Small but venerable

The Pau Hunt offers a soupçon of fast-paced hunting near the Pyrenees, with a new joint-master to refresh the “venerable institution” with Anglo-French roots

- WILL CURSHAM

THE Pau’s joint-master, Jean-Paul Vidailhet, has been involved with the hunt only since last season. The outlook for the hunt was then very bleak.

“Last year, I went to a party with some friends. One of them told me about the Pau Hunt. I knew about it but he told me that by the end of the year, it would be finished,” Jean-Paul said as we shared a pre-hunting coffee at his château at Bernadets.

The crisis was caused by a number of factors. Long-serving master Georges Moutet, who had been sole master since 2000, had been forced into retirement due to ill-health. So too had popular huntsman Bernard Baylac. Without these two at the helm, the hunt was in danger of folding.

It would have been a travesty if this venerable hunt had been banished to the history books, because it is a unique pack and forms a key part of the history of the town of Pau and its surrounding region, Béarn.

Its beginnings go back to the Napoleonic wars. Following the Battle of Orthez in 1814, British and French officers briefly put their enmity aside and decided to hunt together. They met in the vicinity of Pau and there was such an abundance of foxes, and the country was so good, that many of the British officers made a mental note to return.

A quarter of a century later, one such officer, Sir Henry Oxendon, returned. Pau, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, had become a retreat for English high society. These early expats established a sporting home-from-home par excellence, setting up a golf club (the first on the Continent), a steeplechase course and a real tennis club. Sir Henry added a hunt, which came to be known as the Pau Hunt.