08-Jul-2026
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If you read our first post in this series, you'll already know what's happening on the Manor & Co stand at Ragley Hall this July: the Side by Side clay category, the AYA Concourse, the giveaways. What we haven't covered yet is the brand itself. If the name AYA is new to you, or you've heard it mentioned around the gun club without quite knowing the story, this is the post for you.
Because there is a proper story here, over a century of it, built in a small Basque town by two men who had no business succeeding, and a name that has quietly become one of the most respected in British gun cabinets.
Two apprentices, a German gunmaker, and a gamble
AYA's story starts in 1915, when Miguel Aguirre and Nicolás Aranzabal journeyed to apprentice under the German gunmaker Eduardo Schilling, before returning home to found Aguirre y Aranzabal - AYA -a in Eibar, a town in Spain's Basque Country with centuries of arms-making heritage running through it.
It's worth pausing on what a gamble this actually was. Aguirre and Aranzabal were Basque farmers, not aristocrats or established tradesmen, founding a fine gunmaking house in a region that would go on to face cultural suppression for much of the 20th century. Eibar itself was a town of "tongue-twister" Basque names - Ugartechea, Sarriugarte, Arrizabalaga - gunmaking families who had been refining their craft for five centuries before AYA even existed. Breaking into that world and building something that would outlast nearly all of it was never a safe bet.
History, as it turned out, favoured them. AYA survived the Spanish Civil War, survived government consolidation of the Spanish arms industry into a single state company in the mid-20th century, and emerged as what one American gunwriter called simply "the last powerhouse in handmade Spanish shotguns."
How AYA found its way into the British gun cabinet
The British connection, the reason AYA matters so much to UK shooters specifically, has a story of its own.
As Britain rebuilt after the Second World War, two English brothers, Peter and Andrew King, toured the gunmaking workshops of the Basque region while on holiday in Spain. What they found startled them: guns built with the same care and the same design language as the English greats, Purdey, Holland & Holland, Boss, but at a fraction of the cost. Of the gunmakers they visited, AYA had the largest factory and the most accommodating approach to building for export. The King brothers and AYA began collaborating on a range of shotguns specifically for the UK market, patterned deliberately after the Holland & Holland sidelock and the Westley Richards-style boxlock, designs British sportsmen already trusted.
It worked. By the 1950s, AYA had become one of the world's leading makers of side-by-side shotguns, with a growing and devoted following in Britain. At a time when a genuine English best gun was drifting permanently out of reach for most working sportsmen, AYA offered something that felt almost impossible: a handmade, sidelock shotgun, built the proper way, at a price an estate manager or a working farmer could actually justify.
That reputation has held. England remains the single largest market for Spanish shotguns today, and AYA, by most accounts, sells more side-by-sides in the UK than any other maker.
What "handmade" actually means at AYA
It's a word used loosely in marketing copy across the gun trade. At AYA, it has a specific and slightly old-fashioned meaning.
AYA's barrels are still made using the demi-bloc, or "chopper lump," method — two solid pieces of steel, forged and joined by silver, rather than the mono-bloc construction that has become standard across most of the industry because it's faster and cheaper to produce by machine. Chopper lump barrels are slower to make and require genuine skill from the barrel maker, which is precisely why most manufacturers have moved away from the method. AYA hasn't.
The stocks are checkered by hand. The wood is selected, not simply allocated. On the sidelock models, the internal lockwork, the part no one but a gunsmith will ever see, is finished to the same standard as the parts that are. And the factory itself, even today, runs to a rhythm that owes more to a workshop than a production line: AYA's total output sits in the high hundreds annually, made by a workforce that, by trade estimates, numbers under twenty people directly on the tools.
That scale is the point. It's a tiny operation by the standards of mass-market gunmaking, and it's exactly why an AYA gun still feels like it was made by a person rather than a machine - because, largely, it was.
The models: sidelock, boxlock, and the gun that built the name
AYA's range covers both side-by-side and over-and-under configurations, in both boxlock and sidelock actions, plus double rifles for those with bigger game in mind. But three names come up again and again when shooters talk about AYA, and it's worth knowing what separates them.
