shooting venues

Situated in the grounds of the beautiful Ashcombe Estate in Devon, the clay site has been purpose built with the clay and game shooter in mind. All of the clays are thrown as realistically as possible – so targets like driven pheasant, springing teal and dropping duck fly just as you would expect the real bird to do. In addition, our fully automatic Parker traps provide the shooter with consistent, quality targets for that ultimate sporting challenge.
Our Senior Instructor has been involved in the sport for more than twenty years, and can provide tuition for everyone, from the complete beginner to the experienced clay shot and game shooter. Facilities include a Skeet range, Down the Line, Compact and various Sporting layouts where targets are thrown from a variety of towers and stands (and even from trees!). Booking is strongly recommended to use our High Tower, which can throw driven birds up to 150ft!

The team at EJ Churchill, headed by the charming James Webster, run as tight a ship as anyone could wish for in this sporting sphere, chalking up dozens of corporate and private simulated game events each year.

With all of their days taking place on Sir Edward Dashwood’s decorative, 5,000-acre West Wycombe Estate, the Buckinghamshire seat of the Dashwood dynasty for some 300 years, one is assured that all the desired bells and whistles from one of the country’s top shooting schools will be delivered.

Indeed, so keen are the team at Churchills to ensure that their clays emulate our beloved respective quarry species, they go as far as maintaining a dedicated course setter to ensure the clays are as close as possible to the real thing as they’re pinged high and far – and in some number – across those wonderful, deep, wooded valleys.

For homespun Wiltshire charm, Matthew Pickford’s Stoke Drove enterprise, between Shaftesbury and Salisbury, can spirit you away to the fantasy of a summer day of driven birds. Stoke Drove is the antithesis of the larger, more corporate options mentioned; a blissfully quiet and beautiful location makes it one of the best simulated shoots for syndicates keen to air their guns and keep those bad habits and cobwebs from forming during the warmer months.

“We’re really catering for the hardened game-shot here,” says Pickford, “but, of course, we can look after a novice, too. We’re on manual traps here and we love to watch the game-shots coaching themselves. I love to drive clays high over a pretty grass valley to someone who knows what to do with it, however it arrives. We’ve all missed that bird over our least-favourite shoulder and thought, ‘Blow, should have had that.’ With us, you know you’ll get a similar bird along soon enough. There’s never a better lesson than one you’ve learnt yourself. A day with us is one of the best simulated shoots because it feels so much more alive.”