It is 48 acres of seemingly unremarkable woodland on the main road across Exmoor, with some lovely native trees, which was expected to fetch little more than £100,000 when it was sold at an auction this week.

However, after the kind of fierce bidding normally reserved for an artist's masterpiece, Brockhole Woods, near Brompton Regis in Somerset, ended up fetching £160,000 – and the sale has rekindled the bitter divisions over country sports on Exmoor. For the victorious buyer was the League Against Cruel Sports, which outbid a local shooting club at the Taunton auction on Tuesday afternoon.

The woods are almost next to the League's existing and controversial deer sanctuary at Baronsdown, which it has created since buying land on Exmoor back in the 1960s.

The League allows and even feeds deer on the sanctuary and an adjacent piece of land known as Linda's Wood, which Sir Paul McCartney bought for the same purpose.

Local deer and fox hunts are banned, and the hunts have put up large fences around the area in a bid to keep the deer on land they can be hunted.

But the sale of the land to the League has sparked some surprise on Exmoor. A couple of months ago, the Western Daily Press revealed the League was seeking to sell off land and property it had bought around the area to help raise £1 million to fund the forthcoming battle in Parliament over the possible repeal of the 2005 hunting ban.

Chief executive Douglas Batchelor said the purchase of Brockhole Woods, at a time when the League was reducing its holding on Exmoor, was "strategic".

"The land lies to the north of the existing 200-acre Baronsdown sanctuary," he said.

"We announced we would be selling some land in Devon and Somerset to help fund the campaign and the acquisition of Brockhole Woods is strategic. Our plan to sell land to finance our biggest campaign on hunting has been an enormous success. The purchase of this important woodland is a significant step forward in our wider plan to rationalise our land holdings."

Hunt supporters and pro- country sports farmers on Exmoor have long complained the existence of the sanctuary creates an artificially high deer population on Exmoor, amid claims deer there are allowed to be unhealthy.

A spokesman for the Countryside Alliance on Exmoor said the purchase was "very strange".

"It seems a very strange purchase by the League Against Cruel Sports as the Devon and Somerset Staghounds do not hunt this wood, it does not hold deer and as far as we know, no one else goes near Brockhole Woods," he said.

One clue could come from the fact that local shooters wanted to buy the wood, where the existing deerstalking and shooting rights run out at the end of February.

The League has said it will be banning shooting and hunting on the land from then.