The advisory e-mail from my friend Penelope arrived a couple of days before our trip to Scotland: we would be staying with her sister Caroline and her husband, whose social schedule foretold a prodigious amount of drinking and eating, periodic slaughter of birds and multiple changes of clothes. “Drinks at castle on first night,” wrote Penelope. “Pack your vests; all Scottish houses are freezing.”

We walked the whole of the next day, through bog and heather, beside a river, up a lung-bursting hill to see Ayrshire spread below in fiery strands of gold and yellow and red; in the distance was the sea and the faint smudges of Arran and Ailsa Craig. We dropped down to a line of thorn trees, and past a loch with a jetty and a flock of barnacle geese.

There was supper at home with friends – each of whom serviced the local grand houses: “We build, we sew, we do electrics and we fence” – and a shooting lunch on an estate stocked each year with more than 10,000 pheasants: 25p to buy each chick, several thousand to raise them and pay keepers’ wages, 50p a brace sold to butchers and £30 a bird for the privilege of shooting them. The men strode in, shouldering canvas gun cases; a woman in elegant corduroy plus fours approached me: “Hello there; now, who is your husband?” We ate roast pork at a dining table seating 24 – “Our own pig,” said the pretty, hard-working chatelaine – and went out again to stand in a field while beaters crashed around in the woods and lean spaniels trembled with anticipation. From time to time birds appeared across the sky, followed by a deafening volley of gunshots, bodies plummeting and bouncing on the grass, dogs racing to pick them up, a ripple of women’s voices: “Good shot, darling.”

There was tea, then home to dress for the evening engagement – dinner at an enchanting baby castle with Rapunzel windows in a round tower. There was venison, crystal and silver, and the port went round the table three times before the women had to leave; later we played wink murder and drank more champagne. Sunday morning was what Caroline called “men in tights” – a service for Remembrance Day with her husband in dress uniform and the town provost, a foxy woman with blonde highlights, dressed in ermine. Down another long drive for whisky and ginger wine to warm up, an afternoon raking leaves and planting bulbs, dusk in the old stable, listening to Rupert Brooke war poems on the radio and plucking pheasants for dinner.

After this regime of four-hourly feeds, it was a relief the next day to walk through the cliff-top woods at Culzean Castle with its exotic Gulf Stream gardens, glasshouses and the laundry to which family used to send dirty linen by train from London. Then a tramp down the beach where the “Shore boys” were having their regular Monday rendezvous – four old guys and an Irish wolfhound, sitting round a campfire, “talking balderdash,” they told us cheerfully.

valleygirl@thetimes.co.uk

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