EXPLORE THE OUTDOORS WITH VIEWRANGER

As the spring sunshine spreads its rays across the country everyone is heading outside; families flock to national parks, cyclists take to country lanes and walkers enjoy the warm temperatures and clear views from vantage points across the land. Getting outside is never more appealing than when the weather is at its best, and whether you’re walking, hiking, cycling or horse-riding, you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of your time outdoors.

ViewRanger GPS is the outdoor discovery app. It enables you to make the countryside your own, helping you locate, plan, navigate, record and share your outdoor adventures. It’s a digital guidebook for your smartphone, providing interactive routes for your favourite activities using highly detailed Ordnance Survey maps.

Free to download on the App Store and Google Play, ViewRanger provides you

DOWNLOAD NOW! To with instant access to thousands of routes created by publishers such as Trail Magazine Countryfile Magazine and The AA, as well as a community of more than 2 million users. Routes include photographs, waypoint descriptions and points of interest to help you plan your route and familiarise yourself with the area in advance.

You never need to worry about getting lost again – the app works without phone signal and can show you your location no matter where you are. Just download your chosen routes and maps over wifi before you set out and ViewRanger will do the rest, providing you with navigation instructions for every step of your route, regardless of whether you have phone signal along the way.

So whether you’re looking to discover more of your local area or to plan days out in new areas, you’ll find routes for every ability at a variety of lengths and styles – all created by ViewRanger users.

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Fast forward 50 years, and though the scales have changed – the biggest ever CLA Game Fair attracted somewhere near 150,000 visitors – the central focus is remarkably similar. You’ll still see clay shoots, falconry displays and gamekeepers’ gatherings at just about every game fair. And there are more of them to boot – the Midland Game Fair welcomes 90,000 visitors a year to

Weston Park, the Scottish Game Fair at Scone is the biggest event north of the border, and countless more localised events fly the game fair flag.

They are not all huge, of course, but whether it’s six-figure attendance or two boles and a dog, the formula is recognisable. Take one manor house or countryside attraction, situate the aisles of shedding and main arena in the grounds, and populate it with mostly green-clad, dog-towing clientele. As the shooting sports are central to a game fair, you’ll need your exhibitors to follow suit – gun dealers, country clothing retailers, dog training gear suppliers, and of course, as many hat sellers as you can cram in. Get your main arena demos right – a wildfowler with an abnormally large gun and several terrier races to start with – and you’re on the right track. Over the coming weekend, prodigious amounts of gunslips and whistle lanyards will be sold, the pub will be drained of cider, and the visiting folk will be happy (if quite a bit muddier than when they started).

A new chapter

The game fair circuit was dealt a major blow in 2015 when the CLA closed its game fair’s doors for good. The association cited huge financial losses, and said it could no longer continue to prop up the event with its members’ subscriptions.

Thus ended a 58-year tradition – but what went wrong? Every field-hardened game fair trader in the country has their own idea –but the prevailing theory is that it just got too big. Occupying a huge swathe of land, the CLA Game Fair regularly had more than 800 exhibitors and occasionally as many as 1,100. Shooting was involved, as were fishing, gamekeeping and gundogs – but regular exhibitors began to notice more peripheral additions creeping in. Merry-gorounds, jacuzzis and expensive cars began to take up space as organisers sought to keep the numbers up. The inevitable result was that a jeans-clad ‘family day out’ crowd began to usurp the core fieldsports audience, leaving the traditional traders, who need that core if they’re going to make their stand fee back, out of pocket.

Whatever the reasons behind the CLA Game Fair’s downfall, or the disgruntlement that surrounded its final outing in 2015 at Harewood House, the event will forever be looked on fondly as the ultimate countryside meeting place. It was the one event that country folk from Cornwall and Scotland would be equally likely to travel to – and, for