debate rather than taking sides. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) is used for the natural history of the game species and the culinary history of venison; its general statements about seasons are not a guide to current Scottish law.

The Glorious Twelfth

shared The shooting season for red grouse opens on 12 August. In England and Wales the date is fixed by the Game Act 1831, and an earlier Act of 1773 had already barred the sale of grouse before the 12th; Scotland has its own game legislation with the same opening day. Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, in Birds Britannica (2005), explain the odd date through calendar reform: the season once opened on 1 August, but after the 1752 switch to the Gregorian calendar that day fell 11 days earlier in the natural year, close to the breeding season, so a date matching the old 1 August was adopted. The statutes are documented; the calendar story is plausible but not proven.

established In the Victorian era, grouse shooting became a fashionable pursuit of the wealthy, and the Highlands became a playground of sporting estates. On the Twelfth, restaurants in London and Edinburgh traditionally compete to serve the first grouse of the season. The race has a long history: in 1922 the Shooting Times reported that grouse had for the first time been served at the Savoy on the Twelfth itself, shot near Ripon in the morning, driven to an aeroplane and flown to London.

How the Twelfth became a Scottish season

established Before the 19th century the muir-fowl was simply a bird for the pot, taken with snares and traps or shot over pointers and setters. Birds Britannica records that there is no record of a grouse moor being let before 1825, and that in 1837 only eight Scottish moors were for rent; by the end of Victoria's reign there were several thousand. Driven shooting, with lines of beaters and butts, spread from the second quarter of the century, helped by the breech-loading shotgun (1847) and by the railway, which reached Inverness in 1863. In the week before the Twelfth, London termini filled with guns, dogs and luggage as society headed north. The trade sustained keepers, beaters and domestic staff, and a market in tweed, cartridges and whisky. In 1910 George Malcolm estimated the rents of Scotland's 3,157 grouse moors at £789,250. Bags could be vast: in 1872 the Maharajah Duleep Singh shot 220 brace in a day at Grandtully in Perthshire.

established Osgood Mackenzie of Inverewe, in A Hundred Years in the Highlands, gives a single gun's year. His total for 1868 was 1,314 grouse, 33 black game, 49 partridges, 110 golden plover, 35 wild ducks, 53 snipe, 91 blue rock-pigeons and 184 hares, about 1,900 head in all, as quoted by the food historian Annette Hope in A Caledonian Feast (1987). He had been given his first gun at nine. Late in life he regretted the result: of the black game he had shot between 1855 and 1900, "Now, alas! there are none". Hope argues that the Victorian influx, perhaps five times as many guns each season with light, accurate weapons, brought several species close to extinction; that is her judgement, set against Mackenzie's own testimony.

established The calendar mattered to the landed classes. In 1915, at the height of the Gallipoli campaign, Lord Lovat steered a bill through the House of Lords to let the season open on 5 August. The Commons rejected it amid shouts of "We want to shoot Germans, not grouse."

Grouse and other game birds on the table

established Red grouse cannot satisfactorily be hand-reared, so unlike pheasant every grouse shot in Britain is a wild bird. James Boswell boasted of serving Samuel Johnson "Scotch muir-fowl, or growse" in Edinburgh in 1773, and Johnson found "moorgame is everywhere to be had" in the Hebrides. Other Scottish grouse once went to the kitchen too. Blackcock was a Victorian roast; Mrs Beeton recommended hanging the birds for a few days and serving them with toast, gravy and bread sauce. Ptarmigan, the "white grouse", were sometimes driven, though by 2005 they were shot in only a handful of places. The capercaillie, once eaten and later shot as a forestry pest, has been removed from the quarry list as it nears a second extinction in Scotland.

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; second edition 1963), lists four grouse: the wood grouse or capercailzie, the black grouse, the red grouse and the white grouse or ptarmigan, and judges the red to have "the most exquisite flavour". She gives the Gaelic behind two of the names: capercailzie from capull coille, "horse of the wood", and ptarmigan from tarmachan. A red grouse, she notes, weighs about nineteen ounces and should hang for three to ten days according to its age and the weather. Old blackgame, capercailzie and ptarmigan she thought fit for little but soup.

established The birds themselves. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) adds the natural history. The red grouse, Lagopus lagopus scoticus, is the British subspecies of a bird found across the northern world, known as the willow grouse in Scandinavia and the willow ptarmigan in North America. Grouse are plump, chicken-like ground birds, and British sporting convention forbids shooting them on the ground, hence the beaters. The Companion rates them excellent to eat: young birds roasted or braised, older ones casseroled, and in general any good pheasant recipe will suit. It credits Eliza Acton (1855) with the advice to slip buttered toast under a roasting grouse for its last ten minutes, the same trick as McNeill's liver toast.

