The Lyman 56S, last offered in 1959, was the Rolls-Royce of receiver sights for the Savage 1899. The eyepiece in this sight is a Merit “iris shutter” disk.

While we are on the subject of sights that fold up or down and employ spring pressure to hold them in place, some deluxe rifles have front sights with or without folding hoods or large beads that can be raised for use in low light. Severe recoil will sometimes move anything movable. When confronting a dangerous animal at close quarters, with the need for a flurry of shots, having your sights go wonky in mid-barrage is definitely undesirable.

There are various island-type rear open sights that move up, down and sideways on dovetails and are fixed in place with set screws. These are relatively easy to adjust, although severe recoil can send your sight spinning into the grass if the screws are not really battened down.

The solution is to practice enough to identify any problems. The answer may be to remove anything movable altogether and go with a simple fixed blade at the back and fixed bead in front. This may not be the ideal combination in all circumstances, but it certainly beats a system of movable parts that screws up when you want it least.

When Holland & Holland embarked on its design of a new, lower-priced ($50,000) double rifle, its “round-action,” the company cut costs in exactly that way. The sights are a solid fixed blade and fixed bead, with no folding gizmos. This rifle is intended to be functionally perfect, if aesthetically austere. H&H’s riflemakers felt the expensive express sights could be dispensed with without affecting function in any material way and might actually improve it. Were I building a new double rifle in a big caliber, that is exactly the sight I would order.

With the ascendancy of riflescopes in the 1950s, development of iron sights largely ended except to figure ways of making them as cheaply as possible. In the years before that, however, with intense competition among rifle builders and sight makers, some interesting designs were marketed. Some of these would be well worth bringing back. The problem is, they would be expensive and the market tiny.

One such is the Savage Model 15 Windgauge rear sight. I have one on a Model 1899, built in 1916 and configured as an offhand target rifle. The sight is essentially the standard dovetail on the barrel but has a double-step elevation system and windage adjustments by means of a small knurled knob on each side of the blade. With the double-step, it is harder to lose the piece, and that is no small advantage. Of all the adjustment systems I’ve seen, this would get my vote. It is sufficiently adjustable without being complicated or fragile.

Receiver or tang sights are rarely seen on dangerous-game rifles, being more the province of target rifles on the one hand and deer rifles on the other. A tang sight on any kind of hard-recoiling rifle is a peril to the shooter’s thumb and eye. As for receiver sights, iron sights on a dangerous-game rifle are often used in conjunction with a quick-detachable scope, and a receiver sight does not lend itself to such an arrangement. Also, when you dispense with the scope you are expecting action in close, where an open sight is preferable to an aperture.

Almost all receiver sights offer a variety of screw-in apertures, and conventional wisdom has always said you should throw these away (except for long-range target work) and just use the “ghost ring” of the sight itself. This was good advice in 1960 and still is today.