The best of days across country

It’s a given that every contemporary huntsman wishes he or she had been plying their trade in an easier era several decades earlier. And yet, when the time finally comes to surrender the horn there is a realisation that things were not quite so bad after all. That was certainly how I felt following 14 consecutive years during which I thought of little else but foxes, hounds, horses and country. Sadly, I am not sure that will not be the case for the current generation of practitioners battling at the Covid coalface against a backdrop of increasingly stringent regulations and vigilante saboteurs.

I had the great good fortune to hunt my first pack of foxhounds across wild and woolly Dartmoor, a friendly and forgiving land of hospitable farmers, open country and plentiful foxes that, up until the ban, were the essential ingredient for successful sport. When I moved north to hunt the Sinnington in the shadow of the North York Moors gamekeepers used to tell me, “You only need one good