During the Blue Ridge Hunt’s Thanksgiving Meet yesterday, which started at Long Branch, hounds put up an enormous wild turkey near Bellfield off Swift Shoals Road. Karen managed to shoot a photo of the departing Tom.

Martyn and Connor look dressed for business as usual, but I have no idea what the lady is dressed to do.

To our great amusement, we yesterday through the hunting grapevine received a link to a fashion spread in a luxe magazine called Weddings Unveiled, in which one of our local friends here in Virginia, Martyn Blackmore, professional huntsman for the Loudoun Hunt West, accompanied by Connor, his Spotted Draft hunter, and foxhound pack, got to serve as part of the background for the modeling shoot.

The setting was Morven Park, once home to Virginia Governor (1918-1922) Westmoreland Davis. Now owned by a foundation, the estate hosts an array of equestrian and country activities, including the annual Virginia Foxhound Show.

The model has cleverly placed her hands in such a way as to reduce the likelihood of pawprints on her lovely white dress.

Karen’s photoessay on our visit with the Rappahannock Hunt on September 11th is now up.

The Rappahannock hounds are Crossbreds. Now recognized as a separate category at hound shows, the Crossbred Hound, a mixture of American and English foxhounds, was created by Ben Hardaway, Master of Georgia’s Midland Hunt, in response to the arrival of White-tailed deer in his country in the 1960s. Hardaway’s July hounds went off on a deer, and they were eating the same deer when he finally caught up with them days later. To create a deer-proof foxhound, Hardaway searched the British Isles for more docile, deer-resistant strains of foxhound which he subsequently successfully blended with classic American hound lines, finally added a soupçon of Penn Marydel to add just a little extra cry. Hardaway’s breeding program was so successful that the Crossbred category is usually the best represented at current hound shows.

Several of the Rappahannock hounds were long-haired, a trait evidencing Welsh hound ancestry.

That Saturday morning the Rappahannock hounds seemed even more filled with energy and high-spirits than hound packs typically are in general, which is saying a lot. It seemed to be snowing hounds as the pack, released from their trailer, ran, rolled, and frolicked, dashing in circles around the huntsman.

The morning’s cubbing was overlooked by a Bald Eagle who sat perched and watching with obvious interest from a dead tree by a local stream, which I think must have been the Thornton River.

click on photo for larger image

The Thornton Hill Hounds (largely Penn Marydel Crossbreds) wait eagerly to be released from their trailer.

Dennis Downing and Ross Salter lead the Blue Ridge hounds out onto Clay Hill Road.

We were out early this morning with the Blue Ridge Hunt at Fox Spring Woods.

The weather was very dry and scenting conditions were poor. The huntsman and the hounds were mostly working deep in the Virginia woods and this morning’s cubbing meet was short and offered few opportunities for pictures. Still, the scenery and company were delightful as ever, and I expect Karen will eventually produce some kind of photo essay, which I will link when it becomes available.

These are two of only a handful of photos I took myself.

Linda Armbrust, M.F.H., operating as whip, keeps a sharp eye out for errant hounds.

Then 89-Year-Old Huntsman Melvin Poe leading out the Bath County Hounds last November (click on image for larger picture)

Norman Fine, at FoxHuntingLife.com, reports on the recent birthday party held for renowned Huntsman Melvin Poe’s 90th.

Hounds were screaming, and the huntsman was cooking. A cattle guard loomed ahead—a coop to the left and a gate to the right. The huntsman veered left.

“Melvin,” someone yelled, “the gate’s on the right!”

“Melvin just kept kicking on, right over the coop,” recalled Joe Conner, shaking his head and grinning in wonder.

Conner, who has whipped-in to Melvin for years at Bath County (VA), didn’t resurrect that story out of a distant past. It had happened only weeks before Melvin Poe’s ninetieth birthday celebration.

A month or so earlier, I had recognized the same notes of awe and wonder as I stood chatting withe Brian Smith, my farrier, about Melvin’s upcoming ninetieth birthday.

“I was just down at Melvin’s shoeing horses,” he said, “and man, he climbs up on his horse smoother than I do!”

Saturday night, August 28, friends and family gathered at the Marriott Ranch in Hume, Virginia, just down the road from Melvin’s and Peggy’s farm, to celebrate his ninetieth birthday and to honor his achievements.

The Tory Party has promised to allow a repeal vote on the infamous 2004 Hunt Ban.

Bloomberg has read an advance copy of Blair’s memoir.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair said he deliberately sabotaged the ban on fox hunting his government introduced, calling it “one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret.”

In his memoir “A Journey,” published by Random House today, Blair said he ensured that the 2004 Hunting Act was “a masterly British compromise” that left enough loopholes to allow hunting to continue “provided certain steps were taken to avoid cruelty when the fox is killed.” He also told Home Office minister Hazel Blears to steer the police away from enforcing the law.

Blair’s 1997 pledge to give Parliament a vote on the subject dogged him throughout his time in office, with lawmakers opposed to hunting repeatedly trying to introduce a ban. Each time, hundreds of thousands of hunt supporters marched through London, and in 2004 some invaded Parliament.

