Madge and Guy take on the estate life

So Madonna and Guy Ritchie are on the verge of buying Ashcombe, Cecil Beaton?s 17th century sixbedroom Georgian house and estate, for £9 million.

It is a lot of money for a country pad, even if it is an extraordinarily beautiful house with a grand history, fine gardens, a croquet lawn, tennis courts and swimming pool. But what makes it all worth it, what has made Madonna?s movie-making husband?s heart leap and much of the fashionable London male population envious, is that little word 'estate'.

An estate means shooting, and a 1,200-acre estate on the Wiltshire/Dorset border means some of the best shooting in the country.

Shooting Bambi, killing Peter Rabbit and mowing down a raft of pheasants with a £20,000 shotgun may not be politically correct, but it is getting more and more popular.

Rory Bremner may not want it known that he is a dab hand with a 12-bore gun, and Sir David Steel has kept jolly quiet that it took him more than 50 shots to kill his first grouse, but both love shooting. Prince William is fanatical about the sport, so is the current Duke of Westminster, as is almost every living earl and viscount who has worn dead fur around his collar. Sting, Mick Jagger and Bryan Ferry all shoot. So do the current demi-monde such as Dan Macmillan, Matthew Freud and Marco Pierre White.

Shooting is chic. It has become the smartest sport in Britain, despite New Age, New Labour disapproval of it. Shooting syndicates are enjoying their biggest boom since Eighties yuppiedom ? more big-business deals, record contracts, film deals and important friendships are made in the mud of the shooting field than are ever cut on the fairway.

What was once a rural pastime has been gentrified into the politically incorrect vogue. Shooting has become the premier male hobby for royalty, aristocrats, bankers, stockbrokers, captains of industry and the nouveaux riches. And the richest of them all will start banging away on Monday. (The Twelfth ? 12 August ? is the traditional start to the grouse-shooting season but this year it falls on a Sunday, when it is illegal to shoot game birds.) An invitation for a day?s grouse-shooting is worth an entire summer mantelpiece of high-society party 'stiffies'.

The kit alone is wildly expensive. The price of a decent double-barrelled shotgun runs into thousands of pounds. It is engraved, initialled and bespoke and treated with the reverence of one?s first cap pistol. There are hand-made leather gun covers and cartridge bags to buy and expensive weather-proof jackets, hand-knitted socks and wonderful tweeds to appeal to the peacock in us. (There are more male conversations about clothes in a single morning?s shooting than there are for the whole of the rest of the year in town.)

The eight or nine guns (the actual shooters) are driven across country in brand new top-of-the-range offroad 4x4 vehicles or in specially converted shooting trailers to numbered stands. A gamekeeper blows a whistle and local poor people, known as beaters, are paid to shout and bang their way through the woods attempting to send the birds scudding over the guns.

When you kill a bird, a man with a dog will pick it up for you. At elevenses the guns stop for a drink. At lunch they adjourn to a nearby hostelry (or to an estate outhouse) for nursery food and lashings of claret. The girls quite often join them dressed in expensive tweeds and Hermés scarves. (The girls tend not to shoot, but usually spend a brief part of the day standing by their man watching him shoot badly before repairing to the nearby shops or a 'weepie' black and white movie.)

After lunch there are a couple more drives before the men go back to the big house for tea, a bath and more large drinks. In the evening there is frequently a formal black-tie slap-up dinner when wives, girlfriends and mistresses cheerfully join in discussions about who?s sleeping with whom, sporting prowess, anti-hunting legislation and sub-lavatorial jokes.

It costs more than £1,000 a day to shoot driven grouse and around £350 a day for driven pheasant shooting ? and that is before you have tipped the keeper 20 quid. If you are invited shooting, either as a guest of a syndicate or to a private estate, you are expected to invite your host back for an equivalent day.

So it is not surprising that this lazy rich boy?s game is the ultimate networking sport.

Shooting became fashionable in the second half of the 19th century when the breech-loading gun made it possible to kill a great number of birds quickly and the railways made it possible to get to the country houses conveniently.

Furthermore the then Prince of Wales, Edward, adored shooting (he once went on a bat shoot in the tomb of Rameses IV). It quickly became the sport of rich men with too much time and a lot of money. The big shoots would kill 4,000 pheasants in a day.

It was claimed that Prince Edward once had four dead birds in the sky before they hit the ground.

An estate such as Ashcombe may have once been host to wildly gay parties hosted by society photographer Beaton and attended by the likes of Rex Whistler, Salvador Dali and Tallulah Bankhead. It may still contain magnificent pictures and priceless antiques and be surrounded by manicured farms supplying wheat, cattle and sheep.

But its main glory ? and social use ? lies in the coveys of partridges, wild duck and in particular the highflying pheasants among casually sited woods, ponds and thick hedgerows.

And now it is back in high fashion, and Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie want to join the shooting party.