Hi Spooksar,
Welcome to SD - I'm planning a trip over your side next September to spend a couple of weeks doing a wilderness hunt with friends from Calgary. We have plenty of beautiful countryside here but very little that would qualify as real wilderness, given that we are a small island with about 30,000,000 to many people living on it!
We hunt all year round here - with six deer species there's always one or two in season, plus no restrictions on vermin species or foxes. For the shotgunners, there are wildfowl and gamebirds. The main differences are that we have no major predator species and bowhunting is illegal.
UK firearms ownership is not nearly as restrictive as our US cousins would have us believe. As a hunter, if you have good reason, you can have what you need within reasonable limits. If you are a target shooter and belong to the appropriate clubs, you can have anything up to .50BMG. Full and semi-auto rifles are illegal other than .22RF semis. Pistols are highly restricted to the general shooting population and only in very limited use for 'humane dispatch'.
I hunt with .22LR, .17HMR, .223R, .270W and .300WM, have just acquired a .458WM for dangerous game overseas and am waiting for the OK on an 8x57 combination rifle for running game in Europe, so it's not too bad here. There is, however, quite a lot of form-filling and waiting involved, so it's not all positive news.
For an overseas visitor, hunting here is fairly cheap and readily available. The excellent thing about sites like SD ismthat there are plenty of decent guys keen to swap superb deer stalking in the UK for stuff like moose and bear on your side.
Cheers,
Adam.