LIKE an athlete who can’t bear to return to the scene of their sporting triumphs to watch someone else take their place on the start line, Andrew Osborne doesn’t hunt these days. ‘I struggle to watch someone else hunt hounds,’ he admits. ‘I miss being able to hunt them every day—and I want to spend the rest of my life missing it.’
Despite the challenges huntsmen face trying to keep hounds ‘who haven’t read Hansard’ hunting legally, Mr Osborne still considers it the best job in hunting. He should know; there are few hunting jobs he hasn’t done, including being a master and field master, amateur huntsman, hound judge and—since May— chairman of the Masters of Foxhounds Association (MFHA).
The son of a joint-master and secretary of the Holderness in East Yorkshire, he was instantly fixated with the sport: ‘It was all I thought about—much to the detriment of my schoolwork. I just wanted to get home to my terrier and pony.’
His father ‘entirely discouraged the idea of working in hunting’ and sent him ‘to a school without a pack of beagles,’ he adds, scornfully. It didn’t work. Holidays in kennels in the company of ‘proper hunt servants’ such as Willie Deakin and his father, Dick, listening to tales of inter-war hunting set the hook.
Mr Osborne became a joint master, then huntsman of the Sinnington, followed by the Bedale, both in Yorkshire, and then the Cottesmore in Leicestershire, running his own property firm (and small cattle farm) around the more serious business of hunting.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 20, 2021 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 20, 2021 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