established The capercaillie, Tetrao urogallus, has been described as a very large grouse; adult males average 85 centimetres long. The Companion records that forest clearance made it extinct in Britain around the end of the eighteenth century, and that it was later reintroduced to parts of Scotland; Annette Hope dates the reintroduction to 1837. Two capercaillie were still in the Earl of Montrose's larder in 1626. It has never matched its looks as a table bird, because the males eat conifer and their flesh tastes of turpentine.

established The ptarmigan, Lagopus mutus, lives on high, stony mountainsides, and its remote habitat makes it so little troubled that it often behaves like a tame bird. Few are shot. The Companion says its Scottish range seemed to be slowly contracting northwards, and that the flavour, which depends on what the bird has been eating, has been compared to that of red grouse or hare. In Iceland it is a Christmas dish, well hung.

established Her "roast grouse, Scots fashion" puts a knob of butter worked with lemon juice, pepper and salt inside each bird, or a stuffing of red whortleberries or cranberries, and wraps it in fat bacon to keep it moist. The livers are boiled, pounded with butter and cayenne and spread on toast, which goes under the birds for the last minutes of roasting. Grouse, she writes, must come out of the oven at exactly the right moment, neither over nor underdone. Rowan or cranberry jelly, fried breadcrumbs and claret go with it. For "roast grouse à la Rob Roy" the birds are wrapped in bacon and sprigs of heather, and Meg Dods reports that the French chef Alexis Soyer wrapped his in heather moistened with whisky. Grouse soup, grouse-liver savouries on toast and potted grouse for breakfast complete the repertoire.

shared McNeill also passes on two pieces of grouse lore that should not be taken literally. She quotes the food writer P. Morton Shand's joke that the bird "constrains Parliament to adjourn before the Twelfth of August", and the journalist Moray Maclaren's claim that the grouse "pines away and dies outside of Scotland". Parliament's summer recess is not set by the grouse season, and red grouse also live naturally in northern England, Wales and Ireland; Maclaren's point was only that attempts to introduce them to the Continent failed.

Grouse moors

established Red grouse live on heather moorland. To produce large numbers for driven shooting, estates burn heather in small patches to create a mosaic of young and old growth, and control predators such as foxes and crows. Many Scottish uplands are managed in this way.

Controversy

established Grouse moor management is fiercely debated. Birds of prey such as golden eagles and hen harriers have been illegally killed on or near some grouse moors, according to government-commissioned research. Muirburn has been criticised for its effects on peatland and carbon. Supporters argue that grouse moors support jobs, rural communities and some wildlife. In 2024 the Scottish Parliament passed the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Act, which introduced licensing of grouse shooting and muirburn.

Venison

established Venison comes mainly from wild red deer and roe deer. Deer numbers in Scotland are high, because their natural predators, wolves and lynx, are long extinct, and culling is necessary to protect woodland and farmland. Deer stalking is a traditional sport on Highland estates, and venison is sold to game dealers, butchers and restaurants. Farmed venison is also produced. Venison is lean and rich in flavour.

established The word and the species. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) explains that "venison" first meant the meat of any furred game, and narrowed to deer meat by the late Middle Ages. Three British deer are commonly eaten: the red, the largest, now largely confined to the Scottish Highlands; the fallow; and the roe, the smallest and the one cooks rate highest. The Companion notes that the roe was almost extinct in the Scottish Highlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before being re-established. Elizabeth Grant's mention of roe at Rothiemurchus in 1812 shows that it survived in some places, so "almost" matters.

established Hanging and cooking. The Companion describes the traditional handling. Deer are bled and gralloched (gutted) at once, and the carcass is hung for twelve to twenty-two days depending on the weather. During hanging the meat was once rubbed with powdered ginger and pepper against flies; old cookery books' many methods for rescuing tainted venison show that this did not always work. The meat is dark red, fine-grained and very lean, with what fat it has high in polyunsaturates, so it is often marinated and larded before cooking. Roasting, usually slightly underdone, is the favoured method for good venison, with rowan, redcurrant, sloe or cranberry jelly. The Companion also notes that "venison collops" is still a current phrase, a survival of the old word for a slice of meat.

established Gift, not trade. Because game was protected for landowners in Britain and much of Europe, the Companion says, venison was historically not sold as butcher's meat. It was given to friends and dependants as a valued present, or poached. Only with deer farming in the second half of the twentieth century did eating it become widespread. The venison pasty was an English as well as a Scottish dish from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, and beef was sometimes passed off in it: Samuel Pepys complained in January 1660 of a venison pasty that was "palpable beef, which was not handsome".