“The passions aroused by the issue were primeval,” Blair, 57, wrote. “If I’d proposed solving the pension problem by compulsory euthanasia for every fifth pensioner I’d have got less trouble. By the end of it, I felt like the damn fox.”

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who described the law last year as a “farce,” has promised a vote on repeal. Since the act came into force in 2005, only three hunts have been successfully prosecuted, according to the Countryside Alliance, which was formed to oppose the ban. ...

Blair said he initially agreed to a ban without properly understanding the issue. Then, during a vacation in Italy, he found himself talking to the mistress of a hunt near Oxford.

“She took me calmly and persuasively through what they did, the jobs that were dependent on it, the social contribution of keeping the hunt and the social consequence of banning it, and did it with an effect that completely convinced me,” Blair said.

Hunting during fox hunting’s annual preseason consists of cubbing.

Before the regular hunting season begins in October or November, the new entry of hounds is taken out and introduced to hunting, and the same year’s crop of young foxes is introduced to being pursued by hounds.

Training young hounds to hunt properly is a delicate business and by convention hunt membership normally carries no automatic invitation to come out cubbing. Cubbing traditionally is strictly by special invitation of the Master, as inexperienced riders or unreliable horses can represent a serious hazard to inexperienced hounds or create distractions and impair their training.

So confident are the Masters of the Blue Ridge Hunt, however, of professional huntsman Dennis Downing’s management of his pack that cubbing is treated informally. Everyone is notified of cubbing meets and everyone is invited to attend.

During cubbing, traditional hunt uniforms are not worn. The correct attire, referred to as Ratcatcher, consists of non-formal hunting boots, a tweed coat, and a collared shirt and necktie. This summer was exceptionally warm, so even though starting early in the morning, the Blue Ridge field yesterday was prepared for warm weather, eschewing even Ratcatcher jacket and tie in favor of polo shirts.

Yesterday morning at 7:00 A.M., the Blue Ridge Hunt conducted its first cubbing of the year from kennels.

Staff and experienced members of the field stand guard on Kennel Road to keep any young hounds from crossing and going astray. (Click on photo for larger image)

Whipping in in the morning mist.

Huntsman Dennis Downing, accompanied by Whips Ross Salter and Sue Downing, brings the pack down the road in astonishingly good order.

Karen’s photo essay.

Yesterday we attended the afternoon open house at the Old Dominion Hounds kennels in Orlean, Virginia (right around the corner from our new home in Hume).

The puppies were very cute. Karen took photos.

This was the weekend of the Virginia Hound Show. I realized yesterday that, beyond the pleasure of watching fox hounds in the ring, at no other kind of venue could one routinely overhear so many distinctively amusing conversations.

The book I carried along to read while waiting for my wife, A Long Way to Go by Marigold Armitage, daughter of Air Chief Marshall Arthur Harris echoed the live scene around me. Though the novel’s setting is Ireland not Virginia, the topic under discussion and the sense of humor was very much the same.

And who was-out?” asked Aunt Emmy.

We were all gathering round Conor like well-trained hawks to a lure. The hold that fox hunting has over its disciples it as frightening as it is fascinating. Conor would tell us that Paddy Casey had been trying to sell his grey horse and the lad had given it a crucifying fall over wire; that the puppy Aunt Emmy had walked was still inclined to babble; that they had gone away very fast from Killanure and several people had been left; that Mike Harrington’s English horse had flown a stone-faced bank—”the sight went from my eyes to see the lep he made”; that hounds had split on a fresh fox, but Tommy had managed to stop them; that Euphemia Coke had jumped a “hell of a big, dirty drain like Becher’s Brook” on her four-year-old by Tartan; and on these words we would hang, wide-eyed, like children learning about Father Christmas. I had often tried to analyse this fearful fascination; to work out for myself exactly what the black magic consists of, and I had come to the conclusion that it must because fox hunting provides, mentally and physically, the perfect form of escapism, the perfect reaction from the dreary twentieth-century myth of Progress and the perfectibility 0f man. To begin with, even before one has got on one’s horse, there is the dressing-up in traditional clothes—and anybody who does not enjoy dressing up is fit only for treasons, stratagems and spoils—and not really even for those since he will not enjoy being in disguise. Then, I do not believe that M. Sartre himself could deny the romance implicit in the sight and sound of galloping horses, and the power and glory of being a part of this speed and strength and, if one is lucky, in control of it—this rare sensation might have even seduced Oscar Wilde if he had once tried it—might indeed, yet, seduce a Sitwell. Add to this that ancient, incalculable, irresistible lure, the spice of authentic danger, and you have the perfect, the complete, sweet, oblivious antidote, which will for the space of forty-five minutes from Kilquin Gorse raze out the written troubles of the brain as if they had been written on a slate and a damp sponge had been passed across them.

