Holland & Holland guns are celebrated throughout the world as the perfect combination of artistry and craftsmanship. To understand why, you need simply pick one up, balance it in your hands, and allow your eyes to take in every detail of its lines. Look closely. It displays a purity of design and a functional simplicity that is found more frequently in nature than in the creations of man. Then swing and mount the gun to your shoulder and, immediately, your visual sensation is matched by such perfect handling that you know the gun is ideally suited to its purpose.

Such an achievement does not come into being by evolution alone, even though Holland & Holland guns and rifles trace their lineage back to the year 1835. Its other parent is curiosity; the desire of the craftsman and gunmaker to see whether an improvement can be made on accepted methods.

In some things, of course, there is no substitute for tradition. For instance, in the making of a stock the craftsmen still use the finest walnut, taken from the juncture of root and trunk. The root for the wildness and figure that gives the stock its beauty; the trunk for the strength that it gives to the stock's slender grip.

Equally, the hand tools used by the engraver will not have changed much in appearance since the mid-19th Century. But alongside the time-hallowed, is the innovative - a Holland & Holland gun of today is made using the best steels that the modern age can provide, and is drilled, milled and turned by machines far more precise than those used by yesterday's craftsmen in the gun factory so carefully planned and built by Henry Holland over one hundred years ago.

The result is a gun capable of handling the high performance cartridges and ammunition that our forefathers did not have at their disposal; a gun that will give faithful service to its owner and his heirs for generations, and a gun that will give unmatched pleasure the while.

It is this combination of tradition and vision that makes a Holland & Holland gun that most rare of creations; a work of art where the emphasis is balanced equally between the purpose of its work, and the beauty of its art.