AYA No. 2 - the "poor man's Purdey"
The AYA No. 2 sidelock is, without question, AYA's most famous gun and the one most responsible for the brand's British reputation. Built on a Holland & Holland-influenced design, it's been described by American gunwriters as giving roughly seventy per cent of what a London best gun offers, at a small fraction of the price.
It's a true sidelock, meaning the lockwork sits on detachable side plates rather than being recessed into the action body, the traditional configuration that gives gunsmiths a broad, flat canvas for engraving and gives the gun its distinctive external profile. All AYA sidelocks, including the No. 2, carry a small period detail that's become something of a signature: a gold-inlaid cocking indicator on the lockplate, a holdover from the era of external hammers that shows at a glance whether the gun is cocked.
It's available across the full range of British bore sizes, 12, 16, 20, 28 gauge and .410, which is part of why it's turned up in so many forms across so many decades, and why it's the gun you'll most likely see represented heavily in the Concourse's pre-1985 category at Ragley Hall.
AYA No. 4 - the working gun
Where the AYA No. 2 is the gun collectors talk about, the AYA No. 4 boxlock is the gun that's actually out in the field on a wet Tuesday in November. It's AYA's most practical and most heavily produced model - a dependable boxlock game gun without the cost or complexity of a sidelock, built to be shot hard across a long working life rather than admired in a cabinet.
It's a sound starting point for anyone curious about AYA but not yet ready to commit to sidelock money, and it remains one of the most common AYA models you'll find for sale, new or used, in the UK today.
AYA XXV - built for English driven game
The AYA XXV takes its name and its proportions from Robert Churchill's celebrated 25-inch barrel game gun, a configuration Churchill developed because shorter barrels suited his own build and, he argued, made for a faster, more responsive gun in the field. AYA's XXV carries the same high-tapered Churchill rib and the same short, quick-handling character, which has made it a particular favourite on fast, high-bird driven days across the West Country and Wales.
It's a gun built for a specific kind of British shooting, and it shows: shooters who get on with the XXV tend to be devoted to it in a way that's slightly different from how they talk about other AYA models.
A name that's stayed in the family
One detail that tends to surprise people who are new to AYA: it's still, broadly, the same family business it always was. Today, a fourth-generation Aranzabal continues to run the company, carrying forward a name that's been on the door in Eibar since 1915, through a civil war, decades of government interference in the Spanish arms trade, and a near-total collapse of the wider Eibar gunmaking industry that took most of AYA's contemporaries down with it.
Of the storied Eibar gunmaking names, only a handful remain producing fine shotguns by hand today, AYA among them, alongside houses like Arrieta and Grulla Armas. AYA is generally regarded as the largest of the survivors, and the name most UK shooters will recognise first.
Why this matters for The Game Fair
All of which brings us back to Ragley Hall this July.
When you see AYA's Side by Side category on the clay shoot, or walk past the Concourse on the Manor & Co stand and see a 1970s No. 2 sitting next to a current-production No. 4, you're looking at more than a product display. You're looking at a hundred-plus years of a specific, deliberate approach to gunmaking, one that chose to stay slow, stay handmade, and stay focused on a discipline that most of the industry moved away from decades ago.
That's also why the Concourse's pre/post-1985 split makes sense once you know the history. The earlier guns carry the weight of AYA's formative decades, the period when the King brothers' partnership first built the brand's British reputation. The later guns represent a company that kept building to the same standard through enormous change in the shooting world. Seeing both side by side, in the hands of the owners who've kept them, is a rare thing.
If you're heading to The Game Fair and want to see what a chopper-lump barrel or a hand-detachable sidelock actually looks like up close, Gunmakers' Row, and the Manor & Co stand specifically- is exactly where to do it.
Thinking about buying one?
If this has you curious about owning an AYA, new examples currently enter the UK market at approximately £2,000 to £3,000 for the No. 4 and XXV, rising for sidelock models, with the used market offering genuine value at every point below that, particularly given how well a properly serviced AYA tends to hold up over decades of use.
You can browse current AYA listings, new and used, on Rightgun.uk, and use the gun valuation calculator if you're weighing up buying, selling, or simply want to know where a particular gun sits in today's market.
What's next
If you missed our first post on what's happening at The Game Fair this year, you can catch up here. We'll see you at Ragley Hall this July.
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