30 NOVEMBER 1951, Page 14

The Game - Keeper's Gibbet Of all the traditional countrymen fading out

of the contemporary scene I deplore the gamekeeper the least. What a barbarous exhibition the decomposing corpses of the " larder "! His absence not only gives a chance of restoration to the beneficial balance of nature but to the wood- lands of which he was once the tyrant. For a surfeit of pheasants in a wood meant the elimination of practically all the tree-seedlings.