Despite what some people seem to think, 'Rifleman Moore' didn't emerge into the world at birth wearing a green jacket. It did cause some raised-eyebrows that when other boys were playing 'cowboys and indians', I was carrying a broom-handle and attempting to 'muzzle-load' it: where this notion came from has been lost in the mists of obscurity - but the now ancient but most revered copy from my boyhood of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson still on the bookshelf here and a little later the Leather-Stocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper and an attempted outfit made of 'buckskins' may be a clue to it - but the idea simply stuck.


From the age of sixteen, I began to seriously explore the 'lore' of the muzzle-loading flintlock gun which by a process of logic, led to learning about the 'field' application and the use of these in period warfare and also sparked off my collection of old books in which men described both the use of them and their application in combat. 'Muzzle-loading' using gunpowder is a discipline in which the shooter becomes very much part of the gun - not the impersonal of placing several cartridges in the gun and firing them off until there are none left. The loading especially is very personal - like a shooter, each shot fired is an individual and because of the necessary time between each shot the old marksman's adage of One Shot One Kill becomes clear. If you in a situation where you are hungry and 'shooting for the pot' a missed shot might mean an empty belly - perhaps for you and your family... if a soldier engaged in a battle, it could literally mean the difference between Life and Death. That 'men of old' walked into full-scale battles carrying them was both a revelation and a thrill and by the age of eighteen, from amassing both theoretical and practical knowledge I began to realise that I knew more about the reality of 'The Napoleonic Wars' than any of the historians whose books I had read ever did. It was time to delve deeper...

Re-enactment as we know it (or 'living history' as it has come to be known) in terms of recreating a given period of history by people costuming and behaving authentically and offering their visitors their remit of an 'informative, educational, entertaining' display - and to which I personally added 'amusing' - goes back some years. From small 'costumed shoots' for fun at a firing-range or perhaps more seriously at a museum using antique or reproduction muzzle-loading arms began larger 'battle reenactments' which today number many thousands of participants and cover a very wide range of historical periods. The flintlock gun saw common use between 1720 and 1820... my favourite era in history and one which I had already studied extensively and the next obvious step to learn what it was really like was to 'live it'.


My 'sporting' adventures in the field - now using only the muzzle-loading flintlock gun - saw me slowly adopt a 'practical historical' appearance to match: at first wearing my usual sporting attire but accompanied by a homemade shooting bag holding maintenance tools, spare flints and the like and a leather pouch holding birdshot and a copper flask holding gunpowder. Various prints and images of '18th Century sporting shooters' in collected books conjured up the idea of looking like them - my future sporting outings saw me gradually dressed in such a way that one of my fellow-shooters then named me 'Davy Crockett' through my habitual three-cornered 'cocked-hat' but particularly as I had also moved up into 'sleeping-out' overnight in a small camp carrying no more or less than a period adventurer or hunter would have done and only cooking and eating what I'd shot 'in the spirit of the original'.