“In this the patient must minister to himself,” and a psychiatrist prescribing three days’ hunting a week would, I am sure, have the very greatest success. For no one— not if he has drunk too much the night before; not if he has lain awake with a mind reeling restively amongst the Metaphysics of Donne, the philosophy of Seneca, and the psychology of Jung—only to find at 2 a.m. that Soneryl has the laugh on them all; not if he has woken groaning, Suspecting cancer of the liver and hating the sight of his boots; not even he will fail to be healed by the splendid immediacy of the moment when the little black horse (grabbing cunningly at his bit in the hope of getting his head free enough to buck on the far side) faces the stone-faced bank which Mike Harrington’s horse has just flown with such superb disregard of the law of gravity—whilst behind, advancing in a crescendo of bounds and snorting like a steam engine, Euphemia Coke’s four-year-old is showing unmistakable signs that if you and the little black horse do not jump both quickly and cleanly there is every possibility that you and the little black horse will yourselves be jumped upon, heavily and hideously, by Euphemia Coke and her four-year-old.

So Conor held us spellbound with his commonplace tale until they had again marked him below at Murphy’s and the bitches had sung hopelessly above his cosy ramifications in the big double bank.

Will Goodall (1812?—1859?), renowned huntsman to the Belvoir (pronounced “beaver”), the Duke of Rutland’s, was famous for his devotion to his hounds, whom Lord Bentinck reports he contended required to be treated like women, as “they could not bear to be bullied, deceived, nor neglected with impunity.”

Lionel Edwards (Huntsmen Past and Present, 1929) tells us that Goodall’s illustrious career was curtailed by an unfortunate accident.

Will died as the result of falling on his horn, which he carried in his breast, on the last day of the season, after Croxton Races. The meet was at Belvoir. The day was the third anniversary of the Hunt presentation to him—a day on which the inn at Grantham had rung again to the tune of “Will Goodall’s the boy!” The year was probably 1859, the last year of Lord Forrester’s Mastership, as the sixth Duke of Rutland’s first season as Master appears to have been 1859-1860. Will was only ill ten days, during which time he rose from his bed but once, to show Lord Henry Bentinck his young Rallywoods of the third generation. It was with a strange fitness that as the hearse moved away the hinds began to “sing” a strange and mournful requiem, which the “Druid” tells us, fairly thrilled the mourners.

A Guest Blogger at Lilla Mason’s (huntsman of the Iroquois Hounds) Full Cry blog last summer wrote a tribute to Goodall last July.

A few days ago the article prompted an inquiry from a distant reader inquiring about a recent auction purchase.

James and Denise Davies… decided to bid on the copper horn at a local auction near their home in Zimbabwe. The couple have a restaurant in the African nation and also have been collecting antiques for about six years.

“Nobody bid on it, so we got it more next to nothing,” said James, whose usual auction picks are more in the line of figurines and military memorabilia. “We were the only bidders.”

It would seem that Mr. and Mrs. Davies had acquired Will Goodall’s famous (and fatal) horn.

My oldest copy is the 1905-1906 8th edition

Queen Victoria was celebrating her Diamond Jubilee, Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was playing to packed houses in Paris, and the adventurersome (including Jack London) were heading to the Klondike in search of gold in 1897, the year in which Baily’s Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, founded in 1860, began issuing its annual Directory of Hunting, listing organized fox hunts in Britain. The listings were later extended to beagles, bassets, otter and mink hounds, and its coverage made world-wide.

Charles Moore reported recently, in the Telegraph that, despite Labour’s tyrannical hunt ban, Baily’s is not only continuing publication, but is this year, for the first time, available on-line by electronic subscription.

Since the 19th century, the facts of hunting have been compiled annually by Baily’s Hunting Directory. Like Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Elliot in relation to the Baronetage, I find Baily’s my “occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one”. Between its red covers is contained a mass of information about almost every known and recognised pack of hounds in the world. According to the count for 2009, there are now 761 of them. You learn something new, interesting and satisfyingly obscure every time you read it. You also feel a thrill because of the adversity which hunting has so successfully resisted. As Lt Gen Barney White-Spunner says in his spirited introduction to the latest edition, the loss of liberty always “stirs something deep in the British soul”.

I mention the red covers, but in fact the cover turned black in recent editions, in mourning at the ban. This year, for the first time, Baily’s goes online . The publishers say that they still want to produce the book version as well – and I hope they succeed – but a web version undoubtedly offers certain advantages over a book. One is that new photographs can be posted at any time, so the site already carries first-class pictures of the current season. Another is that any subscriber (annual price £12) can contribute his own report of his hunt.

I have happily subscribed.

The print version costs £44.95/US$107 and may be ordered here.

Irish Times 2:59 narrated slide show of a recent day with the Waterford Hunt.

Huntsman Dennis Downing salutes, as he leads out the Blue Ridge hounds at Chapel Hill (Click on images for larger version)

Yesterday’s hunt met at Chapel Hill, in front of the historic stone house which was once the home of “Wild Bill” Donovan (1883-1959), Medal of Honor winner and founder of the OSS.

This handsome fox had no difficulty eluding hounds (photo: Karen L. Myers)

Members of the Blue Ridge Hunt first flight gallop down Swift Shoals Road in Boyce, Virginia yesterday endeavoring to catch up to hounds (click on image for larger version—clicking again on the second page will make the photo larger still)

Doesn’t this look like fun?