But all this grandeur doesn’t explain the sheer number of dead animals Victorian Britain produced. The workrooms of Spicer’s at Leamington, of Wards at Piccadilly, and the likes of Burton of Wardour Street and Gardner of Oxford Street, overflowed with stags’ heads and grouse – in a way that was far more than any old-fashioned house party could ever have managed. Two practical changes made it possible, and both arrived just as Balmoral was being rebuilt, and Albert himself helped to drive the change.

The first change was the breech-loading shotgun. It began replacing the old muzzle-loader in the 1850s and 1860s. The muzzle-loader was slow. You had to reload from the front, ramming powder and shot down the barrel by hand. This limited how many birds you could shoot, no matter how many were there. The breech-loader changed that. It opened at the chamber, accepted a ready-made cartridge, and reloaded in seconds.

The second change was the railway. By 1855, the line to Inverness was open, and the network kept pushing deeper into the glens. Suddenly, a sportsman could leave London and be on a moor the next day. No more week-long journeys north.

No single invention explains the explosion that followed. Together, they unlocked something new. Driven shooting. Beaters walked the ground, pushing birds toward a fixed line of waiting guns. The guns didn’t move. The birds came to them. A day’s shooting became an industrial process. A set number of guns, a conveyor belt of game. Albert knew this style from his experience on the Continent. He brought it to Britain, turning Windsor into a showcase for the German method. Once the technique, the gun, and the railway came together, the only limit was how much game the land could produce.

The Highlands responded fast. Land was converted at a dizzying pace. In the early 1870s, there were seventy-three deer forests. By 1884, one hundred and ten. By 1891, one hundred and thirty. Nearly two and a half million acres. The scale was so dramatic that the government set up the Deer Forest Commission in 1892 just to investigate it. Most of this new forest had been for sheep farming not long before. The truth is that wool profits dropped because deer-stalking rents were steadier than fleece. Money talks.

England kept pace with Scotland, but in its own way. In 1862, the future Edward VII bought Sandringham – almost eight thousand acres in Norfolk. A private retreat for shooting and family life, far from London’s gaze. In the early years, the game books show six to eight thousand birds shot each season. By 1900, that number had soared to over twenty thousand birds in a single year.

But let’s be clear about what happened to all those birds. Most didn’t end up as trophies. The bulk of a driven day’s grouse and pheasant went to the table or the game dealer. Leadenhall Market swallowed up much of the Victorian bag. Only a handful from each season made it to the taxidermist: the best head, the heaviest stag, the first grouse of the year sent as a gift, the bird shot on a day worth remembering. Still, when you have twenty thousand birds a year, or a hundred and thirty deer forests with armies of stalkers and gillies, you get plenty of exceptional specimens. The ordinary birds went to the kitchen. The special ones went to the taxidermist. Multiply that across hundreds of estates and decades, and you see where the taxidermists’ trade came from. The system was built to produce them – on purpose.

All this splendour and industrial-scale shooting leads to one question. Who was actually pulling the trigger? From the 1870s on, it wasn’t just the old gentry. More and more, the best grouse moors and deer forests were let out for the season. The tenants were often newly rich men from manufacturing, shipping, or finance. Not landed families. They paid for a fixed number of weeks. They bought the experience, not the inheritance. It was about being seen to have it, even if only for a moment.

Tillypronie, on Deeside, ties this story together perfectly. Sir John Clark built the house in 1867. He just happens to be the son of Sir James Clark, the royal physician who steered Queen Victoria away from rain-soaked Ardverikie and toward Deeside’s drier air. Victoria herself laid the foundation stone at Tillypronie. Later, she visited Tillypronie with her companion, John Brown. It’s the whole system in miniature – a courtier’s family building itself into royal orbit, on land made desirable by their own advice. Not every letting was so neat. Glencarron, further north in Wester Ross, was pure business. The estate produced about forty-five stags a season in the 1870s. In 1882, Lord Wimborne bought it. The new railway now made its remoteness just inconvenient, rather than impossible.

We need to be honest about what this land was before it became a deer forest. The story of splendour and the story of displacement are not separate here. They are the same story, told from different ends. Much of the land had been a sheep farm a generation earlier. And before that, it held communities – people cleared out to make way for sheep, then sheep cleared out to make way for hunting.

This is hard to reconcile with the beauty and grandeur I see in the landscape. But it matters. I would rather say it plainly than let the splendour obscure the whole truth.

In the end, what the letting economy really sold was proof. A tenant who rented a fortnight’s stalking didn’t have an ancestral hall or a gallery of family trophies. What he had was the stag itself, or the grouse, sent south to be mounted – the only lasting evidence that the fortnight happened at all. The rental market showed itself in the specimen’s proof. Ownership showed itself differently – in architecture – Balmoral and Invercauld prove that. Both, in the end, landed on the same taxidermist’s bench.

South to Leamington

As I have written about previously, Peter Spicer of Leamington made a bold move around 1889 or 1890. He opened a branch in Inverness at 60 Academy Street. That says more about the scale of the Highland trade than any client list could. You don’t staff an office three hundred miles from your workshop just to collect trophies, unless the volume justifies it. The Inverness branch did exactly that. It gathered Highland stalking and shooting trophies for the journey south to Spicer’s workshop at Victoria Terrace. But let’s be clear about what went where. Spicer’s real fame came from something else: fox masks from the English shires. Those were hunting-field trophies, not moorland ones. They came straight to Leamington. No Highland outpost needed. Two separate economies, both feeding the same firm. Highland stags and grouse through Inverness. English fox trophies straight to the door.

Spicer wasn’t alone. Rowland Ward, working from The Jungle in Piccadilly, made his name with big game, not local quarry. London had its own circle – Edward Gerrard and Sons, James Gardner, Walter Burton of Wardour Street included. Each had its own speciality and its own type of clients among the gentry and the new rich. Beyond London and Leamington, the trade spread out. Provincial towns with no obvious reason to be taxidermy hubs took in the overflow. Demand from the sporting estates was everywhere, not just with a few now famous London names. The spoils from hundreds of miles of moor and forest fed a trade that stretched across the country, and the shooting season had taken over the wealthy’s calendar.

The trade didn’t just take what the estates sent. It shaped the idea of the recorded trophy. Spicer’s firm started publishing Stalking Records in 1912. An annual volume, logging the best heads and bags from estates across Britain. Part advert, part hunting almanac. Proof that the culture of the recorded trophy had truly taken hold.

1916

September 1916. A small notice appeared in the Northern Chronicle: Spicer’s Inverness branch was closing. The manager and men had gone to war. Send any parcels or work in progress south to Leamington. In the archive, it looks like a simple change of address. But it marked the end of a chapter. Spicer’s wasn’t the only order book the war emptied. William Robottom, the firm’s cabinetmaker, looked back in 1959 – the year Spicer & Sons closed for good. He remembered a different world. One hundred and thirty stags’ heads a season from Scotland. Lions, tigers, rhinos from far away. By then, Glasgow poachers had thinned the best stalking, he said. It had been years since anyone mounted a good twelve-pointer.

The splendour was real. But it didn’t last.