Carols and calamities

There’s something 7 magical and memorable about hunting over Christmas and the festive period, says Rory Knight Bruce

At the Portman, joint-master and huntsman Hugo Busby always had a plan, as “we never liked to miss a day over the festive period”. Below right: the choir for Beaufort’s popular carol service consists of hunt staff and “experienced choristers”

IT is a Christmas Eve meet at the Curre and Llangibby and 70 mounted riders are

gathered, sipping mulled wine and waiting for the hounds to arrive. It will not be their own pack, who have the cough, but the Duke of Beaufort’s doghounds, hunted by kennel huntsman Tony Holdsworth, who have kindly agreed to save the day. He has roped me in as an amateur whipper-in.

What beheld us as we hacked to the meet was a fantastic sight of Welsh festive cheer. Ponies were adorned with tinsel and reindeer antlers and several grown-ups had gone the whole hog. At one stage, I was overtaken by a Virgin Mary with a baby Jesus on a lead-rein. It all added to the season of goodwill and did nothing to distract us from a fine day’s sport.

Nor do the Beaufort neglect festivities at home. For the past 12 years, the hunt’s Christmas carol service at St Michael and All Angels, Great Badminton, has been run by hunt stalwart Lisabeth Glass and her musical surgeon husband Dickie with proceeds this year, more than £600, going to the church restoration fund.

The choir of 16, made up of senior hunt staff and experienced choristers, are decked out in pleated white surplices tailor-made by Lis Glass. More than 200 congregants attend, drawn from the hunting, farming and local community, with a strong Pony Club involvement that draws in their parents as well.