established Sport against the table. The Companion links the Victorian enthusiasm for all things Scottish, encouraged by Queen Victoria's long stays at Balmoral, to the management of red deer herds on a large scale for sport. Stalkers sought the larger and older stags, the kind painted in Landseer's Monarch of the Glen, while the younger deer were the best to eat. Sport and gastronomy, long partners, parted company.

established From Invermark to the deer farm. The Companion quotes the Scottish deer farmer and venison writer Nichola Fletcher (Game for All, 1987) on an unexpected result. In the late 1870s deer from Invermark in Angus were shipped to New Zealand and released for sport. They multiplied so fast in the forests that they were eventually classed as vermin, but the prices paid by East Asian medicine-makers for their tails, pelts and velvet antlers led a few entrepreneurs to farm them. Deer farming in New Zealand began only in the late 1960s, and in Scotland a year or two later. Venison may now be wild, park or farmed, and Fletcher's advice is to know the origin and age of the deer before deciding how to cook it.

shared Poachers and game law. The Companion's Scotland entry points to Annette Hope's A Caledonian Feast (1987) for the effects of deforestation on the Highland climate and on habitats for wild animals such as deer, for changes in the game laws and for the growth of poaching. Hope argues that the red deer survived the loss of the forests by moving higher, feeding on heather and growing thicker coats, and that the hill climate is why Scottish deer are smaller than English or farmed deer. That is her synthesis of the natural-history writers, not a measured finding. On the law, she notes that the first Scottish Act protecting game birds, under James II in 1447, forbade destroying the nests and eggs of partridge, plover and wild duck, and that the principle of free hunting was not abandoned in Scotland until 1621. Tenants could not kill deer, hares, rabbits or birds without their laird's leave, even to protect their crops. Penalties for poaching ran from loss of the right hand to transportation, but a Highland saying held that no Gael was ashamed of taking a salmon from the river, a tree from the forest or a deer from the hill.

shared Hope's best-known example is the poacher Alexander Davidson (1792–1843), taken from W. McCombie Smith's The Romance of Poaching (1904). Davidson respected close seasons, gave his spoils to those who sheltered him or were in need, read his Bible devoutly and lived on oatmeal soaked in whisky and rolled into patties. He died alone on the hills near Ballater, with an invitation to Gordon Castle in his pocket. McCombie Smith never met him, so this is a romantic portrait at second hand, not a documented life. Hope sets it against the 1980s, when deer poaching had become an organised trade, with gangs using Land Rovers to move carcasses to hotels and abroad.

Deer forests and stalking

established Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), traces how the modern deer forest arose. In the Middle Ages a "forest" (forestis) meant a protected hunting area, often scrub rather than woodland. Royal forests such as Selkirk, Traquair, Pentland, Moorfoot, Stirling and Clackmannan held deer, wolves and boar, and tenants' cattle could not graze there. In the Lowlands deer were coursed with greyhounds or driven towards mounted hunters; in the Highlands the tinchel drove them over days into a walled enclosure at the head of a glen. Taylor's tinchel at Braemar in 1618 lasted twelve days and fed a camp of fourteen or fifteen hundred men and horses, supplied by falconers, fowlers, fishers and the Earl of Mar's tenants.

established The clans' break-up after the '45 ended the supply of men for such hunts, and sheep took over the hills. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Hope writes, deer numbers fell sharply, since sheep and deer compete for the same grazing and cover. Then landowners found they could let the right to shoot. A few shooting lets were advertised in national newspapers by 1812, usually with no lodge and often no road. Clearing the sheep and leaving the ground quiet for a couple of years let the deer return. Hope counts six preserved deer forests in 1811, 18 by 1825 and 40 by 1842. William Scrope, who rented the Bruar forest from the Duke of Atholl for ten years and supplied the Duke, his friends and Walter Scott with game, popularised the solitary stalk in The Art of Deerstalking (1838). Cluny Macpherson, the Jacobite chief, is said to have been the first clan chief to stalk his own deer for pleasure, which Hope reports as tradition.

shared Hope argues that the years from 1880 to 1914 brought the local people unusual prosperity, with work building roads and lodges, on the railways and in the big houses, and with former shepherds becoming gamekeepers, stalkers and ghillies. That is her generalisation, and it sits beside the long record of clearance and land hunger that the estates also represent.

established The venison trade in 1987. Hope reported that the Continent took 93 per cent of Scotland's annual venison output, that few deer farms yet existed, and that she expected farming to bring prices down and make wild deer less worth poaching. Deer, she noted, remain the most efficient animals at turning poor hill grazing into meat. These are her 1987 observations, not current market figures.

