AN ENGLISH TRIBE OF AMERICAN INDIANS
Ursula Buchan is forcibly struck by a Cumbrian hunt's powerful and unselfconscious connection with the land and the past
WE have seen the golden eagles and red squirrels, the butterwort and Grass of Par- nassus. We have walked along High Street, far above Ullswater, toiled up Slciddaw and lost our nerve on Striding Edge. We thought we knew the Lake District. But we talked only to waiters and shopkeepers, for we had no friends there. We had crawled over the skin of Cumbria but never got under it. Until we started hunting.
Six years ago, mildly curious, we went to a meet of the Blencathra Foxhounds in Borrowdale. No sooner had we set off than a holloa drew us to a bank from which we saw a fine fell fox streaking up the beck with the pack in full cry after him. The fox got away. But we were caught.
The day after Jack Straw's announce- ment, that the government would set up an inquiry into hunting and the consequences of a ban, we were at a 'social' organised by the Hunt in a packed pub. I looked around to see if I could spot a bloodthirsty barbar- ian. The middle-aged Cumbrians with whom I was sitting could not have been nicer or more respectable. The young men and women crowding the bar were boister- ous but good-natured. At tables sat digni- fied old ladies with untouched glasses in front of them, listening to a succession of unaccompanied singers (young and old, men and women), while we all joined rau- cously in the choruses. I had a painfully acute sense of the disconnection between perception and reality.
The best singer for me is a retired huntsman with a very pleasing tenor voice. Tall, with a loping stride which swallows distance on the fells, he has a kindly, good-humoured face and a uniformly courteous manner; the kind now always referred to as 'old-fashioned'. The songs are often glutinously sentimental (Always remember your terriers, protect them from wet and from cold' is a universal favourite), archaic (the words 'adorn' and 'abound' abound), but they display a love and knowledge of the countryside and the people who live there, and the ways of wild creatures and hounds, which go very deep. They sing of long-dead hounds and huntsmen by name, ancient but not forgot- ten hunts of doughty foxes, and fortnight- long battles to recover buried terriers.
The songs are still being composed — there is one about the men who marched down to the Hyde Park Rally from Cald- beck in 1997, and another praising a mas- ter who died only three years ago — and it may well be that this is the last, truly unselfconscious, example we have in Eng- land of a living folk-singing tradition. As many hunting people have said to me over the past few years, 'If we were a tribe of South American Indians, there would be a society to preserve us.'
Lord Burns's remit in the inquiry which he has been asked by the government to chair includes the social and cultural aspects of hunting. He could do worse than spend an evening in a pub in Cum- bria, in the company of supporters of any one of the six Fell Packs.
'Socials' are not put on for visitors, although we are welcomed and treated with kindness; they happen all through the season, as money-raisers and get-togeth- ers, for many of those who hunt are geo- graphically isolated and economically threatened hill farmers. The Hunt meets three times a week, between September and early April (and is then on 'lamb-wor- rying call' into May), in a different (but annually the same) area each week. There is a fund-raising coffee morning most weeks, before the Huntsman sets off with his hounds, when the wives have the chance to chat and to catch a sight of the hounds which they 'walk' in the summer. Hunt supporters are proud of the particu- lar hounds they have looked after out of season since puppyhood, and can pick them out with no trouble when they are working quarter-of-a-mile away on a fell. In the summer they meet each other with their hounds at shows all over the Lake District. The Hunt is the centre of a web of human contact, just the sort of face-to-face connection made when people are engaged in some external endeavour, which in our increasingly atomised social lives we risk losing.
The people who follow the Hunt know the name and shape of every crag, gike and ghyll in the 'country', this land of fold- ed hills, of bracken and heather, of bright, sparking becks and cool, glassy lakes. There are those, 30 or more years my senior, who can count the hounds on a far fellside which I can scarcely see with the aid of binoculars. Fascination with the hounds and the way they work is what absorbs them, unencumbered with the need to prove themselves on horses or any fear of falling off. If you do not follow the Hunt, you will probably not see foxes, nor feel the shock of wonder and awe at their canniness and nonchalance (the 'crafty old Reynard' of the songs), and the fierce, pur- poseful instinct of the hounds. On these open fells, especially if you have the strength to follow just behind the Hunts- man or 'climb out' to the ridges, you will often see most, if not all, of the drama unfold, and its congruity and proportion cannot fail to strike you forcibly.
I have a picture in my mind, which never fails to soothe if I cannot sleep, of Blencathra's Huntsman, Barry Todhunter, in his red coat and waistcoat, bringing his hounds down off the back of Skiddaw, in the sunshine of an October afternoon, as a light breeze fretted the hummocky grasses and the shadows deepened in the ghylls, and here and there motionless men stood on bluffs, intently watching as if they never could see enough of those hounds picking their way elegantly down the slope and animating the still land- scape with their waving 'sterns'.
We hunted the following day, a Saturday. The scent was poor, no foxes were killed, but we had a marvellous scramble up the mountain which gives the Hunt its name. Afterwards we stopped on the road to say goodbye to two men, one aged almost 80, who is a retired farmer and descendant of John Peel, and a 19-year-old lad, the son of the Huntsman. They were sitting compan- ionably in a Subaru watching the fell, wait- ing for three stray hounds to come down, to collect them and take them back to the ken- nels. At Hampden Park, the football crowd had just booed the National Anthem and the police were about to make 170 arrests.
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