The recent news that the shooting rights are for sale on one of the last forbidden bastions in the southern Pennines is most interesting. Wanderers on the broad heather moors of Snailsden have always had to run the gauntlet. Its privacy has been strictly enforced; Snailsden is a byword for exclusion. The 4,000 acre-moor also has the distinction of being one of the first places to practice grouse driving, in about 1842.

In keeping with national trends, the game records for Snailsden over the last quarter century show a generally declining annual crop of grouse shot - 528 brace in 1975, 94 brace in 2000, though, of course, there are large variations from year to year. There are no public rights of way over the moor and this has long been a bone of contention, when ramblers have struck out across the line of grouse butts heading, maybe, for the far-off sentinel of the Holme Moss television mast and so upset sitting grouse. There have been periodic angry confrontations with the keeper and his beaters when trespassers have come striding across the head of Ramsden Clough, heading for the upper reaches of Winscar Reservoir.

Here, too, is the source of the River Don, on the lonely, moortop crest of Withens Edge. It starts as a trickle burbling east to flow into an arm of Winscar Reservoir almost within sight of the gamekeeper's cottage at Wetshaw Edge.

There is a hopeful note in the sale particulars, however. It states that Yorkshire Water, as freeholders of Snailsden Moor, wish to designate a linear footpath here, though the proposed route has yet to be finalized. The northern edge of the moor falls away to small headwater valleys draining to the Holme Valley, and they are enhanced by blocks of coniferous plantations around little reservoirs originally built to provide mill water. I remember a fine spring evening when we crossed in an almost straight line from Holme Moss to the rocky declivities of Ramsden Clough. Then we cut across to the public road close to the site of the long-vanished Cook's Study, former shooting lodge and observatory of the Stanhopes. The grouse were calling in the soft, slanting sunlight; a cuckoo sang far away towards Holme. We didn't, though, see any sign of the keeper or hear shouts to get off these precious sporting wastes.