Shooting Grounds were viewed as a necessary evil back in the mid to late 1800's by many gunmakers. They were places for the important work of regulating and field testing shotguns and rifles – firing live ammunition and checking the results at various distances,
sometimes up to 200 yards when regulating a magazine rifle.
Initially Holland & Holland's Shooting Ground at Kensal Green was close to the factory. Old photographs show how much effort was taken in regulating and recording the shot patterns thrown by the guns. This was completed through shooting them against white-washed steel plates, normally at a distance of 40 yards, using the particular cartridge loading specified by each customer. The choke cone of each barrel would be carefully worked until the desired result was obtained. Open sights and telescopes were fitted to magazine rifles to ensure that they shot to 'point of aim' at given distances. The time spent in regulating the 'double' rifles, often in the large calibres, was a mysterious, brutal looking 'art' of aligning the two barrels of the rifle to bring the bullets from both together at the desired distance. This involved the use of a blow torch, tin solder, rosin flux, steel wedges, iron wire, clouds of white smoke and a modicum of luck, not to mention the skill of the regulator.
At the end of the process a pair of once brightly polished barrels emerge part covered in blobs of tin,
soot and hard set heat-blackened tin, soot and hard set heat-blackened rosin to be returned to the factory for the barrel maker to clean off and finish.
An account of a visit to Messrs Holland & Holland's shooting school at Kensal Rise in the summer of 1896, written by Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey Bt. for the Badminton magazine, describes how a keen game shot could go for a session with his own gun or, if a fitting was called for, use a 'try gun'. The try gun allowed the gun fitter/instructor to shape and alter the length, bend and cast of the stock as he watched the user shoot the gun at a variety of targets. The targets used for such an exercise were initially static and shown momentarily against a white washed background, progressing to moving metal targets, then live pigeons flushed from natural cover and clay pigeons launched towards the gun from a high tower as driven targets.
