What I wish I’d known before my first season trail-hunting

I have spent most of my working life in the theatre, so I thought I knew a good production when I saw one. Nothing prepared me for the hunting field. The cast is enormous, the script is written in a language nobody explains, the set changes every 10 minutes and the audience is expected to gallop after the actors. There are no rehearsals.

And the reviews, usually delivered by the field master at some volume, are immediate.

I started trail-hunting late. My children were already keen members of the Heythrop. For a couple of seasons, I was their ground crew, waiting in gateways with a thermos and a growing sense that I was missing something.

My riding CV amounted to some reluctant Pony Club camps in Somerset (I failed the points-of-the-horse test, ignominiously), a gap year mustering cattle in the Northern Territory and one ill-advised bull.

So when a friend suggested I take on his father’s soon-to-be-redundant hunter, Mr P, I said yes before anyone could talk me out of it. Or, as he reminds me, I took on the costs.

On one of my first mornings’ autumn hunting, leaving the ground for the first time, I came off and knocked myself out cold. A month on the sidelines followed. A sensible man would have taken the hint. Instead I made the first of many discoveries: hunting is not so much a pastime as a condition, and the only known treatment is more hunting.

So, for anyone setting out this autumn, here is some of what I have learnt.

You will understand almost nothing, and that is fine

In my first season I saw a great deal of my horse’s ears and the back of whoever was in front. Hounds were a distant noise; the huntsman a flash of colour two fields away. Shouts rolled back down the line – “Hold hard!”, “’Ware wire!”, “Tally Ho!” – and I assumed they were all aimed at me. Some were.

It took a long time before I could stop concentrating on staying on and start watching what hounds and huntsman were doing: the patience, the casting, the moment the pack speaks as one. When it clicks, it is like hearing the full orchestra after months of listening to the violins tune up. This is the “golden thread” between huntsman and his hounds.

Peter Beckford understood this in 1781. His Thoughts on Hunting, written as letters to a friend, is almost entirely about hounds – breeding them, kennelling them, handling them – and hardly at all about the galloping. The Hunting Act 2004 means today’s hounds follow a laid trail, but the craft Beckford describes would still be recognised in any kennel yard. Read him and the day starts to make sense.

The cast is straight out of Surtees

Robert Smith Surtees published Handley Cross in 1843, and nearly all his characters are still out on a Saturday. The suave master, the enigmatic huntsman, the cantankerous field master, the ebullient farmer and the intrepid thrusters – and, occasionally, a Soapey Sponge on a hireling, angling for an invitation to stay.

Surtees’s great creation, the sporting grocer John Jorrocks, called hunting “the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty percent of its danger”. After several visits to the John Radcliffe Hospital, I might quarrel with his maths but never with his enthusiasm. Read Surtees before your first meet and you will recognise everyone. Read him after your first season and you will recognise yourself, which is rather less comfortable.

You will fall off – go anyway

Nobody escapes this one. After my early fall, my family placed me on a strict no-jumping regime, and I spent the rest of that season going round by the gates at the back with a small and cheerful band of fellow travellers.

I was consoled to find that Anthony Trollope had been there first. He fitted an astonishing literary output around his hunting, despite being heavy, short-sighted and by most accounts a moderate horseman. In his Hunting Sketches of 1865, he gives a whole chapter to “The Man Who Hunts and Never Jumps”, treating him with more sympathy than he shows some of the heroes at the front.

He was right. The back of the field is not a lesser place. You see more hound work than you might think, hear the best gossip and nobody shouts at you for overtaking the field master.

The grass is always someone else’s

Early on I was told off, loudly, for riding on “the wrong grass”. To my untrained eye, it was a lovely green field. To the farmer, it was a crop he had paid to sow and would rather not see cut up by 40 horses.

This is the most useful thing a newcomer can grasp. Every yard of country we cross is there by the goodwill of those who farm it. Keep to headlands when asked, shut gates, thank the farmers you meet and say goodnight to the master when you go home. None of it is difficult and it matters far more than your turnout.