Venison in the old Scottish kitchen

established Game as a gift. Period household books bear out the Companion's point that venison was given rather than sold. At the funeral of the 4th Earl of Montrose in 1626, his factor's book recorded gifts of partridge and plover from Lord Stormont, a blackcock and five moorfowl, "the fourth of a hynd" from the Laird of Lawers and "a great hind" from Glenorchy, as quoted by Annette Hope. The larder already held venison, beef, mutton, lamb, veal and hams, with 28 moorfowl, 12 ptarmigan, five blackcock, two capercaillie, 20 pairs of plover, ten wild geese, six golden-eyes and three woodcock. The Ochtertyre House Booke of Sir William Murray's household (1737–39) shows wildfowl at table all year, supplied by "Joseph the fowler" and the estate falconer: fieldfares, plover, snipe, curlew, ptarmigan, moorfowl, wild and solan geese, quail, teal, wild duck and even seagulls. Venison was rare. When a deer did arrive, half was sent to friends "in complyments", and the rest came to table twice a day for over a week as soup, collops, roasts, pies and dishes for the servants.

established Venison was a feast food long before the sporting estates. McNeill quotes John Taylor, the "Water Poet", who in 1618 joined the Earl of Mar's great hunt and found the camp kitchen on a bank with kettles boiling and spits turning, serving venison "bak't, sodden, rost and steu'de" alongside capercaillie and ptarmigan. Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, writing of 1812, recalled that in her remote Speyside household "game was plentiful, red-deer, roe, hares, grouse, ptarmigan and partridge".

traditional McNeill also repeats, from a note by Scott to The Lady of the Lake, the story that the French Vidame of Chartres, visiting the Highlands in the reign of Edward VI, saw hunters eat venison raw after squeezing out the blood between two batons of wood. It is a single traveller's tale passed on at second hand.

established McNeill's recipes show the range of the old kitchen. Venison collops, slices from the haunch, neck or loin fried and served in a gravy sharpened with lemon or orange and claret, were "a very excellent way of dressing venison", according to Meg Dods's Cleikum Club, when the meat was not fat enough to roast. The venison pasty, which Scott called "princely", was made from the cuts that did not roast well, the neck, breast and shoulder, baked in a thick, decorated crust. "Rob Roy's Pleesure", a haunch braised on vegetables and finished with claret, is McNeill's modern version of a dish she imagines raiders cooking in a three-legged iron pot; the name is romantic, not historical. Her "gillie's venison", from a gamekeeper's daughter in Wester Ross, browns cubes of floured venison in plenty of fat in an iron pot and stews them gently for an hour, which the gillies held to be the best answer to the meat's natural dryness. Rowan jelly and red blaeberries were the usual accompaniments.

established Little of the deer was wasted. McNeill gives a deer haggis of heart, liver and suet with toasted oatmeal, credited to a Highland chief's kitchen, deer's puddings of venison suet and oatmeal in deer tripe skins, deerfoot jelly, and smoked deer tongues and venison hams in Highland larders. Osgood Mackenzie, whom she quotes, recalled venison hung in the spray of a great waterfall to keep off the blowflies.

established The shooting-lodge kitchen. Annette Hope draws on Margaret Fraser's A Highland Cookery Book (1930). Fraser was born on a Highland estate into a family of stalkers and keepers, trained as a cook and married a head stalker. Ninety per cent of her recipes, 66 in all, are for venison, using every part of the beast from brains to feet, heart and stomach bag. Her roast haunch is floured, started in a very hot oven with plenty of beef dripping and roasted for four hours with frequent basting, then served with brown gravy and redcurrant jelly. Her salted venison is rubbed for two or three days with kitchen salt, demerara sugar, black pepper and a little nitre, packed in a tub and ready in ten days; a haunch salted for about three weeks could be hung to dry as a ham.

shared How long to hang. Hope records a change in taste. Older generations liked game "gamey", almost high, and within living memory in 1987 some customers judged grouse by listening for maggots, a butcher's story she repeats at second hand. Modern preference, she writes, is ten to twelve days for venison and less for birds, at the short end of the Companion's twelve to twenty-two days for a carcass. Hanging time depends on weather and age, so neither figure is a rule.

shared McNeill's 1963 note on venison reads as a complaint. Scotland, she wrote, had plenty of venison, "cheaper, in fact, than beef", but the town population hardly valued it, because too often it was shot in the wrong season and badly cooked. She called for a proper close season and for sportsmen, butchers and customers to work together so that good venison reached every Scottish kitchen. Legal close seasons for red deer took effect in October 1962. Her remark on price was true of her time and should not be read as a statement about venison prices today.