I have been reprimanded for talking too much, cutting up others at jumps and, memorably, “joyriding”. The field master was usually right. Find a mentor who will tell you the truth and an instructor brave enough to take you on.

Trust the horse

In my second season, I acquired an experienced Heythrop hunter – Bay Con – who knew the country far better than I did. He took me under his wing, gave me confidence and days I will never forget. The lesson for the late starter is simple: buy experience. One of you should know what he is doing and better that it is the one with four legs.

I now have two more in work. I love them both. Mack is a workhorse with a big jump (and cheeky buck) and gets on with it. Grey Con is idiosyncratic and opinionated. He has firm views on where we ought to be standing, what the horse in front is doing wrong and precisely when it is time to go. But he loves his job, is careful and clever, and he has never once let me down.

You are not buying a horse to make you look good. You are buying one who will look after you when you make a mess of it, which as a newcomer you will, several times a day.

My trust in Grey Con is unsurpassed. He taught me to trust him, day by day, jump by jump, and with it came the confidence to stop interfering, look up and enjoy the day.

Before long you will hear the old maxim that a hunting man needs two horses and a spare. It sounds like whimsy but is in fact a warning about livery bills that nobody reads until too late. What began as the loan of Mr P is now three horses and two-horse days, and my accountant has stopped asking.

Be an educated bore

Nobody tells you that hunting comes with a reading list, or that you will want to work through all of it. Roger Scruton came to it in middle age too and On Hunting is the best account I know of the newcomer’s experience. The fear, the bewilderment and the slow discovery of a relationship with the land, with animals and with a community.

From there it is a short step to the 10th Duke of Beaufort’s Fox-Hunting, full of hard-won wisdom from a man who was simply known as “Master”, and to Michael Clayton, for many years editor of this magazine, whose Foxhunting in Paradise is a glorious tour of the great hunting countries.

Siegfried Sassoon is better still on the ordeal of the beginner. In Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, the young Sherston stands at his first meet in an agony of self-consciousness, aware he has arrived at the edge of a complicated social world whose rules everyone appears to have been born knowing. A century on, nothing about that feeling has changed. It does pass.

The friendships 

Hunting brings together people whose paths would otherwise never cross: farmers and financiers, town and country, grooms and retired generals, teenagers and grandparents. It creates new friendships and cements old ones, and quickly, because you are sharing something you cannot explain to anyone who was not there.

The friendships do not stop when the season does. In the summer, groups of us hack out over the same country at a more civilised pace, reliving the best days of the last season and speculating about the next, safely out of earshot of our long-suffering families. And the grooms, car-followers and hunt staff, up before dawn, will teach you more than any book.

The hunt ball

While you are still learning to rise to the trot, nobody mentions that hunting comes with a social calendar of its own. Meets and lawn meets, hunting breakfasts and teas, and above all the hunt ball, which is less a black-tie dinner with dancing than a controlled explosion in a marquee. People who were sober, competent and faintly terrifying in the field at 11am turn out to be capable of quite remarkable things by 11pm.

This is not incidental. A day outdoors, in weather, at speed, with a degree of real risk, leaves everybody hungry, thirsty and in need of company, and a strain of wild hedonism runs through the whole business, in the field as much as in the marquee.

It’s never too late

I will not forget my first two-horse day, at the end of my second season, finishing at six in the evening in the dark after a point that felt like 10 miles (it probably was not). I was exhausted, soaked and elated.

What I really did not know before I started is that hunting is the best antidote to gloom I have ever come across.

Whatever is waiting on the desk on Monday morning, it is impossible to brood about it while crossing a remote field at speed on a horse following a pack of hounds in full cry. You come home cold, wet, muddy and unaccountably happy – and it lasts for days. I cannot explain why this should be so and have stopped trying.

If you are standing in a gateway with a thermos wondering whether to have a go, my advice is to ring someone before you think better of it.

I would do it all again, first fence included. Well, perhaps not the first fence.

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