Hare

established Hares were part of the same Highland larder. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014), in an entry by Laura Mason, notes that two hares are found in Scotland: the brown hare, common across the British Isles, and the mountain or varying hare, Lepus timidus, whose coat turns white in winter. Hares have never been domesticated. Their meat is dark, lean and strongly flavoured, best marinated and cooked slowly; the blood is kept when the hare is drawn and used to thicken the sauce. Jugged hare, cooked in a jug set in boiling water, appears in English recipe books from the early eighteenth century.

established The Scottish dish is bawd bree, bawd meaning hare and bree the broth, which the Companion calls a cross between a soup and a stew. It quotes Catherine Brown (1985) noting that Lady Grisell Baillie, in her early eighteenth-century household book, described it aptly as "Hare soup with Hares in it".

shared Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), finds almost the same words in another household book, the Ochtertyre House Booke (1737–39): "Dinner hare soop hares in it" is an early entry there, and hare, roasted or in soup, came often to the Murrays' table. The phrase may have been a common way of describing the dish rather than one writer's coinage; without checking both manuscripts, the attribution to Lady Grisell Baillie should be held loosely.

• The grouse season opens on 12 August.
• The 12 August date appears in law by 1773 and was fixed for England and Wales by the Game Act 1831.
• Red grouse cannot satisfactorily be hand-reared, so every grouse shot is a wild bird.
• In 1922 grouse shot near Ripon on the Twelfth was flown to London and served at the Savoy the same day.
• In 1837 only eight Scottish grouse moors were for rent; by 1910 there were 3,157.
• Heather is burned in patches to manage grouse moors.
• Deer numbers are high because wolves and lynx are extinct.
• Grouse moors in Scotland now require licences.
• "Capercailzie" comes from the Gaelic capull coille, "horse of the wood".
• A traditional Scottish roast grouse is served on toast spread with its own pounded liver.
• In the 1960s, F. Marian McNeill noted, venison in Scotland was cheaper than beef.
• "Venison" once meant the meat of any furred game, not just deer.
• Deer from Invermark in Angus, shipped to New Zealand in the late 1870s, helped start the herds that New Zealand later farmed.
• Male capercaillie eat conifer, which can make them taste of turpentine.
• Ptarmigan are so little disturbed on their mountain tops that they often behave like tame birds.
• Lady Grisell Baillie described bawd bree as "Hare soup with Hares in it".
• Scotland had six preserved deer forests in 1811 and forty by 1842.
• In 1737–39 the Ochtertyre household ate fieldfares, curlew, solan goose and even seagulls.
• Free hunting was not formally ended in Scotland until 1621.

• Disputed: Grouse moor management. Illegal killing of birds of prey, the effects of muirburn on peatland and carbon, and the value of moors for jobs, communities and wildlife are all contested. The debate is not settled, and the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Act 2024 introduced licensing.
• Disputed: How many deer there are. Estimates vary and are periodically revised by NatureScot. Numbers are high because wolves and lynx are long extinct, but no single figure is fixed.
• Myth: The Game Act 1831 set the Scottish grouse season. It applies to England and Wales. Scotland has its own game legislation with the same opening day, and the 12 August date already appears in an Act of 1773.
• Disputed: The 1752 calendar change as the origin of the Twelfth. Birds Britannica (2005) offers it as an explanation. It is plausible but not proven.
• Myth: Parliament adjourns for the Twelfth, and grouse cannot live outside Scotland. Both are jokes or exaggerations quoted by McNeill. Parliament's recess is not set by the grouse season, and red grouse also live in northern England, Wales and Ireland.
• Myth: "Rob Roy's Pleesure" is a historical recipe. McNeill gives it as a modern dish with a romantic name.
• Disputed: Venison open seasons. The Companion's general statements about seasons are not a guide to current Scottish law, and Scottish close seasons were set in statute, for red deer from October 1962.
• Myth: Roe deer were wholly extinct in the Highlands. The Companion says almost extinct, and they are recorded at Rothiemurchus in 1812.
• Disputed: The life of the poacher Alexander Davidson. It comes from W. McCombie Smith's romantic portrait of a man he never met, not from a documented biography.
• Disputed: Hope's venison export share. The figure of 93 per cent to the Continent is a 1987 observation, not a current market figure.